I'm no fan of Ian Balina or Gary Gensler. To me, their legal interaction is nothing more than the meeting of two scammers. The tragedy is that the outcome of their interaction affects me. What a world, huh? When two jackasses have a problem with each other, the fallout somehow affects people who have nothing to do with the shit.
The SEC has lodged multiple complaints against Ian Balina, a lucky bitcoin early adopter who leveraged his success into ICO pump and dumps in 2017. He got rich from there, but no one takes him seriously now. His Youtube channel has more than 100,000 subs yet struggles to get 1,000 views per video. His Twitter performs even worse. To me, this says the crypto community has moved on. His recent NFT drop, Astrobot Society, looks sketchy as hell, as if he had to buy his own shit to fake a sell out a la the Tory Lanez fiasco. (At least Balina had the foresight to split up the wallets so the scam's not so easily found out.)
Bottom line, there's no reason for the SEC to pursue this. Balina isn't a threat to anyone's well being save a few idiots. You'd think the SEC would put their resources on finding the Wintermute thieves, but no.
The real reason the SEC is going after Balina: They are looking for the weak link in crypto to set legal precedent for an imposition into what they really want — Ethereum.
The important part of the SEC complaint against Balina is that the SEC claims jurisdiction over all Ethereum transactions. It needs to make this blanket claim; otherwise there's no hard firsthand evidence that Balina sold his scams to US citizens. Even though Balina focused his marketing efforts in the US, only speaks English, and lives in the US.
I've argued this before — the SEC needs no new powers to prosecute crypto criminals. It continues to seek new powers for its own purposes, and crypto seems all to eager to just hand them over for no reason. If Balina goes down completely, you, retail investor, gain no new protections from the SEC. If Balina stole your money from a 2018 ICO scam, you won't get that cash back. And the SEC won't help you should you get scammed by some ICO in 2022.
No, the SEC is looking to find someone with less money and support than Ripple so it can take control of the "this digital asset is a securities" narrative.
So far, the biggest supporter for Ian has been Bitboy. This shit just gets worse and worse. A scammer supporting a scammer against another scammer for the right to monopolize scamming the general public...
Never a dull day in crypto!
