Pretty big news this week, as I received an email from CoinEx.

They're closing.

After almost 9 years of operating, another of the bigger exchanges is closing.

Freddie might sing about it, but to me it's another nail in the freedom/privacy coffin.

From what they say in their email, the reasons they're closing are pretty simple: first is that crypto prices have fallen and stayed down for a while, with less trading volume. That seems reasonable but also fairly minor unless their business planning sucks (which is entirely possible).

Then the big ones: "the continuously rising regulatory requirements across major jurisdictions, as well as compliance costs and operational uncertainties".

You could read that as a normal concern, but it looks to me like TradFi working on shutting down anything that threatens it.

You can't beat them? Price them out of the market.

You're the establishment? Pay the politicians enough to shut down the upstart industry.

You're the government? Regulate it until it becomes TradFi.

That looks like the sequence we're stepping into.

We all know that governments loathe crypto because it's like cash: very hard to trace, very hard to control, very hard to tax. That's where the push for the cashless society originally started, as a top-down desire to make everything traceable and taxable. The general swing towards right-wing politics around the world has only helped that move faster and harder, with surveillance and authoritarianism closing the privacy gap even more.

And it's our own fault.

We wanted convenience and nice prices.

We wanted comfort and security.

And we were apparently happy to give up everything the original Bitcoin promised to get it.