Comment by pavel_lishin 11 hours ago
I feel like our discussions of whether this was fraud or not - in the practical and ethical sense, if not the legal one - hinges entirely on the details of what these guys did, details that are not present in the article.
So not only are we not lawyers, we're barely even readers.
This is going to be fun to explain to a presumably non-technical jury.
Something we can easily infer is that the counterparty must be a connected Trump donor.
I have to wonder if there is some deeper connection whereby the introduction of this large not-yet-regulated economic sector actually creates pressure to move our whole society towards an oligarchic mobster/patronage style government. In a steady state where laws are widely known, it's harder to eek out an edge by breaking laws and then buying your way out of trouble - with the law being clear, the Schelling point is to be opposed to you. And an aggrieved counterparty can spend some resources to make sure it stays that way, even if they're not necessarily in favor with the ruling party.
Whereas with this case, nobody actually knows what the law "is" or really even what it "should be". Cryptocurrency was designed on a strong assertion of "code is law". But this doesn't keep governments from inserting their own semantics after the fact. Since there is no clear diving line, most people are not predisposed to thinking it should go one way or the other. This makes having a connection to the big boss man who can put his finger on the scale become much more relevant, and therefore much more valuable.
> Something we can easily infer is that the counterparty must be a connected Trump donor.
How so?
The DOJ has been put directly under the command of the presidency ("Unitary Executive Theory"). Micromanagement makes for reduced regulatory bandwidth makes for little reason to go after crime for the sake of it, especially cryptocurrency related... unless it directly affects someone who can get the ear of the president or if it can be used for a political spectacle. I don't really see the spectacle angle here, so therefore it must be an instance of someone getting burnt in the "code is law" environment and then seeking out-of-band retribution.
you can read what happened here: https://hackmd.io/@dmarz/total-eclipse-of-the-relay