I wrote about an ordinarily sleepy federal agency - the CFTC - and their move to pre-empt state betting laws and reclassify gambling as esoteric financial derivatives.
The good news: the public is fighting back. More about ordinary citizen comments on the CFTC’s overreach:
x.com/bettermarket...
x.com
Better Markets on X: "With over 1500 comments recently filed to the CFTC, the prevailing sentiment among many everyday Americans is clear, writes @amandalfischer : 1⃣Gambling on elections and geopolitical events like war have no place in society; 2⃣Sports betting should stay under the jurisdiction https://t.co/AryNvDu74G" / X
With over 1500 comments recently filed to the CFTC, the prevailing sentiment among many everyday Americans is clear, writes @amandalfischer : 1⃣Gambling on elections and geopolitical events like war have no place in society; 2⃣Sports betting should stay under the jurisdiction https://t.co/AryNvDu74G
![Groundhog Day
There is a tragic throughline running through this long-running script: financial industry leaders blow past legal guardrails, citing that their technological innovations cannot possibly be cabined in by outmoded rules created by a previous generation. Regulatory and law enforcement officials are under-resourced and out-gunned even at times when they have the best intentions for fulfilling the public interest. Other times, these officials are captured by the very industries they're tasked to police. In either case, industries are too often able to establish economic power through their noncompliance with existing law and translate it into political power to rewrite the rules to bless their business models. This noncompliance in the face of clear existing legal precedent creates the very "uncertainty" that the industry points to as a justification to change the law. And the final rhetorical move is to invoke international competitiveness, hoping to scare lawmakers into believing that a failure to bend the law to an industry's favor will harm U.S. industries, jobs and growth.
Crypto has memorized this script and is reading their lines in an Oscar-worthy performance to many policymakers. Congressional hearings bemoan the "legal uncertainty" caused by applying longstanding laws to arrangements that look a lot like pre-existing investment schemes but are digital or blockchain-based. Crypto industry petitions to federal agencies say that Great Depression-era laws "[prevent] market participants from leveraging the efficiencies new technology can offer."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:32lvgu3krzhhw3h6k3pme72r/bafkreih6mirekxauy353h5w7jg2qg4cxkbf4lcl25dzqhiicoejnd2wkou)
