In the spirit of decentralization, the original content of this article is minted permanently in this ZK NFT at 1 am US Pacific Time on October 1st, 2021. You need connect an Ethereum wallet to view the NFT.
China is among the very few subjects that can achieve bipartisan hostility in US politics today. Ironically, crypto is among the very few subjects that can achieve strong hostility from both China and the US.
Apparently, China wants to suppress everything crypto except for the pseudo ones controlled by PBOC, while the US wants to figure out whether or not crypto tokens are securities. The underlying concerns of both governments are actually very similar. They are both intimidated by the revolutionary nature and disruptive potential of crypto. The two governments are among the most aggressive in actions because they are the only two nation governments having enough teeth to matter. Most other nation governments should be even more scared of crypto, but have limited means to enforce meaningful regulations.
Crypto projects nowadays commonly put the US and China on the same list of supposedly evil countries such as Somalia and North Korea. Such a treatment may become the norm for years to come. With the strong decentralization nature of many crypto projects, there are limited ways to delineate a technically actionable boundary between the decentralization core and government regulations. One possible solution is to separate the user interfaces and the underlying decentralized protocols. For forbidden features such as derivatives trading, the web hosts of user interfaces can block IP addresses from the list of evil countries while the protocols remain decentralized. In fact, this is exactly the strategy enacted by the most recent superstar project dYdX. Users with the US IP addresses are blocked from interacting with the website and excluded from the airdrop program. The separate user interfaces can also serve as a portal for governments to exert taxes for economic activities on defi protocols such as Uniswap.
For a considerably long period from now to some future time, crypto should continue to evolve while excluding American and Chinese users officially. Unofficially, adventurous money will break any technical barriers to pursue their dream lifestyles and monetary returns in the decentralized world. Even with the strongest regulations from the US and China, crypto can still manage rapid growth with the remaining 80% of world population and maybe a third of the global investable capital. The global capital landscape is being marked by three major forces: the communist capital from China, the woke capital from the US, and the crypto capital from all over the world.
There will come the day of inevitable, the day when the walls shall fall between the crypto and the other two capital forms. The majorities on the communist and woke sides will wake up and stand up. No centralized regulatory authorities can stop them. That is the day that our civilization advances to the next level when most portions of our society will be coordinated by various decentralized autonomous organizations.
