[polygamous_bat]

> Rules and laws aren't supposed to be a puzzle you argue about via $1000/hr lawyers.

Laws are living things that must always be up for interpretation. This is the sole reason we have courts instead of two parties writing their arguments out into a formal language and feeding them into a theorem prover to see who is right.

And good news, most of the cases they are not! NASDAQ is a public company, you can find out how much they spend every quarter on lawyers. I can tell you that their legal expenses would be smaller than Coinbase's.

Why? Because Coinbase _chose_ to operate in a place where the legal grounds were not quite clear. They profited from the lack of regularity clarity in their early years. Now that the regulations are solidifying in directions that they don't like, they're shedding crocodile tears because, guess what, doing shady business is getting more legally expensive than it is profitable for them. Thankfully, laws are not written solely to maximize profits for private corporations, or protect the profits that they made during times of unclear regulations.

[TimJRobinson]

What is the USA trying to achieve though? If you want innovation to continue in the USA you can't expect companies to wait decades until the government has decided what is allowed and what isn't, they're just going to setup in other countries instead.

The USA was founded on freedom and the ability for people to innovate and create, now it's becoming a place many companies avoid because of a hostile government and this is going to be disasterous for the future wealth of the country.

Coinbase points out in the post that it's been much easier to operate in every other country than the USA.

[polygamous_bat]

> If you want innovation to continue in the USA you can't expect companies to wait decades until the government has decided what is allowed and what isn't, they're just going to setup in other countries instead.

Innovation like South Korea's Terra Luna, Bahama's FTX, and (region unspecified)'s Binance? What would the US do without such "innovation", the horrors!

> The USA was founded on freedom and the ability for people to innovate and create.

Including creative legal solutions that circumvent laws, I assume? I have been involved in an early crypto project in the past, and the way the "token"s are created is by first making them as digital securities, and then adding enough "utility" to give it plausible deniability under the Ethereum defense (something with enough utility may not be a security.) This process generally takes multiple rounds of back-and-forth between the "devs" and the lawyers. However, these tokens act like securities, people buy them as if they're securities, and they are dumped on the market by early investors and devs like they are securities. Unfortunately, it's not fooling people anymore, and SEC can actually take steps on it.

> Coinbase points out in the post that it's been much easier to operate in every other country than the USA.

"Much easier to dump fake securities on the public elsewhere" is probably a feature of the USA and not a bug. I'm glad it is the case.

[worrycue]

> you can't expect companies to wait decades until the government has decided what is allowed and what isn't

I think if it’s not outlawed then it’s allowed. In this case, they should probably hire lawyers to work out if what they are doing is outlawed and listen to their counsel’s advice … or don’t.

> Coinbase points out in the post that it's been much easier to operate in every other country than the USA.

They are free to leave.