![](\"https:\/\/media4.giphy.com\/media\/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExeW1yNmdqbGIzdTVrbTh2YXE5N3J4dm0xMzNpeWpwamVneDhsdDYwcCZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw\/4PUjcUBXIzQYfI8iVa\/giphy.gif\")
<\/p>\nPretty big news this week, as I received an email from CoinEx.<\/p>\n
They’re closing.<\/p>\n
After almost 9 years of operating, another of the bigger exchanges is closing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Freddie might sing about it, but to me it’s another nail in the freedom\/privacy coffin.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
Then the big ones: “the continuously rising regulatory requirements across major jurisdictions, as well as compliance costs and operational uncertainties”.<\/p>\n
You could read that as a normal concern, but it looks to me like TradFi working on shutting down anything that threatens it.<\/p>\n
You can’t beat them? Price them out of the market.<\/p>\n
You’re the establishment? Pay the politicians enough to shut down the upstart industry.<\/p>\n
You’re the government? Regulate it until it becomes TradFi<\/em>.<\/p>\n That looks like the sequence we’re stepping into.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n And it’s our own fault.<\/p>\n We wanted convenience and nice prices.<\/p>\n We wanted comfort and security.<\/p>\n And we were apparently happy to give up everything the original Bitcoin promised to get it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-midweeks","tag-exchanges"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonjourgeorge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonjourgeorge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonjourgeorge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonjourgeorge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonjourgeorge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=413"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bonjourgeorge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":415,"href":"https:\/\/bonjourgeorge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions\/415"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonjourgeorge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonjourgeorge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonjourgeorge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonjourgeorge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/media2.giphy.com\/media\/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExb3IyNmc3b3ZuNXRkOWxmMWs5aXBuanZrZjBxZjk4dGwya3JxeWVvcCZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw\/eAqriEkesYNBC\/giphy.gif\")
<\/p>\n