Again, the premise of this thread is wrong. Crypto is already regulated up to a point. And even if it was regulated more, there will always be unregulated exchanges, ragpulls, hacks and ponzis. Greed and stupidity have no limits.
When places like Peregrine Financial go under... even because the CEO did outright fraud and stole millions in customer's funds, no one jumps up and down and screams that we should ban futures trading because... look what these commodity exchanges can do! Crooks! But as soon as you swap old-school commodities with crypto... NOW the bears claim the problem is all due to crypto and it's all because of crypto we have bad actors!
If your investment with any of these companies were in stocks, you got 100% of your investment back provided the company was a member of SIPC. And for FXCM, it was only FXCM UK that went bankrupt and since FXCM UK was regulated by FCA UK (the REAL FCA in UK not the one branched out to Cyprus), you got your money back as well. And even for futures firms that did not guarantee any return of deposited, in Man Financial's case, the judge presiding over the bankruptcy proceeding was able to approve the return of 93% of the capital from investors. And all of the companies were audited annually by their appropriate regulatory bodies which ensures that the customer funds were segregated from the companies' operating funds. That is still way more than how customer funds with protected and scrutinized when invested with crypto firms. If the crypto industry today can have 10% of the regulations imposed upon the other "government casinos", it would be a great progress. And btw what's GNI? Gross National Income? LOL
Audits were a total disaster in the case of Peregrine Fin. In one case, the fraud was exposed when a secretary faxed the REAL values for account holdings to the auditors. Then Wasendorf bluffed them out, by telling them the wrong financial statements were submitted by mistake, but he'd be happy to forward the REAL balance sheets. LOL And it worked! Even when he should have been caught red-handed, they got duped. Kinda the same thing like when x-futures trader Markopolos sent a bundle of docs to the SEC outlaying Madoffs entire ponzi scheme, they totally ignored it. And most interesting, Ed Thorp did research before Markopolos and wrote an article about Madoff's system being a ponzi too. But no one was listening...
Sure. When was the last time they robber your bank from their mother's basement? At least bank robbers have to make it to the bank. Exercise!!! Yes, crypto is shit without bad actors, but you have to admit, the idea of easy money, less regulations, ponzi set ups, etc bring in the bad actors...
Now that I think of it, I remember McAfee hardly got much a bad rep when the company was 'cooking the books' back when they were competing against Symantec. They did the typical old-fashioned 'Channel Stuffing' tactics to rope & dope investors away from the competitors under false pretenses. Note: This is NOT what McAfee went to jail for. That was a 'crypto' thing... which got a hell of a lot more attention. BECAUSE it was... regarding evil bad crypto. And along the lines of 'channel stuffing', even the crooks doing this today seem to get away with very little to no jail time in the fiat world. Hell, the CEO of SunBeam simply walked off into the sunset after they got busted for the same shenanigans, as well as many others. The only positive thing about it, is that SunBeam is no longer in existence (not that it really is a good thing).
They ignored Markopolos' warnings because Madoff's got somebody on the inside of the SEC. Madoff's niece, the compliance officer of Madoff's firm is married to the SEC Commission Compliance officer who has since left the SEC. They vehemently stated that he did not participate in or was affiliated in any way with the investigation of Madoff but who knows. He might not have participated in the investigation but who knows whether he's tipped Madoff on the investigation or not or affected the investigation in any way especially in the treatment of Markopolos' complaints. This is why I don't like the financial industry in that everything is so hierarchical. As long as you can make the money, you can do no wrong. You are worshipped like a King. Nobody can doubt you and if somebody doubts you, they get ridiculed and ostracized. They have this mentorship system where the mentor cultivates you and shows you the rope and then you owe this mentor everything but what if the mentor is doing something bad and wrong like Madoff? Nobody dares to say anything. Anyway this is going off-topic but this is just to show that Madoff's case is different and very special. In majority of the cases, the audit does discover things and if the entity is small enough, they do get caught and the public does get protected.
Oh this is a Product, not an ETF!!! Big difference!!! Product, schmoduct, if it walks like an ETF and quacks like an ETF, then it is shit.
It would be interesting to know the volume of transactions for purpose of commerce relative to the volume of trades. That's the answer to if it's gambling or something else. Guessing somewhere around 1/10,000 of a percent?