(I'll start off this comment by saying that I'm biased, because I'm working as a cryptocurrency protocol developer.)

What is it exactly that the crypto lobby wants to do? Make it easy for people to buy crypto without KYC laws? Oppose laws that make staking or mining illegal? If you disagree with those things, think you might want to be careful what you wish for.

> No one’s grandmother is losing their life savings gambling on Azure SQL ledger databases.

This is a problem, I agree. But so is grandfathers losing their life savings on sports betting or 25-year-olds losing their life savings on mobile game microtransactions, so I think it's strange that people rarely seem as interesting in regulating mobile games as they are in making it harder to buy crypto. (I can't even go on the Amtrack in Chicago without being inundated with ads for some sports betting service.)

But okay. I would probably support a law that limited how much one person could spend on a crypto exchange per week, and made them watch an informational video about how they might lose their money, or something like that. But in general, I like being able to have money that the government can't stop me from spending! That seems like the type of ability the government should let me have, in the name of freedom if nothing else. There is something that's fundamentally right about someone's grandmother fleeing war-torn Ukraine, and being able to take her life savings with her just by memorizing 12 words.

As for laws that staking illegal, how much do you really want the government regulating what programs you can run on your computer? I can run an Ethereum staking node on a Raspberry Pi, and who does that harm for you to justify banning it?

For making mining illegal, to what end? There's the problem with the carbon footprint, but it seems insane to me to worry about that when I can barely step outside without getting obliterated by a gas-guzzling 6,000lb F-350. A carbon tax, or better, a carbon club [0] would let people decide for themselves how to use their computer without allowing them to ignore their climate impact.

I see it the same as encryption. Legalizing encryption is not without downsides – it undeniably helps criminals and child pornographers. But would we support banning encryption because of that? I think not: the freedom to speak without the government overhearing you is a fundamental right.

Buying, trading, and staking crypto assets seems like a fundamental right in the same way – without the freedom to do transactions, what other freedoms do you have? Is freedom of speech very useful to you if you can't buy a megaphone or host a website? A good middle ground is to do what we can to make sure people aren't getting scammed, while infringing on as few liberties as possible.

> A great many researchers and working software engineers don’t like this abuse of computer science terms to peddle risky investments.

This is fair – if you don't like cryptocurrency, of course you wouldn't like your research area to be associated with it! But there's more to life than worrying about other people using words wrong, and there's more to like about crypto than you might know. I wrote about what I find interesting w.r.t. cryptocurency here: https://chadnauseam.com/coding/cryptocurrency/a-hackers-case... . Cryptocurrency is probably the most fun area of computer science right now, with a breakneck pace of development an

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2022/02/16/as-the-...