My point is simply that crypto requiring a nuanced legal treatment is not implicitly by design even if it was promoted as a feature early on by grifters and anarchists. It’s a technology like any other and it’s the regulators’ job to create fair and appropriate treatment for it (and our job to elect ones who will).
Bitcoin was literally designed to circumvent state monetary systems and their affiliated controls. Almost all the crypto descendants follow this path as well.
So yes, it was by design that it’s hard to regulate.
First of all, the actual difficulty is not really material since we're debating whether it was a design goal. Bitcoin came out of a long line of libertarian/anarchist projects to circumvent state controls. I don't know why you're pretending like this is some unique interpretation of history. E.g. the problem that the Satoshi whitepaper sets out to solve was (as cited in the whitepaper, source [1] in the footnotes) laid out with this preamble:
> I am fascinated by Tim May's crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities
traditionally associated with the word "anarchy", in a crypto-anarchy the
government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and
permanently unnecessary.
Secondly, a lot of features make it harder to regulate than cash. Off the top of my head, being able to transport it over national borders via the Internet. Storing arbitrarily large amounts of it in zero physical square meters. Keeping it relatively secure without having to rely on third parties (banks) gaining knowledge of your ownership, etc. etc.
Bitcoin isn't any different than cash except it’s got a decentralized public immutable ledger and therefore isn't a bearer currency. But like cash its transactions are not governed by an authoritative financial institution that can repudiate and/or reverse them. (It’s proven effectively easier to regulate than cash on the tracking transactions front, though.)
That’s the “anarchy” the paper refers to.
In the paper, the goal was not to topple governments. It was to build a digital cash equivalent where the payment processing happened in a distributed and ultimately trust-less “anarchist” manner. Thus allowing people to transact as they do in cash, but digitally.
All this anti-regulation no laws style of anarchist stuff is downstream. Sure it’s adjacent, but also easily conflated.
Anyway, to be super clear, being resistant to the rule of law is a very different property than being resistant to centralized control.
Cash is decentralized.
Credit, debit, ACH, are centralized.
Crypto is decentralized.
All are subject to the rule of law. But only centralized transactions can be manipulated without coercion or use of force against a one of the parties involved (if they are unwilling to abide).
I don't know any technology that fundamentally cannot have laws created governing its use. It’s just not possible to prevent someone from legally regulating something. But it is possible to design systems that don't require 3rd parties to mediate transactions and do require an actual authoritative monopoly on violence to manipulate, as we’ve seen with cash and as is the case with BTC.
Care to explain? FWIW I was around when crypto was born and know very well the initial scene and motives. The crypto anarchists showed up pretty quickly, sure, but they weren't the seeds of the technology.
