The joke is that the only reason crypto wouldn't "survive" if unregulated is because they (the feds) would un-regulate it out of existence.
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This is kind of philosophically interesting in light of Giorgio Agamben's discussion of sovereignty and law, in which the prime act of the sovereign is to enact the "ban", i.e. deciding who or what is excluded from the law, which is itself still a status in relation to the law, specifically one of exclusion. So people who trade crypto can be unregulated in the sense of gray area, yet-undecided legality, or they can be "unregulated" in the sense of "explicitly excluded from the legal realm", banned (abandoned), removed from any sort of legal relationship with the state. The USA isn't China, where the idea of someone being "unpersoned" for trading crypto seems like an act that the state could choose to make, but that's the sort of thing I thought would make a good joke.
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This is kind of philosophically interesting in light of Giorgio Agamben's discussion of sovereignty and law, in which the prime act of the sovereign is to enact the "ban", i.e. deciding who or what is excluded from the law, which is itself still a status in relation to the law, specifically one of exclusion. So people who trade crypto can be unregulated in the sense of gray area, yet-undecided legality, or they can be "unregulated" in the sense of "explicitly excluded from the legal realm", banned (abandoned), removed from any sort of legal relationship with the state. The USA isn't China, where the idea of someone being "unpersoned" for trading crypto seems like an act that the state could choose to make, but that's the sort of thing I thought would make a good joke.