There are three kinds of people:

1. Those who want less regulation
2. Those who want more regulation
3. Those who want better regulation

Two of them are wrong.

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

The perspective I'd like to argue for is that regulation is not quantitative, but rather qualitative. Asking for "more" or "less" of it is just talking past each other.

There is no such thing as "no regulation", even the decision to not constrain an action is a regulatory act.

We'd all be better off if we discussed regulation through the lens of "how do we improve our regulations?" Which may of course mean editing some old clauses (removing a line, adding a line, it's all just editing).

Obvious example:
"Crypto is unregulated"
"Crypto needs more regulation"
"Crypto is overregulated"

All true statements depending which perspective you take yet there's no majority that will agree on one. Instead, I suspect most people would agree "Crypto needs better regulation" and I suspect from that starting point we might even (mostly) agree about what that looks like.

IMO that's like arguing that fewer lines of code is better. It may be true (smaller bug surface area) but it's missing the point, and results in the wrong conversations.

The ideal design/solution may be more lines of code than we currently have, and optimizing for fewer lines of code at all costs is going to lead in the wrong direction. Switching to a better aligned language might result in more LOC but if it would better express the problem space then it's worth it.

Even @geohot's tinygrad library that has an explicit goal for minimizing lines of code still continues to expand that limit. I even buy that substantially increasing lines of code should be a measured and mindful decision.

Anyway, I'm all for minimizing our constraint set as a high-level goal, but conversation should be about qualitative improvements rather than quantitative:

Working on Farcaster and Warpcast. Longer thoughts at https://dwr.email

Fewer rules, better enforcement. Harsher penalties for people breaking said rules, especially for white-collar crime.

IMO that's like arguing that fewer lines of code is better. It may be true (smaller bug surface area) but it's missing the point, and results in the wrong conversations.

The ideal design/solution may be more lines of code than we currently have, and optimizing for fewer lines of code at all costs is going to lead in the wrong direction. Switching to a better aligned language might result in more LOC but if it would better express the problem space then it's worth it.

Even @geohot's tinygrad library that has an explicit goal for minimizing lines of code still continues to expand that limit. I even buy that substantially increasing lines of code should be a measured and mindful decision.

Anyway, I'm all for minimizing our constraint set as a high-level goal, but conversation should be about qualitative improvements rather than quantitative: https://warpcast.com/shazow.eth/0x849b358e