Unpopular opinion: bring on the heavy handed regulation

For most of us here, we saw crypto as a way to completely exit the legacy financial system. Earn in ecash, pay in ecash, save in ecash. No need to touch nasty third party financial institutions like exchanges or payment providers. Just "peer to peer" cashlike transactions between two willing parties that never have to touch any kind of centralized point of control or regulation. AS INTENDED.

Along the way the entire mission of crypto got lost in an orgy of speculation. For a speculator, the only point of holding crypto is to later sell it back for fiat. To a speculator, crypto without exchanges is pointless. To these people i say "Too bad so sad. I'm sorry you didn't understand the value proposition of the thing you were speculating on."

Also, most of us here never saw the first world as ground zero for crypto adoption. The first world is served by a mostly functional banking and payment processing infrastructure, and runs on mostly stable, if inflationary, fiat currency. Almost nobody in the first world has ever experienced outright government mass confiscation of bank accounts or hyperinflation. Almost everyone in the first world has access to some form of high performance electronic commerce.

It is the developing world where emerging crypto economies make sense. There are places that are reasonably well served by internet infrastructure but where banking and the local economy is a joke. These are the places where crypto can make a real, measurable difference in people's lives by providing them with a form of money that their corrupt government cannot easily seize or hyperinflate.

So I say: bring on draconian crypto regulation. Those of us who bought crypto for the right reasons and with a long term investment horizon will ultimately be better off. Let's push the speculation out and drive crypto innovation back into the places where it will do some good. Yes of course the fiat price may crash in the short term, I say bring it, if it leads to a true crypto economy forming elsewhere.