My plan to sidestep these regulations is to take an existing cheap chain and launch a product on it, without consent or communication with stakeholders. I will buy a large percentage of the chain before doing this, of course. Maybe plug it into zrx so the conversion is automatic for the end user. Just another launch cost and I can avoid the SEC entirely.

Do you think that the SEC won't still come after you? That they'll just go, "Drat, we must've been outsmarted!"

I won't be creating an expectation of value. If I were to do this on ethereum, for instance, no one would bat an eye. It would be just another dapp.

But then you don't get any funding? Unless you pump the coin in which case the SEC will still be coming.

I generally don't seek funding for my apps. I instead just build them with a monetization path attached. What I would aim to do is to boost a crypto community coin with adoption. My monetization would be to sell the ownership I have of the coin when the dapp is in use.

I don't know if it's legal according to the SEC. I would love some clarity.

Komodo and a few other decentralized exchanges break this issue pretty easily. Same reason privacy coins cannot be shut down.

That's incorrect. Tokens can prevent their transfer to parties that don't have the proper KYC. The smart contract decides that.

That's a cool point. I wonder what can be done to bypass such a restriction? Maybe if you had a contract like WETH that wrapped accredited-only tokens in a proxy token.

Pay someone from another country to do KYC for your address.

Because they don't have the technical knowledge to ensure compliance with 88 pages of mandates, maybe? If you violate GDPR you will be fined by the EU even if you do not exist in the EU.

It's funny that they have the technical knowledge to implement tracking (or outsource it to another company), but they don't have the technical knowledge to comply with GDPR (or outsource it to another company).

But why would a news website per se need to collect or process user's personal data? If you don't, you don't have to care about GDPR at all.

Um, to sell more profitable ads.

They probably feel that the non-targeted ad revenue they would make from EU customers would not be worth the server costs, costs to comply with the law, and potential fine costs (risk).

Maybe or it could be that they don't have a data compliance officer, which is mandated by the GDPR. Or it could be that they just don't know what the issues are and have no clue how to get compliant. IP addresses are protected data and make you a data controller if you have log files.

The point is that if you are exercising the law to it's maximum extent then it is next to impossible not to collect personal data, even if you have no intention to.

For example, some hosting providers in Europe now automatically disable webserver logs unless the customer explicitly activates them to make sure they don't accidentally collect user data.

Now you might say, well if you run your own virtual server where you control all the services and know for a fact that no personal information is collected you won't run into that problem. But then you might still collide with the law because some network monitoring of the hosting provider might store connection logs. And it is on you to make sure that the companies you use for your business are compliant with the GPDR. You even need to have a contract with every single one of them with which you instruct them to process your users data and that they have to comply with the GPDR when doing so.

And even if you think everything you are doing is correct there are still some law firms that try to extort money from you by claiming some violation. In Germany this game of cat and mouse has already begun (and I don't mean the well known cases against Google, Facebook et. al)

> extort money from you

This isn't the US. You can't sue for GDPR non compliance, only complain to the authorities

I'm looking forward to seing the first non-EU company (that has no EU offices) fined by the EU and the middle finger that will ensue.

Computation has made everyone able to connect with each other with practically no barriers. AI will make connection with machines and people seamless. These are super powers.

There is absolutely no reason to be miserable at your day job. You should be preparing for superpowers if not actively using them.

I recommend watching lectures/talks during work, skipping meetings and reading from thought leaders instead of working hard to reach deadlines. Everyone is connected which means you can read and watch what Ian Goodfellow has to say about unsupervised learning or see what the issues with the world computer are from Vitalik himself as easily as listening to your marketing department figure out how to grow 10% in the quarter.

Lol that’s easy enough to say when your family doesn’t depend on you to feed them.

Your family is counting on you being prepared for the future.

Overbearing legislation applied by unelected representatives is being abused. If only there were technical solutions provided with an assumption of goodwill instead of 88 pages of mandates without such an assumption.

Legislation is usually applied by unellected people. Judicial independence is usually seen as a good thing. Perhaps you mean that the law was enacted by unellected people, which is also incorrect of course? So now I don't see your point at all?

The law has been proposed by the European Commission who is just nominated not elected.

The European Commission's members are sent there by the national governments. Elect another parliament/government if you don't like who yours did sent.

It's easier to vote "yes" in an quit the EU referendum than what you suggest. Which is what the Brits actually did. The former works while the latter doesn't.

We don't elect governments over here, just Parliament and President.

Thank God for the Queen and the Lords eh?

Proposed yes. Just like in the UK un-elected civil servants propose all kinds of laws and regulation. Just like with the EU commission you only get to propose laws. The council of ministers (heads of states for EU countries) and the directly elected EU parliament actually get to enact regulation.

Being able tho propose a law is not ther same as enacting a law, and is not the same as applying a law which is what the parent comment said.

Proposed by the European Commission, yes, but it also had to be passed by the directly-elected European Parliament.

I'm not in the EU but must comply to their regulation.

The internet at it's base abstraction is a borderless medium without regard to locality. Imposing legislation by user region is a dangerous precedent as each region can now impose fee-seeking legislation on internet companies.

So what do you propose no laws at all for the internet? Or each jurisdiction makes orts own law? In which case would the US mind getting the hell back inside it's borders and stop trying to extradite British teenagers who alledgedly broke some 'hacking' law?

Sounds like Team America again.

The government's of the world are struggling with internet jurisdiction issues, currently the US is taking the stance that any act against their companies is a US matter, whereas the EU is looking at abuse of its citizens is an EU matter. Weaker states have no recourse at all. I find it hard to judge that the US stance is ethically better than the EU's

Any solutions should come from first level engineering principles not lawyers and politicians. I don't care if it's US prosecuting a kid for hacking, companies storing and losing information on people or a space shuttle exploding. The problem lies in the failure of software and the solution should be in software.

Assumption of good will is a trap that naive people fall into. If someone can take advantage of something, it will happen.

> If someone can take advantage of something, it will happen.

As demonstrated by the troll in this very situation, right now (assuming the filer is actually a troll).

Completely agree in general. It's a probability thing, given enough traffic all possible events happen. That said I do not understand how these mandates protect anyone.

The bad actors are still going to be bad and lie about it, the honest actors just got burdened with some of the worst legislation in recent history without it even coming from our elected officials.

It's dangerous and I don't care for having to backtrack through years worth of projects in use and figure out how they can each be GDPR compliant. It's a tax on creators time and is imo one of the worst possible things legislators can do to an emerging space (as all software is).

How are the representatives "unelected"? The European Parliament is elected every five years by the citizens of all EU member states and voted on the GDPR in 2016 after long talks. Some even say that the GDPR is not hard enough.

The GDPR was passed by the European Comission, not the EP. Members of the EC are appointed, just like ministers in governments. But governments can only pass time limited decrees which then have to be signed into laws and voted for in Parliament. The EC which can pass binding regulations that apply indefinitely.

I think you mean "proposed" instead of "passed" - "passed" is usually used to mean "passed a law"

The commission proposes legislation, the council & parliament pass it

You are wrong.

The GDPR was formally proposed by the European Commission, but it then went to the European Parliament (where it was amended). If the European Parliament had voted against it then it would have never become law.

You do realise that the European Parliament is directly-elected, right?

Not by me and I do not consent. My consent does not matter, unfortunately, I must abide. Governments are good at that.

I just spent the last few weeks on this and the regulators took a 'tech should conform to my understanding' approach. It's horrible legislation, time consuming across a still-emerging field (talk about hindering progress..) and I'm not even part of the EU. I am tempted to just shut off my services to the EU until I redeploy everything as dapps and wipe my hands of this nonsense. Let EU deal with blocking eth because it doesn't conform to the way they think technology should work.

For platforms, I invest to get a discount on apps I intend to release. SONM falls into this category and is one of my largest holdings.

Engineers are trained to look critically at proposed solutions. It's much harder to imagine where the future lays. I personally see crypto as just another extension of software eating the world.