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Comment by mcpackieh | Hacker News Reader

I'm well aware of how vague and stupid regulatory laws can get. And I know that the government only provides clarity when they deign to do so, I'm not entitled to it.

I can write a letter to the ATF asking if my shoestring with two loops tied in it counts as a machine gun if I also own a certain rifle, or if I only own certain parts of that rifle, or if I sell it to a guy who owns that rifle; they might respond but maybe not. (As a matter of fact they have made public statements concerning such shoestrings, but only because they chose to.)

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In the end it comes down to poorly written laws. The laws overreach broadly with vague language, and then citizens and corporations are afraid to act due to fear of lawsuits.

The idea of "guidance" is "hey, would you fine or sue me if I act like this, in this gray area, that's genuinely hard for me and my lawyers to determine if it's within the law?"

The court decisions to refute the ATF on bump stocks and SEC on crypto ETFs show the laws were written fuzzily there. SEC's insistence that the law speaks for itself looks kind of dishonest, or ignorant.

If you've never worked with a rules engine that interacts with the mushiness of human interaction than you don't understand how insane it is to claim there needs to be "very clear" rules.

Human interaction is fuzzy, THAT'S why the rules are fuzzy. Also, the SEC itself isn't the arbiter of what the law says, that's the court's job.

Go ahead, try to write a complete and comprehensive and unambiguous system for defining human interaction.

> Also, the SEC itself isn't the arbiter of what the law says, that's the court's job.

To the extent to which we are taking about the laws (and not rules), it is worth noting that the SEC--despite claiming these laws are clear--is almost hilariously bad at understanding them given that they are now on a losing streak in the courts ;P. So far, they have lost on their enforcement of Ripple, were told the reasons they denied Greyscale were unacceptable, and the courts have them on a right timeline (refusing to cede jurisdiction) to provide to Coinbase the regulatory clarity they petitioned for (which is currently supposed to happen by October 11th, but we'll see if they figure out how to delay further).

Frankly, the SEC is probably feeling their way around too. They have an internal model of what is and isn’t lawful and they sue based on that. But that’s their internal model, not the actual law - as decided by politicians and the courts. Their internal model will be revised based on court rulings.

Frankly, these crypto bros seem to be trying to get the SEC to publicly contradict themselves, and plan to use that as ammo to turn the court of public opinion against them, but the SEC isn’t interested in playing their game.

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