> There is simply no underlying value within any of these coins. Why would a sane person invest in them?

I remember hearing the same arguments against Ebay and other e-commerce companies: this is all vaporware, there is no physical value (meaning bricks and mortar storefronts), we should prohibit people from investing in all of those, etc.

I personally would not touch most cryptos with a 6' pole, but that is just my opinion. We should still allow someone who believes in this space to invest their own money the way they see fit. My 2c.

Nah. The average person was and should have been prevented from investing in Ebay until they were a publicly traded company, which required Ebay execs to share with the public enough information to have a hope of correctly valuing the investment.

Even if you don't care at all about individuals getting fleeced by scammers, there's a societal reason. We need investment capital for growth, and we need it to be reasonably sanely allocated. If some people raising capital can lie and others have to tell the truth, that puts truth-tellers at a structural disadvantage, meaning more money for fraud, less money for good investments, and a strong incentive for everybody to lie in equal amounts just to keep up.

Worse, over the long term, markets with high levels of scamming mean that most people learn to stay out of them entirely. This leads to even less capital for good investments plus society-wide misallocation of capital. E.g., people just keeping money in their mattresses. So long-term economic growth is harmed for a generation or two. Because even if you clean up a market so it is safe, it takes a long while for people to forget previous pain.

So as a society, we want what America had for decades: strongly regulated financial markets so that the average joe has a variety of safe investment options. For the few who really want to invest in the risky stuff, they can go out and get a Series 65 exam to prove they know what they're doing. [1]

[1] Process described here: https://www.natecation.com/accredited-investor-investing-sta...

For tax or other community money pots, sure. For my own -- thanks, but no thanks. I will spend it however I like.

I don't get the sense that you read what I wrote. Tax money pots are less worrying to me because the information/skill asymmetries are lower.

In any case, in the US it's still illegal for most investments to take money from non-accredited investors. So yes, this includes your money.

OK, I should have been clearer on what I have been arguing with. Specifically, you expressed this sentiment a few times:

> Even if you don't care at all about individuals getting fleeced by scammers, there's a societal reason. We need investment capital for growth, and we need it to be reasonably sanely allocated

Anytime people start talking about what is acceptably sane and what is not and start restricting investments based on this characterization we create self-reinforcing, traditionalist setups that suffocate everything else.

I don't think that's true at all. The US has one of the most tightly regulated securities markets in the world. But it also has one of the most innovative economies. And our markets are strong enough that foreign companies work to list here to take advantage of the amount of capital available. That apparent contradiction is easily resolved: strongly regulated markets create the kind of trust that draws in the investment capital necessary for innovation.

> The US has one of the most tightly regulated securities markets in the world. But it also has one of the most innovative economies.

I agree with this. However I wonder if this is driven by the setup of the 30+ years ago, when US was effectively the only game in town for quick financing of the innovation (accidentally, when it was a lot less regulated). Such setups, if they work well, can keep going for decades before a slow erosion makes them fail.

I think the litmus test will be the way the US handles upcoming economic challenges. Will it be able to keep innovating or will we just keep throwing money at what worked in the past and do not better than average (which, I suspect, will not be good at all). We will see.

So do you think that everyone should remove gamestop from stock brokers? It's not connected to the underlying business performance.

There's many regular investment vehicles that you can invest in where this also applies. This is not a crypto or Coinbase problem.

Brokers also let you trade foreign currencies and metals.