They'll pay a fine that equates to about 1% of the company's monthly earnings and no one will ever be charged with anything. They'll probably pay it from their existing government subsidies.
Does anyone have any idea what effective blockchain regulation would look like? I live in one of the few states that heavily regulates crypto trading already, but it hurts banks/exchanges more than it does retail buyers/sellers. Crypto is turning out to be the 3D printed guns of the financial world. They can't regulate your computer or the software that's on it. I suppose they can make some aspects of it criminal, but even that is totally avoidable in most cases.
1-Require all crypto trading to go through a licensed broker? Most crypto is built around peer to peer trading anyways and you can buy and sell all you want without ever having to use a middle man.
2- Capital gains taxes? Security coins are a thing and they're totally untraceable. That also means crypto purchased with security coins is totally private as long as your wallet address isn't publicly tied to you. I don't wanna call it money laundering but it's basically money laundering.
3- ISP based restrictions? VPNs exist.
4- Outright prohibition? Not enforceable for anyone with moderate knowledge of the crypto market.
5- Requiring blockchain creators to install backdoors for the feds? Totally unenforceable due to how decentralized and global blockchain creation can be. Satoshi Nakamoto is credited for creating Bitcoin, and nobody has any idea who he is or if he's even a real person.
6- Wallet auditing? Sorry IRS man. I lost all my crypto in a tragic boating accident. I lost my seed phrases. I got hacked. I got scammed. I'm a retard and sent all my holdings to the wrong address. There's probably 100 or more valid reasons to "lose" your crypto that are unverifiable.
7- Anti-anonymity measures through brokerages? You already have to submit a photo ID, address, bank account, selfie, phone number, email, social security number, etc. to trade on major exchanges. It's a honeypot for normies but people tend to trend away from exchanges once they learn more about them.
It just seems like the framework already exists for the vast majority of people to ignore any attempt at regulation, and it's flexible enough to adapt to an unforeseeable situation. There's already blockchains that are immune to quantum computation, price manipulation, and 51% attacks (controlling more than half of the computing power on the network.) I'm pretty sure that if you want to play with crypto, nothing is really going to be able to stop you until some unforeseen technology comes along.