Follow the law, get rich, change the law, vs break the law, go to jail, lose it all

Strategic compliance vs strategic non-compliance

There seems to be different strategies which people take regardless of their political beliefs. The legitimacy strategy involves following the law, get rich while following the law, and then change the law. If we look at for example Microsoft, Google or Facebook, we will see that they follow the laws of the countries they operate in and make profit. When they become big enough then they begin to lobby to change laws to protect their strategic interests and ability to make future profits.

In a sense, on a level of the individual, we can see there is the path where the individual complies with the law to reduce their own risks. The risk of losing their wealth, which could be time, health, beauty, monetary, social, whatever it is that they have that they do not want to lose. When the individual does not comply with the law, the social norms of their community, the ethics of their neighbors, then they increase the risk of their wealth being lost.

Of course not all individuals take this course and some individuals choose to break the laws. In most cases these are individuals who don't have a lot to lose (desperation), or who are young (inexperienced), and typically the more an individual has to lose in their life the less of certain kinds of risks they can take.

This doesn't mean that the laws are just or that we must agree with the laws to comply with them

The main point is compliance is a strategy, a means to an end, and the individual or corporation does not need to agree with the laws in order to see it's more pragmatic (cheaper) for the business or personal life to comply. This isn't always going to be the case and if the laws become more expensive to comply with than to break (if the individual or business has more to lose complying than breaking the law), then the pragmatic thing to do would be to violate the law. So compliance is not absolute, and is merely a cost reduction strategy. It reduces legal fees, it reduces healthcare expenses, it reduces costs across the board, and that is why most people in the world comply.

But to comply doesn't mean to agree with it. It's no different than if you export your franchise to a foreign country which has laws you don't care for or understand. If you want your company to be profitable in that foreign country then you'll comply with the laws of that foreign country or there is no way your company will be profitable due to fines, legal fees, boycotts, etc. The same holds true for crypto projects, where in some cases it is a grey area where it is clearly not a matter of ethics, but of public perception.

Assume the mainstream demographic has a perception of a crypto project as "good" or "evil". Assume most crypto projects want to be perceived as "good". If the crypto project wants to be perceived as "good" by the mainstream demographic of society then it has to appeal to the sensibilities of that demographic. On the other hand some crypto projects definitely do not appeal to the mainstream but still have value because they appeal to the norms of certain subcultures which perceive the crypto project as "good". So as long as some demographic perceives your project as "good" the project will have it's supporters, but if the goal is to be profitable and not just useful then it requires growth, and growth requires mainstream demographics.

Steemit is a good example of this kind of project which is appealing to the mainstream. I don't particularly agree with some of the radical decisions myself such as having the wallet amounts transparent with no privacy, or having certain hard forks, but I realize these may be necessary for attracting mainstream users. Mainstream users who are going to comply with their local government, who want to be kept safe, who don't want to manage private keys, who don't want to be a crypto-anarchist, or a cypherpunk or a computer nerd, but who just want to blog and make money, have fun, make friends. The majority of profits come growth, which comes from the majority of people.