Belgian Crypto Ads Must Warn of Risks Under New Rules (coindesk.com) 29
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinDesk: Crypto ads in Belgium must be accurate and warn investors of the risks under new laws announced by the country's financial regulator Monday. Powers published in Belgium's Official Gazette on Friday mean any mass-media campaign to promote a digital currency would have to be submitted to the Financial Services and Markets Authority (FSMA) 10 days in advance, allowing the regulator to intervene if needed.
"Virtual currencies are all the rage at the moment, but they involve considerable risk," the FSMA said in a statement. "They are often subject to wild price fluctuations and are vulnerable to fraud and IT-related risks." The new rules, which will take effect on May 17, require ads to state that "the only guarantee in crypto is risk." Belgium joins European countries such as Spain and the U.K. in imposing restrictions on publicity campaigns, which often mirror those already in place for traditional finance.
"Virtual currencies are all the rage at the moment, but they involve considerable risk," the FSMA said in a statement. "They are often subject to wild price fluctuations and are vulnerable to fraud and IT-related risks." The new rules, which will take effect on May 17, require ads to state that "the only guarantee in crypto is risk." Belgium joins European countries such as Spain and the U.K. in imposing restrictions on publicity campaigns, which often mirror those already in place for traditional finance.
Crypto is broken by design (Score:3)
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Crypto advertising needs to be treated like tobacco and put in brown boxes covered in warnings.
Yep. Because that totally stops smokers from buying it.
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"We can already see that smoking is safer than drinking soda."
No, we can't. We really, really can't. Smoking doesn't double or triple your chance of lung cancer--it increases it 15 to 30 times.
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Yes, it's bad for you. That's not in question. It is however, not nearly as bad for you as smoking is.
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And ignore the cancer, there's still huge increases in other health issues - emphysema, chronic bronchitis, strokes, heart disease.
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"Yep. Because that totally stops smokers from buying it."
Well, yes, it does. It doesn't stop *all* of the smokers from buying it, obviously. It may not even stop most of the smokers from buying it. But it's a provable fact that the number of people buying cigarettes goes down when it's in unattractive packaging. That's why cigarette companies want to put them in attractive packaging and spend quite a lot of money making that packaging attractive (when they're allowed to).
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Stopping smoking is hard, even with unattractive packaging, since it's highly addictive. However that packaging might be most effective at stopping a lot of people from taking up smoking in the first place.
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It's not that hard to cut and paste. Most modern tools make it really easy not to screw up send addresses unless your system is compromised.
Base chain level transactions aren't really meant for the average Joe anyway. Not in the long run.
As far as "connecting a wallet" goes... connecting it to what exactly?
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FWIW, there is no possibility of error free copying methods, one methods that reduce errors. E.g. copy-paste is subject to frame registration errors. (And to other errors, that's just the one that happened to me earlier today, copying a web link.)
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Do you actually transact on any blockchains often? I've never had a cooy/paste error oldschooling it with generic wallet software.
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You missed the point. Error free copying is impossible because of noise and entropy. You can reduce the error rate, but not eliminate it. It doesn't matter WHAT context you are working in, this remains true.
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I mean, have I? You're talking about incidents that are extremely rare, while blithely ignoring the fact that most crypto toolchains nowadays allow you to save wallet addresses for repeat use and/or use QR codes to simplify copy/paste operations. Entropy/noise like flipped bits from stray cosmic rays CAN happen, but that's so rare and, honestly, shouldn't ECC fix that?
And in any case, most base chain txns requiring a full crypto address are really meant for backend operations that an end-user would never t
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I'm surprised that the last 2 hex digits aren't a checksum like credit cards using Luhn algorithm [wikipedia.org]?
Oh wait, that would take planning, understanding computer science, human psychology, and work from the crypto bros. /s
Alex, I'll take "Noobs Designing Crypto" for $100.
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They DO have a checksum in the address. I'm quite surprised this is news to any of you. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bas... [bitcoin.it]
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Thanks for informative link.
Of the 20,000+ shit coins how many use Base58 encoding though? And how many do (or don't) have a checksum in the address?
The biggest risk (Score:2)
These people are not going to be stopped.
What about bank ads? (Score:2)
It seems to me these people are fighting the wrong fight. The crypto crisis is history, it's a banking crisis we're having now. Bank ads should really carry a warning about the real risks they take with their investments, about the bail-in laws that have been passed since the last financial crisis (hint: if your bank fails, *your* money may be used to bail out the bank, and you might get some shares in the bank in return), about how government deposit insurance schemes are really just a smokescreen intended
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This is a government agency trying to turn public attention from the current bank crisis toward crypto problems.
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As a citizen of Belgium, crypto here is absolutely not on anybodies radar (maybe a very very very small percentage of people), and I work in the tech sector.
I went with my cousin to an open day in a school which does IT bachelor's degrees, and there were four choices for specialisation: security expert, software engineering, AI and blockchain. There was zero interest in the two last degrees, nobody stood there asking question.
Re: What about bank ads? (Score:2)
invest in regular banks (Score:3)
Re: invest in regular banks (Score:2)
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Doesn't work for cigarettes, won't work for this. (Score:2)
If somebody is distracted by the dangling keys of quick riches, telling them it's risky won't talk them off the ledge. File it away with beer commercials that end with "drink responsibly" after showing you T&A for 90 seconds.