This clash raises a lot of issues, ones that I had to spend some time mulling over before responding here.

Of course, the SEC is going to jump in. As the Dank Guide to Civics explains, people with power are motivated to seek more power. They always have a vision of the good, a vision that correlates well with their power growing. The Howey decision liberated that desire in the SEC, as it gave them license to wander out of Wall Street and exert their jurisdiction elsewhere. That's what we're seeing with SEC v. Arise.

The conflict of interest factor you highlighted, I didn't think of. Instead, after skimming the facts and mulling over, it occurred to me that the SEC is acting like an overweening legacy agency -like that part of the legacy media that wants special First Amendment protections denied to citizen journalists but kept for professional journalists. Unless said journalists resemble this lady, of course.

The SEC is legacy in two ways:

• Its institutional memory and customs bind it to the industry which it regulates.... as of the time that it became a dominant force in that industry. Interestingly, the SEC has been criticized both for being too heavy-handed and for being too forbearing. Undoubtedly, the believers in its mission - like the supporters of the legacy media - brandish criticism from both sides as evidence that it's in the zone of the happy medium. But it's a zone that's centered on old-style Wall Street, one where a new company proceeds in an orderly paper-strewn way from private company to public company. The SEC is grounded in an age which was much slower than today's.

When it announced on July 25, 2017 that The DAO 'is' a security, was I the only one who felt like a binge watcher who saw the interjection of a last-season story arc that had already been closed? By July '17, The Dao had long been turned into a simple refund contract via Ethereum ledger overwriting.

• The SEC is also legacy sociologically. It gained critical sway over financial markets at a time when it was seen as the protector of proverbial widows and orphans: people who literally did not know a stock from a bond. Its institutional worldview is a world wherein slick-talking sophisticates take advantage of lamblike naifs.

As a result, its worldview is profoundly paternalistic - although in its defense, it tries to be 'paternalistic' in a way that an executor of a widow's trust would be. We need not question their motives to realize that their proper milieu is a world where the masses are essentially passive: potential playthings of smart-brained and silver-tongued sophisticates.

In other words, the SEC is a legacy institute of managerial society : a society split into a managerial class and ordinary folks. One wherein the latter accept their lot as people whose destinies are shaped by the former.

The clash between the SEC and Arise is the clash between the old world and the social revolution embodied by cryptocurrency. At stake is, do we have the right to direct our money as we see fit, at the cost of paying hard for our mistakes? Or do we not have that right, because of an imbalance of power at our expense which the SEC is there to ameliorate?

I hope it's the former. The latter does protect us, true, but it also condemns us to the role of wards.