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Kraken CEO Jesse Powell to step down as CEO after founding the company that is now the fourth-largest cryptocurrency exchange by spot trading volume.

COO Dave Ripley will take over the reins from Powell, who will continue as chairman of the companys board. The transition will be finalized in the upcoming months as the company looks for a suitable replacement for Ripley. Ripley and Powell will continue to perform their existing functions during the search.

Powell told Bloomberg that he had announced his decision to step down to the board over a year ago, citing boredom.

As the company has gotten bigger, its just gotten to be more draining on me, less fun, he explained.

Following his exit from the top job, Powell, a public critic of crypto regulation, will spend his time on crypto industry advocacy.

#JesPoS seemed like less work. @krakenfx is in excellent hands with @DavidLRipley. Ill continue to be highly engaged as chairman. Big thanks to the team for trusting me, our investors for taking a chance, and all my industry peers on the front lines, he tweeted.

Speaking with Fortune, Ripley confirmed that there would be little change in the companys libertarian culture when he succeeds Powell.

Powell founded Kraken in San Francisco in 2011 with fellow board member Thanh Luu. Kraken became the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S. during the last crypto bull market.

The outgoing CEO was a vocal opponent of the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Controls decision to ban cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash and urged crypto investors to take their money off centralized exchanges following a Canadian trucker protest against government vaccine mandates in Feb. 2022. He also halted Krakens operations in New York after the New York Department of Financial Services required the company to comply with specific regulations to continue operations.

Powells outspoken leadership style made headlines earlier this year when he questioned certain employees choice of personal pronouns, igniting a firestorm of criticism from employees threatening to walk out.

In June, the controversial CEO published and co-authored with Ripley a company culture document drenched in libertarian philosophical values consistent with the so-called cypherpunk movement characteristic of early bitcoin adopters and believers. Powell encouraged those that disagreed with the document to opt into a program offering them four months salary if they never again worked at the company.

In hindsight, Powell believes that the document rallied the troops, galvanizing the company and making it a desirable workplace.

Going forward, consistent with his libertarian views, he believes that cryptocurrencies will continue to grow.

The world is a changing place, and Bitcoin is anti-fragile and a safe haven from whats happening in the legacy financial system, he said.

For Be[In]Cryptos latestBitcoin(BTC) analysis,click here.

DisclaimerAll the information contained on our website is published in good faith and for general information purposes only. Any action the reader takes upon the information found on our website is strictly at their own risk.

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Outspoken Kraken CEO Walks Away From Top Job, Calls It 'Draining' - BeInCrypto

As I noted yesterday,I'm still trying to fully digest theNetchoice v. Paxton opinions, but I passed along two commentaries from top scholars on the subject, one entirely critical from Prof. Genevieve Lakier (Chicago)and one that's mostly critical fromProf. Alan Rozenshtein (Minnesota). I thought I'd also pass along are more positive commentary from Prof. Adam Candeub (Michigan State):

Last Friday in NetChoice v. Paxton, Judge Andy Oldham of the U.S. Court of Appeals wrote an opinion for the Fifth Circuit upholding H.B.20, Texas's law prohibiting social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, from discriminating against users based on their viewpoints. The Texas law would require the internet platforms' content-moderation policies to employ viewpoint-neutral criterion, ending censorship of conservatives and dissenters from the internet.

Big Tech supporters on the left and libertarian right greeted the opinion with beating of breasts and gnashing of teeth. The Left worries that the platforms will be less able to stifle views it finds dangerous and undesirable. (Commenters on the Left have yet to square this view to their hostility to corporate First Amendment rights in Citizens United.) Libertarians decry the opinion as an intrusion on the internet platform's "editorial discretion" which they claim the First Amendment protects completely. Both sides smear the opinion as an act of judicial willfulness unmoored from precedent.

But Judge Oldham's opinion stands on firm ground. The opinion's critics argue that the First Amendment protects the act of exercising "editorial discretion": the right of platforms to control what content they transmit. But, critics forget that the First Amendment protects only expressive actsa point made clear in the two Supreme Court case on which Big Tech (and Judge Oldham's critics) base all their critique: Miami Herald v. Tornillo and Hurley v. Irish American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston.

In Miami Herald, the Supreme Court held that when newspaper editors decide to include a particular op-ed in their pages, they convey the editors' message that the article is insightful or otherwise valuable. Similarly, the St. Patrick Day's Parade organizers in Hurley, expressed a message, attributable to them, of general support for each group it approved to march, communicating with the various groups a discrete set of ideas and positions.

In contrast, most platform acts of content moderation are not expressive under the Supreme Court tests. Most obviously, they are not expressive because most are never communicated and therefore cannot convey a message. For instance, shadow banning, by which a platform renders a user's posts invisible to all but that user, cannot convey a message because no one knows, except the platform, that it is happening.

Indeed, all other types of invisible content prioritizations lack the required expressiveness because users don't know when content is promoted or hidden. Instead, invisible prioritization only communicates by reference to other speechand as the Court recognized in Rumsfeld v. FAIR, protected speech must convey a message itself, without extraneous explanation. Finally, content moderation as a whole cannot convey a message because the platforms keep their decisions private, and users lack access to representative samplings of edited material to infer any message.

Of course, when an internet firm bars an individual from their platforms because of his viewpoint and explains why, the platform engage in an expressive act. But, these acts of platform censorship simply express discriminatory animus. Just as the First Amendment does not protect lunch counters in their "expressive" refusals to serve individuals belonging to a particular race or religious groups, so the First Amendment does not protect the platforms in their discriminatory refusal to serve the public even if the platforms consider their refusals expressive. Indeed, state and local civil rights laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of political belief or affiliationand have survived for decades without successful First Amendment challenge. H.B. 20 stands firmly on the rationale that undergirds all of our civil rights law.

And, finally, as Judge Oldham pointed out, just as telephone companies do not express their customers' conversations which they transmit, a social media platform's transmission of a message does not express its own editorial decisions or speech. The platforms themselves maintain this position vociferously. In countless section 230 cases, the social media firms argue that they should have no liability for their users' speech because it is speech, as section 230 states, of "another." Now, the platforms claim users' speech as their own for First Amendment purposes. But, they cannot have their section 230 free lunchand eat it too.

The opinions' critics end up arguing that the First Amendment gives private businesses and entities control over opinions expressed within their premises. But, precedent rejects that view. Cable systems must carry local broadcast stations; telephone companies must carry messages expressing all viewpoints; and, airlines must carry passengers regardless of their views of the 2020 election. Similarly, courts, like the Supreme Court in Pruneyard, have long upheld state laws that require shopping centers to allow political expression, prohibit neighborhood associations from banning political lawn signs, and limit employer's ability to control their employees' political speech and expression on the job. This precedent upholds H.B.20.

The Supreme Court should grant certiorari in this case because it touches key issues in today's political discourse. The complex concerns it raises deserve the most exacting scrutiny. But, claims that the Fifth Circuit's opinion is anything but a thoughtful reflection of the Supreme Court's current First Amendment jurisprudence should not mar that important public discussion.

Prof. Candeub is a law professor at Michigan State University and senior fellow at the D.C.-based Center for Renewing America, and served as expert witness for the State of Texas in NetChoice v. Paxton.

Originally posted here:
Another Commentary on the Fifth Circuit's Texas Social Media Law Decision - Reason

Upon taking control of the Libertarian Party (L.P.) this May, leaders from the internal bloc known as the Mises Caucus quickly adopted "national divorce" as one of the retooled party's core rallying cries on Twitter. New national Chair Angela McArdle proudly tweeted that she was "organizing the LP like an insurgency and preparing for counter insurgency operations."

Over the past three weeks, minus the bloody violence part, the state Libertarian affiliates in New Mexico and Virginia have indeed divorced themselves from the party's national leadership. But the Libertarian National Committee (LNC) is not letting them go peacefully without a fight.

On August 25, the Libertarian Party of New Mexico (LPNM), which achieved major-party ballot-access status in 2018 thanks to the 9 percent presidential showing in 2016 in that state by former two-term Gov. Gary Johnson, announced that it was disaffiliating from the LNC.

"You have conspired, with a faction inimical to the principles of libertarianism, to impose upon us officers and governing documents foreign to our rules, unchosen by our members, and unacknowledged by the laws of our state," state Chairman Chris Luchini wrote, in a long bill of particulars. "You have adopted messaging and communications hostile to the principles for which the Libertarian Party was founded, serving no purpose other than to antagonize and embarrass."

At issue was an August 9 LNC letter declaring the New Mexico state party's July 12 Constitutional Convention to be "null and void" due to "multiple" procedural violations, involving the proper advance notice and the manner of the convention (electronic). In a phone interview last week, Luchini theorized that the LNC's real objection was to a bylaw change the LPNM made at that convention limiting the number of annual executive committee personnel changes to not more than two, thereby preventing the Mises Caucus (or any other bloc) from winning complete control of the state party in a single convention.

While Luchini granted procedural errors over advance notice on an earlier convention prior to the July one, he said the LNC's responses have been unduly and unreasonably punitive and harassing.* "Violate a procedural rule, God forbid, commit heresy against Robert's Rules of Order, they think us making a mistake justified any action on their part." Rather than submit to national discipline, the LPNM chose secession.

No, we break up with you, the LNC responded in a meeting this past Sunday night. The National Committee refused to recognize the LPNM's right to exit, and instead voted 141 (with two abstentions) to disaffiliate itself from the New Mexicans. But this divorce will come with a likely custody battleover the name.

"If state parties choose to disaffiliate and operate completely independent of the national LP," McArdle wrote to me this week, "they will need to come up with a new name."

Luchini, for one, finds it ironic that the LNC is threatening to sueuse state forceto protect its trademark over the term "Libertarian Party,"* especially considering that the LPNM had been in operation for decades before the LNC got around to trademarking the term in 2000.

The LNC anticipates that a new group of New Mexico Libertariansthe national party bylaws require just 10will arise to form a new state-level L.P. in New Mexico that the LNC will then recognize as an official affiliate. But the existing ballot access relationship with the state of New Mexico remains with the disaffiliated party for now. According to a special rule of order passed at that same LNC meeting Sunday night, "The petitioners [for such a new party must have] held a public meeting which was open to all current national Party members and immediately previous affiliate Party members," with reasonable notice.

That same day, the Virginia Libertarian Party's state central committee (SCC) announced that it had dissolved itself after a 75 vote (with one abstention), complaining that "the national image of the party" was now "functionally indistinct from other alt-right parties and movements." The party's website and Facebook page disappeared; its email addresses stopped working.

The move was illegal, LNC Secretary Caryn Ann Harlos says, though the Virginia State Corporation Commission issued a letter Tuesday stating that the dissolution complies "with the requirements of law." A parliamentarian consulted by the LNC countered that the dissolution required a vote of full party membership, while now-former Virginia L.P. chair Holly Ward believes that the SCC itself is the only relevant "members" who needed to approve. McArdle also said in a post to the LNC's business listserv that "corporate dissolution papers do not make or break an affiliate and lots of affiliates don't have corporate status." Technically, in Virginia another legal step known as "termination" must also occur, after the Virginia party's assets have been properly distributed.

Ward charged in a phone interview that the LNC has become a "fraud," properly backing neither Libertarian candidates nor Libertarian messaging, in a state whose party achieved a remarkable 6.5 percent running Robert Sarvis for governor in 2013 (and another exceptional-for-Libertarians 2.4 percent running Sarvis for Senate in 2014). The national party has made the Libertarian banner toxic to potential candidates, Ward claimed, which she thinks helps explain why there are no L.P. candidates on Virginia ballots this year. In doing candidate outreach, Ward says, she found "interested parties declined to run based on the current image and narrative of the national party."

Several local and regional Libertarian organizations in Virginia objected to the SCC's abrupt self-destruction, and the conflict is ongoing: Disgruntled Virginia L.P. members are being asked to write letters of complaint to the state government (a move Ward considers a potential use of state force to achieve a political goal, and thus a Libertarian no-no), and the Libertarian Party of Northern Virginia has been decrying the move and vowing to "continue to work with affiliates across the Commonwealth to conduct the business of the party," state party dissolution or not. There are various means for members to call for a new special convention and elect new officers who don't want to dissolve, Harlos says, working on the presumption that the dissolution motion should be considered illegitimate.

"While the LNC has had to referee some internal party disputes recently," McArdle wrote in her email, "we're still focused on advancing the message of liberty, supporting candidates, and moving the needle in the direction of freedom. I appreciate how level-headed and calm the remaining LPVA officers have been and anticipate they will get their affiliate back in order quickly."

Virginia and New Mexico are not the only states experiencing Libertarian turmoil. Massachusetts now has two functioning parties using the name Libertarian, only one of which is recognized by the LNC.

The Bay State fight emanated from a Mises-associated bloc of members from the state party calling for a (bylaw-legal) special convention in December 2021, that the old guard attempted to quash in January 2022 by expelling from the party all who called for it. Competing conventions were then held in April and the newer, Mises-oriented bloc is the one the LNC now recognizes as an affiliate.

Still, all the Libertarian candidates on the Massachusetts ballot this year are the ones put forward by the older body, doing business as the "Libertarian Association of Massachusetts." Andrew Cordio, chair of the officially recognized "Libertarian Party of Massachusetts," said in a phone interview this week that he's currently more focused on membership and volunteer growth and outreach than candidates and ballot access.

In 2021, the Mises Caucus faction, then influential but not dominant on the LNC, was on the opposite side of a state-disaffiliation case, successfully blocking a move to break ties with a New Hampshire L.P. that was seen by the old guard as being too "toxic" for the national brand. (Roughly, some accuse the Mises side of hypocrisy, seeing the current New Mexico situation as analogous, except now the Mises crowd are for disaffiliating a state party that displeased them.) The attempted purge of the New Hampshire party, which has since attracted national attention for various inflammatory tweets, led directly in June 2021 to the resignation of thennational Chair Joseph Bishop-Henchman.

Harlos, consistently the LNC's most meticulous stickler for proper parliamentary procedure, explains that the national party is duty-bound to protect the rights of members, sometimes over the actions of their governing bodies. If the LNC seems to be interfering with a state party, she says, it's because "we have to determine who [the legitimate state affiliate] actually is," which has to include "if they conducted themselves within their own bylaws."

The LNC may be exerting a heavy hand of late in publicity and state affiliate management, but on the issues core to the functions of a political partyballot access and candidatesthe national party is largely irrelevant; the state parties do all the heavy lifting and have the legal relationships to their state's electoral officials. The national party's role is to occasionally offer financial, legal, promotional, and organizational support to either ballot access drives or (more rarely) candidates or candidate training.

The national party does pick a presidential ticket by majority delegate vote at its biannual convention in presidential election years, but every state affiliate has the legal power to ignore that choice and place its own preferred candidate. It almost never happens with any state party in happy affiliation with the LNC, but a rogue Arizona L.P. in 2000 did place science fiction writer L. Neil Smith on the presidential ballot in that state over national choice Harry Browne.

It seems overwhelmingly likely that whoever the Libertarian presidential nominee selected by the national convention delegates is in 2024, he or she will not be on the ballot in all 50 states, a threshold that the L.P. has achieved the past two presidential elections and six times total in its 50-year history.

Despite these state conflicts, including assertions that current national policies are hurting the brand, according to its August financial report the national party's number of active donors did begin rising after the May convention turnover in management, though as of August that number is lower than in any month in 2021 under the leadership displaced in Reno; August revenue is lower than the vast majority of months of the past year after a huge May rise that beat all but one month of the past year.

Luchini in an email this week said that there are plans to launch a new national organization of state Libertarian parties that do not wish to be affiliated with the current Mises-dominated LNC. While Luchini would not name any states specifically, he says he is confident from backchannel discussions that while New Mexico was "the first" to disaffiliate while still being recognized by the LNC, it certainly "won't be the last."

*CORRECTIONS: A previous version of this article was unclear about which convention Luchini granted notice errors on. A previous version of the article was unclear about precisely what term was trademarked by the LNC.

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Libertarian Party Faces State Rebellions - Reason

BOISE A rift in the Idaho Libertarian Party has cost the party its best-known Idaho candidate, 1st Congressional District hopeful Joe Evans, who withdrew in late August and has now been replaced by a first-time candidate from Post Falls.

Evans was the partys top vote-getter in the 2020 election, receiving 16,453 votes, or 3.6%, in a three-way race for the same post, which was won by current GOP Congressman Russ Fulcher. Evans actually got more votes in Idaho that year than the Libertarian Partys presidential nominee, Jo Jorgensen, who received 16,404 votes or 1.9%.

The Libertarian Party counts 11,081 registered Libertarians in Idaho, according to August figures from the Idaho Secretary of States office; thats 1.1% of Idahos registered voters.

There was an ideological break between the previous board of the Libertarian Party of Idaho and the one thats currently in charge, Evans told the Idaho Press. And unfortunately, because of the size of the Libertarian Party in Idaho, a break between a significant candidate and the board is simply unsustainable.

He said he didnt want to campaign while they were coming in behind me and telling everybody that libertarianism stood for something else. So it wasnt worth my time to spend the next 60 days fighting over the issue.

Though the Idaho Libertarian Party held a convention and elected new officers in April, the election of a single precinct committeeman in Bannock County in the May primary with just five votes made that person, Todd Corsetti, the only official member of the state Central Committee, with the ability to appoint other members, according to the Idaho Secretary of States office. As the party was thrown into confusion, it tried to revert to its previous officers, a move the national Libertarian Party rejected.

They have a hard time getting precinct committeemen elected at all, said Jason Hancock, deputy Idaho secretary of state, because Idaho law requires at least five votes to elect someone to that position. Most Idaho precincts dont even have five registered Libertarians. In the May primary, seven candidates ran across the state; Corsetti was the only one to receive five votes.

Hancock said the election made Corsetti a county chair, and he appointed his wife as state precinct committeewoman for the county.

The state central committee of each political party consists of all of the county central committee chairs and all the state committeemen and women, he said. That was those two people at that point.

My understanding is that when the national Libertarian Party got involved, they ended up landing on the side of this elected group, I guess youd say, since they had kind of propagated themselves through the electoral process and state statute, Hancock said, as opposed to kind of the legacy group that had been in charge.

Corsetti then successfully petitioned the party to expel its previous chair and the newly elected chair, Jennifer and Robert Imhoff, and Jayson Sorensen, who had lost narrowly to Robert Imhoff for the party chairman post in April, was appointed as the new chairman.

Sorensen said, Theres a caucus called the Mises Caucus that basically ran the table in Reno and is a majority of the party now. Reno was where the partys national convention was held in May. This is kind of just the backlash to people that have been in power for a long time now losing that power, would be my take on it, Sorensen said.

The rift echoes similar splits that have happened in a half-dozen other states, as the Mises Caucus took over the national party, cementing its victory at this years national convention.

Corsetti is a member of the Mises Caucus, which is variously described as the paleo-libertarian or Ron Paul wing of the Libertarian Party, or by Paul himself in 2021 as the libertarian wing of the Libertarian Party. Formed in 2017, it opposed the more pragmatic positions taken by 2018 Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson, and opposes moves toward progressivism.

Theyre social conservatives, Evans said, though others in the party dispute that label. Some of the other members were very much part of the pro-life portion of the party, and they very much cheered the overturning of Roe v. Wade. They believe strongly in the state being able to enforce anti-abortion restrictions. Evans, who supports abortion rights, said that was the dividing line for him as a Libertarian.

The national Libertarian Partys platform included a plank advocating leaving decisions about abortion up to the individual until this year; it was removed at the party convention in May, leaving the platform silent on the issue.

Sorensen said he was sorry to lose Evans from the partys slate of candidates. He was a good candidate, he said. We were hoping that after the split, we would be able to work with everybody other than the two individuals who were removed, and it just didnt work out that way.

Sorensen, 32, a farmer from southeastern Idaho, said Corsettis election as a precinct committeeman in May was a first for the Idaho party.

I think were definitely going to grow, he said. My personal opinion is that the Libertarian Party of Idaho has been somewhat of a social club for a lot of years. My hope is that we grow and we continue to recruit members and work with other organizations in Idaho to build coalitions and grow the party.

On the day of the deadline to name a new candidate, the party named Darian Drake of Post Falls to replace Evans on the ballot for the 1st Congressional District seat.

Drake, 49, said hes a member of the Mises Caucus and he defines it as a pushback against progressivism, in the sense that its pushing back against collectivism and identity politics.

A resident of Idaho for five and a half years, Drake said his top issue is individual rights.

At an August meeting of the Libertarian National Committee, the committee voted 13-0 to uphold the April convention results from the Idaho party, and recognize officers elected then, and their successors, including Jayson Sorensen as interim chair, are the legitimate officers of the Libertarian Party of Idaho.

The Idaho Secretary of States office agreed. In a Sept. 6 letter to Sorensen, Secretary of State Lawerence Denney wrote, After consulting legal counsel, the office of the Idaho Secretary of State recognizes Jayson Sorensen as chair of the Libertarian Party of Idaho. As such, any appointments to fill federal or state vacancies will only be accepted from this individual.

Then, the office accepted the appointment of Drake to replace Evans on the ballot. He was in under the wire on that, said Hancock, who said Drake will appear on the November ballot.

Evans, 53, who ran as a Libertarian for the state Legislature in 2018 before his first run for Congress in 2020, said, The board was pretty much split in April. Then Todd Corsetti used his position to remove certain members giving the Mises Caucus dominance on the party.

Evans, a U.S. Army veteran, data engineer and web designer from Meridian, said he hopes to focus for now on ballot initiatives, including a 2024 medical marijuana proposal, rather than running for office. Im still pursuing libertarian goals, just not doing it as part of the party, he said.

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Idaho Libertarian congressional candidate withdraws, amid party upheaval - bigcountrynewsconnection.com

I am current reading an excellent book on zoning written by M. Nolan Gray, entitled Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How To Fix It. It might sound like a bland topic, but its a surprisingly easy and enjoyable read.

Most Americans have never given much thought to residential zoning, and have little idea as to what it is all about. Gray punctures many myths about zoning. For instance, zoning rules were not set up to prevent polluting factories from locating near residential neighborhoodsthere were already public nuisance rules against that sort of thing prior to the first zoning laws in 1916. Rather, zoning rules are aimed at making cities less dense than they would be in a free market, and imposing strict economic segregationbasically keeping the poor as far away as possible. Studies suggest that zoning regulations dramatically reduce Americas GDP by sharply increasing housing prices in our most productive areas, making the country significantly poorer than it would be with free housing market.

So where are libertarians on this important issue? Heres Reason magazine, discussing a proposal by Leo Pustilnikov to build 2300 housing units at the site of a former power plant in Redondo Beach, California:

Leo is a pure speculator and its laughable that he would buy a piece of property and try to enforce his will onto this community, says Nehrenheim.

A registered Libertarian, Nehrenheim has twice now won elections on a platform of stopping overdevelopment and preventing the Santa Monica-ization of the city.

Its proven a popular message in Redondo Beach among an eclectic mix of supporters. His 2021 reelection campaign received donations from the local Sierra Club and the enthusiastic endorsement of theLibertarian Party Mises Caucus.

The Mises Caucus and the Sierra Club? Thats not quite Baptists and bootleggers, more like southern and west coast Baptists.

This seems part of a broader movement within the Mises Caucus:

Along with Rothbard, one of the biggest influences on prominent members of the Mises Caucus is the political theorist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who disagreed with the pro-immigration views of Ludwig von Mises. Hewrotethat politicians have a perverse incentive to let in unproductive parasites, bums, and criminals and that the power to admit or exclude should be stripped from the hands of the central government and reassigned to the states, provinces, cities, towns, villages, residential districts, and ultimately to private property owners and their voluntary associations. Hoppe advocates for the Swiss model, where local assemblies, not the central government, determine who can and who cannot become a Swiss citizen. Hoppe has alsosuggestedthat democrats and communists will have to be physically separated and expelled from a libertarian society.

In fact, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native born Americans.

Progressives often have more inclusionary rhetoric than the far right, but in practice their communities are some of the worst offenders. Gray suggests that the most extreme examples of government enforced economic segregation (which leads to de facto racial segregation) occur in progressive areas of the northeastern US and California.

PS. This picture shows the location of the power complex in Redondo Beach where the proposed residential development would occur. In the past, this proposal would almost certainly have been shot down. Today it has at least a fighting chance, due to some recent deregulation that makes it a bit easier to build multifamily buildings in California.

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The open society and its enemies - Econlib