As a Chicago-born financial anthropologist, I’ve traced the silent fractures in global crypto regulation—not by policy, but by human cost. From MiCA’s sterile uniformity to Hong Kong’s quiet openness, from Russia’s confiscated miners to Saudi Arabia’s halal blockchains, this is not a tech report. It’s an elegy for decentralized dreams caught between law and longing. Who truly owns these tokens when no state can decide what they mean?