241–250 of 360 posts
Ironically ether & bitcoin started dropping last night around midnight. Makes me wonder if any SEC folks were involved in insider trading. Anyone care to speculate on what this will do to ether/bitcoin values? Does this concentrate interest in the existing players or does it hurt demand and speculation therefore depressing prices?
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Of course. We don't restrict the rights of the entire population to engage in voluntary interactions to preempt crime. We punish actual criminals to deter other would-be criminals, and leave everyone else to be free. We don't require a publishing license because someone might use their right to free speech to libel someone else. We punish the libeler.
You realize that's not in the slightest bit true, don't you? For example: Under contract law, there are certain rights that _you are legally not permitted to give away_. You can't actually sell yourself into slavery. You can't contractually disclaim gross negligence on your part. You can't have a contract that unilaterally benefits one party without consideration provided for the other. You can't accept a contract wh…
What isn't true?
>For example: Under contract law, there are certain rights that _you are legally not permitted to give away_. You can't actually sell yourself into slavery.
A court will void contractual provisions like this, based on a comprehensive body of case law that establishes what constitutes consent. This is a universe away from what you're defending here, which is a federal agency prosecuting individuals because they entered into some investment transaction without 'permission' from said regulatory agency.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11707497
[2] https://www.sec.gov/reportspubs/investor-publications/invest...
When DAO originally made the HN Front page I made this comment [1] calling DAO snake oil and suggested people could lawfully operate their own "DAO" as an Investment Club LLC, specifically Investment Clubs can be exempt from securities laws [2] subject to the restrictions I outlined in my prior comment such as a limit of "100 tokens" (i.e. 100 members to make future investments). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item…
Ironically ether & bitcoin started dropping last night around midnight. Makes me wonder if any SEC folks were involved in insider trading. Anyone care to speculate on what this will do to ether/bitcoin values? Does this concentrate interest in the existing players or does it hurt demand and speculation therefore depressing prices?
Why isn't ETH crashing right now?
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There is a massive negative externality for allowing scammers to run free in a situation where the upfront ability to assess fitness-of-goods is lacking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons the money quote being The cost of dishonesty, therefore, lies not only in the amount by which the purchaser is cheated; the cost also must include the loss incurred from driving legitimate business out of existence…
That's not an externality. An honest business is not entitled to any customer's business. If the customer wants to squander their money away at the casino, leaving them with no money to spend at the honest business, they have that right. It's their money, and they are not obligated to spend it at the honest business. And in any case, the market for lemons is a theoretical exercise. It does not actually happen in real…
The point is that everyone is worse off in a situation like this, both customer and (legitimate) business.
It is a type of market failure, everyone loses.
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I'm not sure what a "non-securities investments" in the US securities scheme would look like. An "investment contract" is sort of the catch all category for everything that tries not to look like a security, but actually is one. If something is an investment, I can't imagine that it's not a security.
The Howey Test defines an investment contract more narrowly than you imply. People lose absolutely staggering amounts of money each year on bad investments. Money is like water. It flows around these regulations. The detours just add friction that slows innovation, and diverts capital to fees for legal/accounting professionals.
I mean, maybe?
An investment of money, managed by somebody else, with the expectation of profits. I feel like that covers most things we would typically consider to be investments. Aside from something like, "I bought this piece of art... as an investment." Maybe I'm just missing some obvious examples?
If you read the actual report ( https://www.sec.gov/litigation/investreport/34-81207.pdf ), you may notice that the SEC is careful to apply securities law DAO specifically. In particular, they apply the security test: "did investors invest money with a reasonable expectation of profits derived from managerial efforts of others?" Since DAO was a wisdom-of-crowd VC fund, the answer is a clear YES. On the other hand, th…
Where it gets strange is if your tokens are picked up by an exchange. What happens if someone buys your tokens with the expectation that they can sell them to someone else? Then the price of your tokens might rise, and they've made a profit. Does that count as expectation of profit?
When DAO originally made the HN Front page I made this comment [1] calling DAO snake oil and suggested people could lawfully operate their own "DAO" as an Investment Club LLC, specifically Investment Clubs can be exempt from securities laws [2] subject to the restrictions I outlined in my prior comment such as a limit of "100 tokens" (i.e. 100 members to make future investments). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item…
It's a decentralized and autonomous application. How could an autonomous application on the blockchain be an LLC?
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Extreme libertarian views like yours have been rejected almost everywhere in the world. Maybe it's your opinion that allowing scammers to manipulate people is their basic right, but no one seems to share that sentiment.
You're not even representing my view accurately. My view is that scammers should be punished, not the entirety of the population on the premise of preempting crime. Rejecting a person's argument on the grounds that it's "extreme [insert label]" that "everyone rejects" is not constructive.