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Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

nytimes.com

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Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#111

Post by hellbanner »

dmix wrote: post #104
flimflamfloozle wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That guy on TV is a broker. He doesn't want to hold any gold. He wants to sell and buy at the same time and make money off of the spread.

Not sure if the answer is obvious here but I don't know much about finance, does 'spread' here mean the difference in the asset price from purchase/sale time (whether by market change or artificial markup) or the brokering fees involved? or both?

#2:

Any vendor will buy a good at say, $9 and sell at $10. In the US there are many pawn shops saying "We buy and sell gold!" - it's never at the same price.

#1: A smart gold trader will buy low, sell high.. they will buy more gold when prices are low and advertise to sell more when the price is high.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#112

Post by ringaroundthetx »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #96
ringaroundthetx wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/bankinforeg/regdcg.htm > Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal nor securities advice. Look, we know. Only armchair financial enthusiasts use those disclaimers, and you've made it painfully obvious and its a bit contrived. Federal Reserve regulation D is not the SEC's regulation D that you talked about. Regulation D is not an applicable exemption, neither is Filecoin's u…

> Regulation D is not an applicable exemption, neither is Filecoin's use of it, because the secondary markets where people are inevitably going to trade them have to be registered broker dealers to legally trade things that admit they are securities Filecoin appears to be using Rule 506(c) of Regulation D, a § 4(a)(2) exemption. Also, you don't need to be a broker-dealer to issue, buy or sell unregistered securities.…

in your grandparent post, you are still linking the Federal Reserve's deposit insurance regulation, while talking about the Securities Exchange Commission's exempt securities offering regulation.

I still find that entertaining, let me help you https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answers-regdhtm.html

Classic strawman, I wasn't claiming Regulation D required anyone to be a broker dealer to issue buy or sell an exempt unregistered security. The claim is that reselling it freely requires you to go through or be a broker dealer, unless all buyers are accredited investors.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#113

Post by [deleted] »

blhack wrote: post #110

To put it into perspective, the tezos ICO recently raised a little more than $200,000,000 worth of BTC and ETH. Here's their twitter: https://twitter.com/tez0s?lang=en Here's their subreddit: https://reddit.com/r/tezos Here's their website: https://tezos.com It doesn't look like they have really updated anybody on what they're doing with $200,000,000 since their ICO closed.

[deleted]

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#114

Post by whytaka »

How exactly are ICOs performed?

1) Set up mining software.

2) Start running it on your own machines and mine enough tokens for ICO.

3) Sell tokens. Profit. ??

Are investors at some point invited to run the mining chain on their own machines? Surely they don't just trust that the company raising money will do manage the accounting on their own.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#115

Post by [deleted] »

richardknop wrote: post #74
alistproducer2 wrote: post #55

I was involved with one of the bigger ICO right at the beginning of the ICO craze. I had pretty regular conversations with the project founder and was in talks to become the dev evangelist. The project had raised ~$5 million in ETH (this is when ETH was trading around $80). Despite the fact that this project had raised a crazy amount of money the whole project was being conceptualized and coded by a single 23 old guy…

And what you described is one of the more "legitimate" ICOs. Many of them are outright scams. This one at least tries to do some token work while pocketing the massive amount of raised money.

[deleted]

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#116

Post by alistproducer2 »

JSONwebtoken wrote: post #106
alistproducer2 wrote: post #55

I was involved with one of the bigger ICO right at the beginning of the ICO craze. I had pretty regular conversations with the project founder and was in talks to become the dev evangelist. The project had raised ~$5 million in ETH (this is when ETH was trading around $80). Despite the fact that this project had raised a crazy amount of money the whole project was being conceptualized and coded by a single 23 old guy…

I don't know the degree of complexity or technical ambition of the project you were a part of, but it's not unusual for a 23 year old guy to write most of the Ethereum app. In fact, that's probably the reason why most ICOs are a scam, there's an insanely low barrier to building a proof of concept. The boilerplate is like 15 lines. When it's so easy that any 20 year old backend dev can issue a token, you should alread…

>23 year old guy to write most of the Ethereum app

The project is a from-scratch smart contract blockchain: including a new contract language

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#117

Post by xur17 »

whytaka wrote: post #114

How exactly are ICOs performed? 1) Set up mining software. 2) Start running it on your own machines and mine enough tokens for ICO. 3) Sell tokens. Profit. ?? Are investors at some point invited to run the mining chain on their own machines? Surely they don't just trust that the company raising money will do manage the accounting on their own.

In a lot of cases ICOs are built on top of the ethereum network, so no mining is necessary. Transaction fees are paid in Ether, and the ICO / token is setup as an Ethereum contract.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#118

Post by alistproducer2 »

whytaka wrote: post #114

How exactly are ICOs performed? 1) Set up mining software. 2) Start running it on your own machines and mine enough tokens for ICO. 3) Sell tokens. Profit. ?? Are investors at some point invited to run the mining chain on their own machines? Surely they don't just trust that the company raising money will do manage the accounting on their own.

Most are ERC20[0] tokens with a promise to convert them to the projects native token when their blockchain is stood up.

[0]: https://theethereum.wiki/w/index.php/ERC20_Token_Standard

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#119

Post by alistproducer2 »

ovulator wrote: post #109
walrus1066 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beware that: “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” (John Maynard Keynes) Especially relevant to short selling

Shorting has got to be the dumbest way to invest. With a normal investment there is a ceiling to how much you can lose (the amount you invested) but there is no ceiling to how much you can gain. The complete opposite is true for shorting, not a bet I would make on any certainty level.

This is my exact thought as well. The risk-reward of shorting makes the most sense when volatility is low. It is certainly the worst thing to do in an irrational bull market AKA bubble.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#120

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ringaroundthetx wrote: post #112
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regulation D is not an applicable exemption, neither is Filecoin's use of it, because the secondary markets where people are inevitably going to trade them have to be registered broker dealers to legally trade things that admit they are securities Filecoin appears to be using Rule 506(c) of Regulation D, a § 4(a)(2) exemption. Also, you don't need to be a broker-dealer to issue, buy or sell unregistered securities.…

in your grandparent post, you are still linking the Federal Reserve's deposit insurance regulation, while talking about the Securities Exchange Commission's exempt securities offering regulation. I still find that entertaining, let me help you https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answers-regdhtm.html Classic strawman, I wasn't claiming Regulation D required anyone to be a broker dealer to issue buy or sell an exempt unre…

We've come full circle to the article's point. Barring an act of the Congress, most ICOs are conducting themselves in a way that is, under current law, illegal.
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