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SEC blocks the Telegram ICO – what this means, and what happens now

davidgerard.co.uk

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Re: SEC blocks the Telegram ICO – what this means, and what happens now

#71

Post by ryanlol »

PeterisP wrote: post #44
seibelj wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But these are foreign corporations? I think I’m confused about how Russians, with offshore corporations, and foreign bank accounts, can suddenly be banhammered by the SEC...

Telegram was implemented in Berlin and now is domiciled in UK; most of their operations, money and people are fully within reach of the western judicial system. While Durov comes from Russia, he is in exile and Telegram is structured to keep their money and people out of the reach of the Russian judicial system for various reasons. Also, a big part of their target audience of Gram early holders is in USA, so they als…

>Telegram was implemented in Berlin

Why are you spreading this lie? It’s very well known by now that Telegram was primarily developed in St. Petersburg, in a building shared with VKontakte.

https://twitter.com/bershidsky/status/910169626989953024

https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/910186197598838784

https://theoutline.com/post/2348/what-isn-t-telegram-saying-...

>While Durov comes from Russia, he is in exile

Durovs exile is very fleeting, normally you wouldn't visit the country you're in exile from... https://tjournal.ru/tech/52954-durov-back-in-ussr https://lenta.ru/news/2017/03/20/durov/

I should also add the obligatory note that Telegram has shipped obvious backdoors in the past allowing them to selectively decrypt secret chats https://habr.com/en/post/206900/

lol @ the downvoting TON bagholders

Re: SEC blocks the Telegram ICO – what this means, and what happens now

#72

Post by noxer »

schmichael wrote: post #25

With each new cryptocurrency drama due to flouting AML/KYC regulations, flouting securities regulations, collapsing/exit-scamming exchanges, murders, drugs, sex trafficking, let's not forget: PoW is an ecologically irresponsible algorithm.[1] Altogether cryptocurrency is such a terrifyingly irresponsible ecosystem, I'm surprised anyone wants to be involved in it. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/…

No serious digital asset still uses PoW or at least is on the way to ditch PoW. If you look at the most popular tokens/coins you'll see all the PoW coins are useless and no one is developing anything for them. They are just there to speculate and because people can't let go. TON uses PoS btw.

Re: SEC blocks the Telegram ICO – what this means, and what happens now

#73

Post by noxer »

aey wrote: post #28

SEC is blocking their launch. On the face of it, telegram has been complient with the SEC up to now and have filed exemptions for their sale. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1729650/000095017218... On their own discounts are not illegal. I think what’s obvious is that the network is not truly decentralized and depends on telegram and investors expect to profit from telegrams work on the network. So they shoul…

Read their paper, they stated form the beginning that TON isn't able to launch decentralized. The initial investment to run a node is to high so they can't just put some binary on the net and ask people to run it. They planed to run every node in the beginning to show that it works and then everyone can join (with no control over who joins) but to join you have to have GRAMs so by stooping them to distribute grams they basically made it impossible to decentralized. Although they could still give out GRAMs, start the network and just ignore the SEC. Technically the network would decentralize over time but for that to happen there must be a market for GRAMs. Who's gonna obtain "illegal" GAMS to run a node and get paid with "illegal" GRAMs which can only be sold "illegal" again. And even people would do the services on TON are meant to be used by the masses if they can't simply buy GRAMs the whole thing can't fuel itself.

Re: SEC blocks the Telegram ICO – what this means, and what happens now

#74

Post by celticninja »

schmichael wrote: post #58
austhrow743 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't all that the stuff that makes crypto exciting? Its the wild west come again. A new frontier. Appeals to the desire to expose oneself to risks for profit. To do something that maybe you shouldn't. To operate outside of the soft, protected existence of mainstream first world society. Bowl without the bumper bars. Absent that emotional fulfilment its just boring old money.

I know "wild west" is a popular analogy, but I fear people may forget it was awful. Native peoples were slaughtered and forced off their land. Natural resources were mined and hunted with no regard for long-term sustainability. There was slave labor, sex trafficking, and endless profiteering based on speculation or downright lies. The rich got richer and maybe some poor people got a leg up? A whole lot of people ende…

Same analogy was used for the internet and look what it gave us? It is also based on the Wild West of the USA and it turned out ok, not without its own problems but I'm not sure we would be saying let's just wipe the USA off the map because when it started things were not perfect.

Re: SEC blocks the Telegram ICO – what this means, and what happens now

#75

Post by spurdoman77 »

noxer wrote: post #72
schmichael wrote: post #25

With each new cryptocurrency drama due to flouting AML/KYC regulations, flouting securities regulations, collapsing/exit-scamming exchanges, murders, drugs, sex trafficking, let's not forget: PoW is an ecologically irresponsible algorithm.[1] Altogether cryptocurrency is such a terrifyingly irresponsible ecosystem, I'm surprised anyone wants to be involved in it. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/…

No serious digital asset still uses PoW or at least is on the way to ditch PoW. If you look at the most popular tokens/coins you'll see all the PoW coins are useless and no one is developing anything for them. They are just there to speculate and because people can't let go. TON uses PoS btw.

Usually when I visit web shops accepting cryptos as a payment all top coins accepted are pow coins.

Re: SEC blocks the Telegram ICO – what this means, and what happens now

#76

Post by Temasik »

noxer wrote: post #72
schmichael wrote: post #25

With each new cryptocurrency drama due to flouting AML/KYC regulations, flouting securities regulations, collapsing/exit-scamming exchanges, murders, drugs, sex trafficking, let's not forget: PoW is an ecologically irresponsible algorithm.[1] Altogether cryptocurrency is such a terrifyingly irresponsible ecosystem, I'm surprised anyone wants to be involved in it. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/…

No serious digital asset still uses PoW or at least is on the way to ditch PoW. If you look at the most popular tokens/coins you'll see all the PoW coins are useless and no one is developing anything for them. They are just there to speculate and because people can't let go. TON uses PoS btw.

wrong

BitCoin is $bsv and the first client is windows

satoshi has patented to replace central bank initially tiny country

Re: SEC blocks the Telegram ICO – what this means, and what happens now

#77

Post by celticninja »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #8
snagglegaggle wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's arguable. You're completely within your rights to refuse an unlawful order from a police officer. That it usually would lead to you getting shot reflects poorly on our society, not on the judgement of the person refusing the unlawful order.

> You're completely within your rights to refuse an unlawful order from a police officer Subpoenas are court-ordered requests for documents. If you disagree with them, you fight them in court.

If the court is in your home territory this may make sense. If, for example,you got a subpoena from a high court in Saudi Arabia, would you respond? Would you even hire a local lawyer? Nope,you would wait until it was filed in a court in your country of operations.

Re: SEC blocks the Telegram ICO – what this means, and what happens now

#78

Post by rjknight »

davidgerard wrote: post #66
aakilfernandes wrote: post #36

The author of this article is turning inches into miles. SAFTs aren't dead. The SEC is alleging Telegram has failed to deliver the promises it has made, so the SEC is pre-emptively stating they need to halt delivery. Presumably, once they complete their promises they'll be able to deliver Grams. From the SEC Complaint: The Whitepaper spoke of potential future products and services that investors could use in connecti…

(author here) nah, pretty sure SAFTs are dead. The whole point of the SAFT rigmarole was to sell tokens as securities but not have them be securities on delivery, pretty much as Telegram was planning to do here - the point was not to be considered securities by the SEC. This complaint demonstrates what the SEC think of the idea, i.e. they don't care and will look at how your token actually works and whether this is a…

I think the argument could be a bit clearer here.

A SAFT allows a party to offer the delivery of tokens at some point in the future. This offering is a securities offering under US law, and therefore has to comply with the relevant regulations. In practical terms, that means filing some forms with the SEC, ranging from fairly lightweight forms if you're offering the SAFT privately without marketing, to increasingly heavy burdens if you want to market it, and the "mini-IPO" leavels of bureaucracy that would attach to a Reg A+ offering. So, it's perfectly possible to offer a compliant SAFT if you do it right.

The problem comes when the tokens are to be delivered (which was imminent, in Telegram's case). The SEC argues that not only was the SAFT contract a security, but the rights offered to Gram holders are themselves constitutive of a security, despite not being registered as such.

The SAFT is a security, but one for which Telegram appears to have been mostly compliant. The tokens themselves, which are set to be delivered to those original investors, are not registered as securities, and this is the problem, because the plan is to distribute those widely to the public, or "retail investors" as they would be regarded in the context of a securities offering.

If the Gram token were not a security, designed in such a way as to avoid triggering the Howey test, then there would be no problem (aside from Telegram's other problems, but I'm keeping the scope narrow here).

So the "SAFT is dead" argument isn't that the SAFT is automatically non-compliant, or that nobody can do a compliant SAFT offering, but instead is this: that some people in the blockchain community erroneously encouraged the belief that whilst a SAFT offering is a securities offering, the tokens that result from the investment are somehow prevented from becoming securities because the "security-ness" stuck to the SAFT itself, and that this view was wrong.

This gets tricky to discuss because the SAFT contract is basically fine, but the mistaken understanding of what a SAFT can do in practice is what allowed people to believe that selling Grams to the general public was likely to be a non-regulated activity. So, that interpretation of what SAFTs can do is dead, yes. For my part, it's not something that I ever believed, so it doesn't register as being the real news here.

Re: SEC blocks the Telegram ICO – what this means, and what happens now

#79

Post by noxer »

spurdoman77 wrote: post #75
noxer wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No serious digital asset still uses PoW or at least is on the way to ditch PoW. If you look at the most popular tokens/coins you'll see all the PoW coins are useless and no one is developing anything for them. They are just there to speculate and because people can't let go. TON uses PoS btw.

Usually when I visit web shops accepting cryptos as a payment all top coins accepted are pow coins.

Crypto payment in a web shop isn't even a real use case. What they do is send crypto to a third party which sells it for fiat and then the good is paid with fiat. Does that need crypto? No that would work with anything else. The Code on a Paypal PSC for example isn't a crypto coin/token but it can do the exact same thing just better in most cases. The reason you can buy stuff with crypto in web shops is because people wanted to not because it makes sense to do that. It would kinda make sense if there would be a world current with rather stable value. But stable coins are IOUs aka debt so they are not really cryptos.

Re: SEC blocks the Telegram ICO – what this means, and what happens now

#80

Post by jfk13 »

celticninja wrote: post #74
schmichael wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know "wild west" is a popular analogy, but I fear people may forget it was awful. Native peoples were slaughtered and forced off their land. Natural resources were mined and hunted with no regard for long-term sustainability. There was slave labor, sex trafficking, and endless profiteering based on speculation or downright lies. The rich got richer and maybe some poor people got a leg up? A whole lot of people ende…

Same analogy was used for the internet and look what it gave us? It is also based on the Wild West of the USA and it turned out ok, not without its own problems but I'm not sure we would be saying let's just wipe the USA off the map because when it started things were not perfect.

> internet ... it turned out ok

Did it? The internet I see is largely overrun by bandits and shysters looking to make a quick buck at the expense of every sucker they can find.

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