141–150 of 360 posts
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I don't think the findings unequivocally imply that ETH and BTC are securities. Or am I missing something?
It's saying that companies raising money through ICOs are issuing securities in form of ownership tokens in their companies.
The SEC should show that it protects everyone's rights and not just large firms with piles of cash to pay to them and to pay expensive lawyers. Otherwise we have to assume that this is largely about trying to tax things. The way they can do this is by making a real effort to update their technical, documentation, and regulatory programs. Is there a straightforward way to do an Edgar filing that doesn't require a bunc…
In short, the idea that people must be incompetent because they're in the government is pretty ludicrous. The SEC is consistently one of the best technical organizations despite the fact everyone lobbies for them to have the fewest resources with which to do their job.
If you think all ICOs pass the smell test, maybe you haven't been fleeced enough in your life to appreciate scams when you see them?
Source: I run a crypto hedge fund and have spent a lot of time evaluating ICOs. Some of them are legitimate, philosophically sound ideas looking for funding and some of them are outright scams.
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It does seem to be ambiguous. If you read the qualifications in section III: https://www.sec.gov/litigation/investreport/34-81207.pdf , they seem to apply to voucher tokens as well. Especially "A reasonable expectation of profit".
If Valve decided to fund the creation of Team Fortress 3 in part with exclusive pre-order hats, would that now violate securities law?
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You interfere with my right to personal autonomy by bankrupting yourself throwing good money after bad in stupid investments, leaving yourself destitute and in need of additional public services. Or do you also intend to claim that the poor should be allowed to die on the streets as punishment for not being rich?
No one has a right to force you to support someone who made themselves destitute. You're using one infringement of personal autonomy to justify another.
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Care to elaborate? What's the difference?
IANAL, but a security is profit-sharing/right to $-related things, like stocks and bonds. Tokens that are used to make purchases within applications/networks are not securities, for example in the Storj example above, tokens are bought to purchase storage, and there's no implication of organization profit-sharing or appreciation of value, etc. While some people may speculate on the growth of the network and purchase…
There is. These tokens are explicitly marketed on that basis.
I'm not terribly happy with the decision, though I can't say I'm surprised. I enjoy the drama of the Wild West that is Ethereum and the rest of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Minimal regulation encourages innovation, while regulated markets can exist for people who want stability and certain guarantees to prevent fraud (or at least make it difficult). I wonder what would happen if financial regulations became more "op…
It might not change the overall ecosystem that much. Many companies doing ICOs are already locating themselves in friendlier jurisdictions, and making some effort to block U.S. contributors.
Geo-blocking US IP addresses won't work either, because an ethereum contract can't refuse a transaction based upon its source IP address (it doesn't know it). So if an ICO publishes their ethereum contract address online (e.g. via a twitter post), they are implicitly advertising to US investors.
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This changes nothing to most of the ICOs, most of them have information that they do not offer their tokens to US citizens.
Are they obliged to check this, though? The only checks I've ever seen are making investors tick a box on a webpage to confirm that they aren't a US citizen. Is that good enough, or are these ICOs expected to do more thorough checking? Some ICOs have advertised their sales in the US, I wonder if the SEC will look on that as offering their tokens to US citizens, whatever the wording they put on their websites?
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Much like vaccines, meat inspection, and building codes, we've forgotten what it's like without them. We (Great Britain and USA) have been making securities regulations for 400 years. The important lesson of securities regulation is that it helps the "good" guys more than it hurts the bad guys. When I buy 100 shares of PZZA, I want to be reasonably confident that Papa Johns is cooking pizza and not the books. That co…
A case for mandatory vaccination can be made, as it addresses public health threats, which are negative externalities. Meat inspection cannot. You can choose to eat only government certified meat and not suffer any ill effects from non-certified meat being available on the market. Just because you want products certified by a government body to be safe doesn't mean you have a right to force others to live according t…
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.The SEC should show that it protects everyone's rights and not just large firms with piles of cash to pay to them and to pay expensive lawyers. Otherwise we have to assume that this is largely about trying to tax things. The way they can do this is by making a real effort to update their technical, documentation, and regulatory programs. Is there a straightforward way to do an Edgar filing that doesn't require a bunc…
I mean, this describes tax code and legislation in general. I'm hoping we can get text parsing models to the point that they can be utilized to simplify legal documents or even the entire US Tax Code. Like, Google Translate can translate Chinese to English decently, imagine if one day it could translate Legal Tax Code MumboJumbo to English as well? Or even cooler, if you could plug in your personal details (well, ter…
In Australia the government has official tax software. It pulls all your PAYG information and auto-fills most of what you need. In NZ, people don't file taxes at all. They login to the IRD website and their tax data is populated. You can accept what's presented or file for corrections.
H&R Block and TurboTax actively lobby against the US IRS from creating the same type of filing system. Our entire banking system is 20 years behind the rest of the world:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-american-banking-system-is...