Earlier quoted context omitted.
The important difference being that Pokemon cards don't meet the Howey test: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/howey-test.asp So yes, if finance were unregulated, then he wouldn't have been violating the securities regulations that didn't exist. But they did exist, and the Howey Test is from 1946, so it shouldn't have been a surprise. A lot of people tried to pretend that the existing financial regulations, many o…
Which point of the Howey Test do you feel is not satisfied by Pokémon cards? (If your answer has anything to do with the existence of the game, I am curious what you think of baseball cards.) You state that they don't satisfy the test with quite some certainty but left the reasoning to the reader; but, it would seem, to me, like Pokémon cards are no different from many of these cryptocurrencies the SEC is interested…
Yes, if you ignore the primary reason for Pokemon cards (the game), then they can magically be made to look like securities....
They then sell these things to people who are absolutely buying them with the expectation that they will go up in value.
No, completely false and this betrays a complete lack of understanding of why people buy collectibles. People buy collectibles to collect them; the value is in possessing the collectible; rare collectibles have value because it is harder to acquire them to add to one's collection.
With respect to baseball cards: they are collectibles. They have value because people collect them. To keep. They don't represent an interest in a common for-profit enterprise, and they don't derive their value from the efforts of others. The value of a card is derived from the card itself: the quality of the print, the rarity of the card in its respective printing run, and (most importantly) its physical condition. Popular players' cards are usually more valuable because more people want to own the card, not because owning the card will somehow make you more money from that player's efforts. (I still have a few baseball cards from when I was a kid. My Ken Griffey Jr card is worth about a penny because it is not in good condition; my mint Tim Belcher card is worth $1.35 because I never had a reason to look at it. But even though nobody knows who he is outside of hardcore Dodgers fans, some people out there still want to have a complete Dodgers lineup from the 1987.)
And this is why analogies to collectibles always fail for crypto bros: collectibles have value in themselves, but crypto only has value to the extent it might represent something else.