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Coinbase issued Wells notice by SEC

reuters.com

261–270 of 327 posts

Re: Coinbase issued Wells notice by SEC

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression it was due to the initial distribution mechanism. It was all open mine, no presale. Basically everything else has had a presale or premine. I could be wrong, because if that were the justification forks should qualify too by virtue of inheriting the chain history.

In the Ethereum pre-sale they explicitly state it is not intended to be a security or investment offering: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sal... Staking and maybe EIP-1559 could change things? It's sad since it seems like Coinbase is now directly collaborating with Ethereum developers https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-3651 > The COINBASE address shall be warm at the start of transaction exe…

>In the Ethereum pre-sale they explicitly state it is not intended to be a security or investment offering:

I'm not sure if ETH was completely in the clear even with this approach. Vitalik and other founders seemed to have created expectations of profit in their ICO presentations to US investors in a few 2014 videos.

Re: Coinbase issued Wells notice by SEC

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s interesting to hear your perspective. Do you really believe that any given token does not qualify as a common enterprise? Crypto tokens seem to pretty clearly meet that definition. Additionally, if I were to buy any given token and then it gains or loses value without any effort on my part, that would pretty clearly satisfy #3. Not sure what #4 is that you’re referencing

That doesnt satisfy #3. People buy gold expecting profit through no work of their own as well. Gold is a commodity. The key there is the efforts of others , someone has to do something for you to be profitable. Just speculating on something doesn't qualify. Some tokens qualify as common enterprise and some don't. And lots and lots of tokens are sold on the expectation of profit, almost all of them.

Gold fails #2. It’s not a common enterprise. There’s no investment contract to owning a piece of gold. Crypto tokens, on the other hand, are literally defined by contracts written in code.

Re: Coinbase issued Wells notice by SEC

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tbf, recreating banks but without regulation is one way to go about orchestrating once-in-a-generation wealth transfer from... one LP to another.

What does that even mean?

It means reinventing the wheel is going to yield a square. But not just a square but a new and exciting square where many people who once had money no longer have money because it was transferred to another pool of liquidity and those poor souls still left outside in the cold will not be made whole.

Re: Coinbase issued Wells notice by SEC

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of what "finance" is seems somewhat arbitrary doesn't it? Person A: spends $1k per year on lottery tickets and doesn't win anything. Person B: puts $1k into BTC at the years high and sells at the bottom getting back $200. Both people had the goal of making a double percentage return. One had an arguably significantly higher chance of doing that. One person was able to buy their lottery tickets at the c…

You’re just making things up now. Person B doesn’t have to “file a ream of identify documents” or keep watch on regulations to put $1k into Bitcoin. As for taxes, you owe them on lottery winnings as well. And for any non trivial amount, you will pay them.

Which of the worlds various hundreds of disparate tax obligation and financial regulation jurisdictions are you referring to?

Or have you "made up" there's just one and its yours?

Re: Coinbase issued Wells notice by SEC

#265
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- Coinbase's position is that they are simply providing a technical service to their customers to do something that their customer's could do themselves. Sure, I could write multiple mortgages and roll them up into an MBS myself too, isn't the bank just doing the technical work there too?

> I could write multiple mortgages and roll them up into an MBS myself too, isn't the bank just doing the technical work there too The bank is quite literally writing multiple loans and selling a security. I fail to see how providing tools for customers to more easily put up their tokens as collateral for the privilege of writing new chunks of data to a blockchain (and reaping the rewards) is at all equivalent to eit…

Wait, temporarily giving someone currency that they eventually give back to you is more or less the definition of a loan, no?

And Coinbase is doing the work of abstracting that process into a single instrument (Coinbase earn)? Because that’s securitization.

Re: Coinbase issued Wells notice by SEC

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression it was due to the initial distribution mechanism. It was all open mine, no presale. Basically everything else has had a presale or premine. I could be wrong, because if that were the justification forks should qualify too by virtue of inheriting the chain history.

In the Ethereum pre-sale they explicitly state it is not intended to be a security or investment offering: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sal... Staking and maybe EIP-1559 could change things? It's sad since it seems like Coinbase is now directly collaborating with Ethereum developers https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-3651 > The COINBASE address shall be warm at the start of transaction exe…

> In the Ethereum pre-sale they explicitly state it is not intended to be a security or investment offering

I mean you can say whatever you want but if it quacks like a duck it’s still a security, if you don’t mind my mixed metaphor lol

Re: Coinbase issued Wells notice by SEC

#267
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can take my money and put it into a slot machine, gamble it on horses, gamble it on sports games. I can buy useless thousand dollar sneakers, I can buy pokemon cards. I can waste my money on absurdly overpriced art, give it to scammy non-profits, donate it to scammy spoiler political candidates. > In some states I can use my money to hire hookers, or buy drugs. > But if I want to buy crypto, all of a sudden that…

He probably would. I have access to a bunch of good investment opportunities that US citizens don't have, because they are "protected" from accidentally making money. I have a stack of little pamphlets outlining interesting investment deals in Australia all labelled with "don't show this to anyone in the US, if you are a US person this isn't for you and we ask that you don't read it". This isn't crypto, only standard…

Isn’t this pretty standard among developed countries and not unique to the US?

I don’t think, to reverse the example, that US companies can offer investments to Australians without an AFSL or without oversight by ASIC or APRA.

Re: Coinbase issued Wells notice by SEC

#268

> Staking is a process in which cryptocurrency holders volunteer to take part in validating transactions on the blockchain. For me the key word here is `volunteer`. I'm no 'crypto bro' by any means, but can someone tell me why this is against SEC rules ? Or if it explicitly even is ?

It's a basic regulated market. Because it's so easy to rip people off with financial products (ponzi schemes etc.) the SEC requires you to register a security if you want to sell it to retail. The registration is quite simple but just ensures they've written in black and white what they're claiming to sell. These regulations exist as a direct result of fraud and shenanigans in the past. All that crypto is saying is "Oh this is something new so it's not covered by regulations", but that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny -the business being conducted may be different, but the financial aspects of these products are fairly standard and come under existing regulations.

Re: Coinbase issued Wells notice by SEC

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge number of crypto projects never advertised their tokens as an investment, and explicitly and repeatedly stated that they are not investments and should not be expected to appreciate, yet the SEC still charged them with promoting an unregistered security.

I get scam emails that say "this is not a scam!", too.

You losing the context here. The point was that slot machines are a scam, but also a billion dollar industry.

Re: Coinbase issued Wells notice by SEC

#270

I can take my money and put it into a slot machine, gamble it on horses, gamble it on sports games. I can buy useless thousand dollar sneakers, I can buy pokemon cards. I can waste my money on absurdly overpriced art, give it to scammy non-profits, donate it to scammy spoiler political candidates. In some states I can use my money to hire hookers, or buy drugs. But if I want to buy crypto, all of a sudden that is a p…

Almost everything you listed is heavily regulated. Why shouldn’t crypto be regulated as well?

Can you link me to the regulatory body that oversees sneaker markets and sneaker exchanges? My teenage kids will be very interested in reading this.
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