Yes, as with every company that ICO's, we are acutely aware of the Howie test and have paid lawyers a lot of money to review our business model and white paper. But the lack of clarity from the SEC means we and every other company are somewhat in the dark.

OK, but you realize that the blockchain in your case is only used because regulation exists right? As in, if the SEC did not exist, you could just sell shares on an open market without registering. But you're using the blockchain so you don't have to do this. Is this correct?

I understand your token thingie can be used like a digital coin to redeem for data, but surely that doesn't require a blockchain... you can just do internal accounting of the digital coins in MySQL? Then you wouldn't have to pay the Ethereum network for every state change or transaction so you could cut costs.

EDIT: I just had a realization. This means you intentionally chose inefficient tech (Ethereum as a database for your coin) JUST so you can pay for a regulatory circumvention mechanism. Oh god...

Most Silicon Valley companies are based around regulatory circumvention in some way. But you're right; in this case you're just trading the SEC's governance for Ethereum's. I'm not sure that's a good tradeoff.

Most SV companies are based around regulatory circumvention?

Nah, just the unicorns.

Uber -- sure

AirBnB -- sure

Palantir -- They may be scummy in other ways, but I don't think they're based on avoiding regulations

WeWork -- I don't think they're ignoring zoning or whatever

SpaceX -- No. But maybe they don't count because LA?

Pinterest -- No.

Dropbox -- No.

Stripe -- No.

Hulu -- No.

Lyft -- sure

Magic Leap -- Nope.

Zenefits -- Okay, sure.

Cloudera -- Not even a little.

Credit Karma -- I don't think so.

Docusign -- No.

That's how far down the list of wikipedia's unicorn startups I got before I got bored.

I disagree on a couple of these (SpaceX being the biggest) but yeah, I do think a lot of what comes out of Silicon Valley are solutions to the problems of business owners created by regulation.

Notice the way that is phrased. The whole backlash across the western middle class against the "liberal elite" is a sense of "all tech has done for me is replace my nice union job with a gig job driving for Uber". There is a real sense that Silicon Valley doesn't have to play by the same rules as the rest of us, and people want that to stop.

> OK, but you realize that the blockchain in your case is only used because regulation exists right? As in, if the SEC did not exist, you could just sell shares on an open market without registering. But you're using the blockchain so you don't have to do this. Is this correct?

No. He's not selling shares in the company. He's selling the product, he just hasn't built it yet.

The reason to do this on Ethereum instead of MySQL is partly because it makes it easier for users to exchange tokens with one another, partly because the infrastructure is already built, and mostly because people ho mad for it and it seems to be an easy way to get millions of dollars.

I think almost all ICOs are basically scams, but that doesn't mean they're just a way to sell shares without regulations.

Edit: and in fact the vast majority of Ethereum network costs are paid by the customers, not the company. I'm confident that using Ethereum for this is a cost-saver relative to MySQL, but it wouldn't even matter if it wasn't because of the huge ICO craze.