That's not quite right.

You could say that WoW Gold is "premined". You can't "mine" it yourself, and it's only issued by World of Warcraft.

Same thing with Walmart gift cards and Disney Dollars.

Call it money, or tokens, or scrip, but it's not a security.

If you sell it to users primarialy to transact with it, it's probably not a security.

If you sell it to fund the development of the enterprise, and buyers expect to profit from that enterprise, then it probably is a security.

If the thing you are buying has only its intrinsic value, then it is a commodity.

An example would be a baseball card (intrinsic value only) vs. a card that entitled you to some fraction of that baseball player's future income over the course of their career. The latter isn't really something that exists, although it probably could, but if it existed it would probably be some type of security.

I think i have an idea for a new ico....

Call it : sportico!

Maybe I am just being pedantic, but it seems most tokens could make an argument that they are products just by the fact that they build a brand and may have a technology that differentiates them from others. I have little hands-on financial experience but the terms of abstraction by which we define what a currency consists of seems like a philosophical topic to me. I am curious how this gets resolved.

It seems cryptocurrency may offer the puzzle piece which illustrates this spectrum of abstraction to a degree which is truly painful. A year ago, I had no idea what a security is, and after reading about them for a year, I am doubting that they exist as a logically defined objective category. Like many things in finance, the concept of these securities appears to be a relative conjurement, dependent not on logical definitions but on contextual gaps of unimaginable forms of abstraction. As cryptocurrency implements the unimaginable, those gaps are filling. We will eventually face a continuum of abstraction limited to philosophies of material.

I tried to read the linked release, got about 1/5 of the way down it and was just incredibly bored. I hate to sound so lazy and will try to read it again later.

The lines become much more blurred when you’re talking about a staked currency where an ICO is necessary to help evenly distribute the coins which are then mined. Honestly, as annoying as this is, the definition is security is so broad that I find it hard to picture any cryptocurrency not being defined as a security.

Any valuable thing that isn't a commodity, is a security. Every fiat currency is a security. Stocks and bonds are securities. Etc. The government can regulate securities (or rather, regulate their issuers, because there is a clear issuer), and so they do.

The definition of security isn't really vague; it's just a definition of exclusion. Replace security with "non-commidty" whenever it comes up and things might be clearer.

Gold ownership was outlawed in the US in 1933 by FDR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

EDIT: "The limitation on gold ownership in the U.S. was repealed after President Gerald Ford signed a bill to "permit United States citizens to purchase, hold, sell, or otherwise deal with gold in the United States or abroad" with an act of Congress codified in Pub.L. 93–373,[19][20][21] which went into effect December 31, 1974."

The issue is when A) people buying the token are doing so because they expect the value to increase, and/or B) the value of the network comes from a central party or promoter rather than from the network participants. If a currency is pre-mined, then it's more likely to be a security because the network participants aren't helping to secure the network. Similarly, if the product doesn't yet exist, then it's more likely to be a security because the network participants are unlikely to be creating value.

The fact that the token may be pre-mined or the product may not yet exist doesn't inherently matter except to the extent that they make it much more likely the token fails conditions A and B.

Similarly, if Ethereum goes to proof-of-stake then it's more likely to be considered a security, but there isn't a specific law saying that proof-of-stake tokens are illegal.

You could, for example clone Bitcoin exactly, but make a change where you recieve a billion free coins. It would be dumb, but that wouldn't be a security.

The problem is when ICOs premine and sell you a token for something that doesn't already exist yet. The token represents a future promise, as opposed to something that exist right NOW.