Being a security does not mean it can't also be something useful; it just means that the security aspects of it are potentially subject to securities laws.

EDIT: Beanie babies aren't securities because you actually the beanie baby. However, a piece of paper entitling you to ownership of a beanie baby could be a security.

Imagine a coin securitizing Bitcoin miners ("cloud mining coin"). Yes, that's a security.

Now imagine Ethereum. It was ICO'd, talking in today's terms. Is it a security? (hint: SEC just admitted it's not)

True, but then you're limited to things which can be stored in a blockstream in the space allocated to a single coin. There aren't many useful resources that could fit into that space, even fewer that would scale.

Now imagine Ethereum. It was ICO'd, talking in today's terms. Is it a security? (hint: SEC just admitted it's not)

Unless there is something about Ethereum that I'm not aware of, it does not represent any sort of ownership interest in another asset, it is the asset.

I didn't see any admission like that. Quite the contrary. I think the statement pretty clearly places the ethereum ICO (as distinct from the functioning network after) as a security.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sal...

There are a number of points in that post that scream security.

Obviously, this isn't the first time we've had offerings ostensibly taking these forms. People used to buy comic books in the hopes of their appreciation. Ty sold Beanie Babies to people who were stockpiling them for eBay.

The reason Ty didn't get in trouble, but Munchee did, was that Ty was never stupid enough to record videos extolling the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity people had to 9x their investment in restaurant review coupons. Again: a very significant component of the SEC's concern is about marketing and promotion.

They are certainly speculation. But I doubt the SEC would ever claim that literal bars of gold (not notes, physical bars of gold) are securities.

So now just imagine a token that has the same functionality.

You receive a token, it's made of paper like the notebook but does something useful.

Should that token, the piece of paper be regulated? Lol yes, it's now money! And all other assets or securities are regulated.

If you're saying that the piece of paper represents ownership of something, then the paper is most likely a security or derivative, in which case it is already subject to regulation. A token with the same functionality as this piece of paper would be regulated, and vice versa...

Pretty much anything that can be bought and sold is an asset. Yes, that includes notebooks and paper.

They both represent either computation-time or file-storage-and-bandwidth time.

Ethereum could easily represent time on a distributed AWS Lambda. And FileCoin can represent an AWS S3 storage.

It just so happens that they both are also cryptocoin.

It gets even uglier that the turning-like machine in Ethereum/Solidity also exists, kind of, in Bitcoin. In fact it was because it worked in Bitcoin they developed Ethereum. So technically even Bitcoin can do processing work. Makes everything a bit murkier to be honest.

These aren't new concepts. People have been trying to get around regulation for thousands of years.