If the SEC was going to come down like a ton of bricks they would have done so already. I could be wrong, but their actions seem to demonstrate that they're taking a very measured, careful approach to coming up with a regulatory framework.
My comment was a reaction to other comments, not the statement from the SEC - which actually doesn't say much either.
I definitely wouldn't feel comfortable proclaiming with any certainty that Bitcoin or Ethereum or even ICOs were definitely going to fall afoul of the SEC. My understand is that the SEC is generally a lot smaller than "we" think it is and it's sort of a random function. Cryptocurrency is super important to HN, but the SEC's definition of "systemically important" is different than ours.
Their mandate is to protect unsophisticated investors. That's why they weren't particularly interested in Madoff, and why the rules are so much laxer if you target "accredited investors."
Given that mandate, I think it's highly unlikely that they're going to go after romping, runaway successes. They'll focus on blatant pig-in-a-pokes.
I'm using quotes because that's code for unsophisticated investors, the very group the SEC is supposed to protect.
Could you elaborate? Why do you think that the SEC has made a final policy decision on crypto/ICO?
The SEC refers people to the Howey Test in all of their statements, which is fairly clear guidance that they don't consider Bitcoin to be a security. With something like Ethereum they're not going to say, since something can alternate between being a security and not being a security, so any sort of specific guidance wouldn't be especially meaningful.
It's ambiguous what 'it' refers to (comment vs. the article) in your sentence. If you meant the comment, then I disagree because it doesn't pretend to say something 'important', it just points out that the article doesn't introduce anything new for people doing things that aren't clearly a scam under existing laws.
If you meant the article doesn't say anything important, then I agree and I don't think the comment you replied to says anything different.
Agreed. The main thrust of my comment was that this is a non-article, and yet it seemed to be inviting commenters to lay out their pet theories on the validity of cryptocurrency as though they were validated somehow by the article's contents.
Perhaps we can tap the Winklevii's expertise to audit the SEC for malfeasance
What?
I will admit I initially took offence, though, because I rather like tptacek.
It would be monumentally newsworthy if there was clear guidance that Bitcoin and Ethereum "weren't securities" (more generally: that businesses that simply deal in Bitcoin were generally outside the purview of securities regulation). But we do not in fact know that right now.
No expert believes that you can look at the list of current enforcement actions and reliably predict the SEC's next actions. They could keep taking out scammers for the next several years, getting practice by picking out the low-hanging fruit. Or, they could at literally any moment come down like a ton of bricks on the industry's most mainstream participants. We simply don't know.
What we do know is that "coin-mediated" finance is enabling thousands of people to launch investment-driven businesses who would previously not have been able to do that before, not because of a lack of technical ability but because the laws made it prohibitively expensive. Those laws have not been repealed. A lot of reasonable people are waiting for the other shoe to drop.