SEC Charges Kik With Conducting $100M Unregistered ICO

Re:SEC Charges Kik With Conducting $100M Unregistered ICO by brianhama on Tuesday June 04, 2019 @05:50PM (#20099616)

This filing makes it appear that Kik was attempting to scam investors. That is simply not true though. Take a look at the Kin Foundation’s github repos. This is one of the most active crypto projects there is. My company implemented Kin into our app with over 10 million users. 40 other apps have also implemented it. There are over 400,000 users spending Kin within our apps each month. Kik might have broken securities law in their offering to the public, but don’t confuse that with the resulting project also being fraudulent or a scam. It’s not.

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Re:SEC Charges Kik With Conducting $100M Unregistered ICO by VikingCoder on Tuesday June 04, 2019 @05:53PM (#20099630)

Is the technology a scam? You say no.

Is the ICO a scam? Yes, it wasn't legal.

"This filing makes it appear that Kik was attempting to scam investors."

Yes. They were. They pretended their ICO wasn't going to break securities law.

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Re:SEC Charges Kik With Conducting $100M Unregistered ICO by badfrog on Tuesday June 04, 2019 @06:00PM (#20099684)

> Is the ICO a scam? Yes, it wasn't legal.

Not everything that's illegal is a scam. If somebody sells me cocaine and I'm happy with the product, it's illegal but nobody was scammed.

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Re:SEC Charges Kik With Conducting $100M Unregistered ICO by VikingCoder on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @08:45AM (#20103785)

Yes, that's true. However, many securities laws exist to protect investors. So, if you knowingly violate securities laws, there's a pretty good chance you are knowingly putting investors in a disadvantageous position. That's a textbook definition of a scam.

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Re:SEC Charges Kik With Conducting $100M Unregistered ICO by neokantian on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @03:44AM (#20102304)

> Yes, it wasn't legal.

Legal or illegal according to the laws in what jurisdiction? As international users, we obviously benefit from decisively reining in any American attempt at extraterritorial expansion. That is why, for example, we support the interdiction of American warships in the Black Sea (Russia) and the South Chinese Sea (China). I am waiting for the good news that either of these countries has finally sunk one of these vessels. That will be party time!

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Re:SEC Charges Kik With Conducting $100M Unregistered ICO by brianhama on Tuesday June 04, 2019 @05:58PM (#20099670)

In hindsight that seems to be the case, but in 2017 at the time of the ICO, the laws and how the SEC would interpret them was much more uncertain. They clearly decided to take a huge risk and it backfired. I’m not saying that it’s a risk I would have ever taken myself though.

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