https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/07/31/sec-asked-coinbas...

> “They came back to us, and they said . . . we believe every asset other than bitcoin is a security,” Armstrong said according to the FT. “And, we said, well how are you coming to that conclusion, because that’s not our interpretation of the law. And they said, we’re not going to explain it to you, you need to delist every asset other than bitcoin.”

> Armstrong said the SEC recommendation left us no choice but to head to court.

> The SEC told the FT its enforcement division did not make formal requests for “companies to delist crypto assets.”

Hinman and SEC pushing him to say it: https://blockworks.co/news/sec-hinman-eth-not-security

SEC chair Gary Gensler: https://decrypt.co/138334/gary-gensler-sec-ethereum-not-secu...

SEC prev chair Jay Clayton: https://finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/us-sec-chairman-jay-c...

Hester Pierce “crypto mom” ironically has never explicitly stated a position on Ethereum

What are they going to do now, backtrack on their own public statements?

Their auditors views and interpretations vary wildly year to year, and they will not provide any written guidelines for their positions. Instead they insist it’s up to the discretion of the individual auditor. I’ve seen fairly reserved people in screaming matches by the end of it all, and concessions will eventually be made which seems strange for a regulatory body to do.

All that is that say, they won’t backtrack on anything. They’ll simply say that those were the views of those people as individuals, and they are not reflective of the official stance of the regulatory body.

It’s absolutely reasonable to doubt anyone making unsubstantiated and unverifiable claims in this space.

> Their auditors views and interpretations vary wildly year to year, and they will not provide any written guidelines for their positions.

That's why I started with the disclaimer that "yes I know crypto it's a scam", but the regulators also seem to be making it difficult to stay compliant.

Really I feel like I should clarify the above since I wrote it pretty late at night, and it I don’t think I really summed the experience up well. Another commenter mentioned their experience with other regulatory bodies that really cuts closer to what I intended to say:

“While I have no experience in dealing with the SEC, I do in dealing with EASA and SOX audits. One common theme, both give you the barebone rules as written, and it is up to you to figure out how to follow them.”

That really is my entire complaint. The grey area of what “counts” according to an auditor will vary over time, and what might count one year will suddenly be inadequate the next or vice versa.

Which, of course they would, and would go so far as to create new forms of currency to try to do it.

They legally can't. That's rulemaking. There are formal processes for government agencies issuing binding guidance.

There is a real problem with ambiguous laws. But asking the SEC to be your lawyer is a bit of a fool's errand. Coinbase absolutely knew they were breaking the law when they set out; they, and the rest of crypto, just hoped they could change it before they got caught.

In case of SOX, you are required to have one company doing the prep work (processes, controls, internal "audits") with you, while another company does the formal audots and signs of on the balance sheets and financiap results. The latter wont give you any guidance neither when it comes to how compliance can be achieved.

And in both cases, there are always people that refuse to accept the well established guiderails and limits, when those are explained to them. Excuses range from inconvenient to I-do-not-want-to to "but what about innovation". Which is just bonkers, because both, SOX and EASA basically allow you to write your own internal rule book, and still people are not happy. It seems following rules is just below some people and their egos. Not that auditors care so.

Note that all of these are a long time ago, and even if their offhand opinions were legally binding the "strongest" of these articles

> had stated in a speech that ETH “in its present state” — as opposed to during its distribution via initial coin offering (ICO) — won’t be regulated as a security.

> Chairman Clayton noted that he agrees that a digital asset’s definition as a security is “not static” and thus can change over time.

Things have obviously changed. Also, the way Ethereum works has changed.

No. Your first article cites Gensler's statements from 2018; he took the helm at the SEC in 2021 [1]. The second somehow draws conclusions from a letter Clayton wrote "without ever mentioning ETH directly" [2].

> What are they going to do now, backtrack on their own public statements

Moot point. When the SEC sued Coinbase, it didn't mention Ethereum. This entire line of argument is a red herring.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Gensler

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-sec-chairman-jay-clayton-1...

As is the headline's "CEO says." This article is based on the anecdotes of a person being sued by the SEC.

Which at least is a reasonable thing for a regulator to say.

I'm not precluding who is right and wrong here, just that the form of the request is not crazy.

It would make infinitely more sense if they said "Going forward, our interpretation will be that all cryptocurrencies are securities, and you'll need to become a real brokerage/exchange. Do this or we're suing." That would provide space for reasonable people to disagree, work it out in the courts, lobby Congress to legislate around the topic, etc.

But this version is non-sensical -- I simply can't imagine any reasonable persons would ever come to a meeting of the minds that Ethereum is a security but Bitcoin is not a security.

> The court found that the “Programmatic Sales” did not satisfy Howey’s third prong because such buyers could not reasonably have expected that Ripple would use the proceeds of the sales to improve the XRP ecosystem and thereby cause an increase in the price of XRP. Citing SEC v. Telegram Group Inc., the court stated that this inquiry turns on the “promises and offers made to investors” and not each buyer’s motivation, making the blind bid/ask aspect of the transactions a key consideration. Ripple did not make any promises or offers because it did not know who was buying the XRP, and the purchasers did not know who was selling it.

https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/fin-tech/1348902/sdny-ru...

https://archive.li/2023.07.31-040202/https://www.ft.com/cont...

https://fortune.com/videos/watch/in-2018%2C-gary-gensler-sai...

The other thing you need to look at is exactly what Paypal offers:

Bitcoin, ETH, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash.

https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/crypto

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-06-07/when-i...

"Some of them did securities offerings, but by the time the SEC noticed they were too entrenched and decentralized and it would have been a pain for the SEC to go after them. Ethereum, most notably, very very clearly did an ICO in 2014, raising about $18.3 million by selling ETH tokens. If they did that today, or in late 2017, the SEC would have some serious questions. But by the time the SEC got around to cracking down on ICOs in 2017, Ethereum was big and decentralized and the SEC would have had a hard time, practically and legally, challenging its 2014 ICO. And so everyone sort of grudgingly concedes that ETH is not a security."

I thought all of those, including bitcoin, are just baits used by those conmen.

You need to have a pretty big brain tumor to believe there is any tech involved.

Fwiw, it's possible to sync to Ethereum in a few hours now. The features to enable that were added in 2021, before the merge.

If you want to sync an archive node instead, which contains all historical transactions verified from the beginning, that takes about a day and a half, but current work will bring that down to a few hours as well.

It used to take nearly 2 months, and the state was smaller then, so this is an interesting technical achievement because it's just the same data represented more efficiently.

When you consider how much work a $35 Raspberry Pi 4 could do in 2 months, is it still an interesting technical achievement, or is it an embarrassment?

The syncing bottlenecks were mostly storage performance bound, not CPU bound, so the Raspberry Pi thing is not as relevant as it may look to someone who doesn't know the difference.

The Etherium blockchain is roughly 1122.97 GB. Cool, how long would it take me to write all that data with an RPI4? Let's pick the ~20th fastest SSD listed, just so we ensure we don't have a ringer in the data: https://pibenchmarks.com/benchmark/53760/

Awesome, let's do some division. Let's pick the DD speed: 1122.97GB/174 MB/s = 1.79273627 hours. Hm, that can't be it.

The RPI4 could write the entire Eth blockchain in under 2 hours. Hmm. Well, maybe there's lots of data being added in a torrent at the end? That could be a real problem?

https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_chain_full_sync_data...

Looks like it's adding about 3GB a day. A rip roaring rate of 34.7222222 kBps.

Ok with the data in hand, this looks like a pathetic system and it doesn't look like a technical achievement. It looks like an embarrassment to me. Could you check my numbers?

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-06-07/when-i...

"Some of them did securities offerings, but by the time the SEC noticed they were too entrenched and decentralized and it would have been a pain for the SEC to go after them. Ethereum, most notably, very very clearly did an ICO in 2014, raising about $18.3 million by selling ETH tokens. If they did that today, or in late 2017, the SEC would have some serious questions. But by the time the SEC got around to cracking down on ICOs in 2017, Ethereum was big and decentralized and the SEC would have had a hard time, practically and legally, challenging its 2014 ICO. And so everyone sort of grudgingly concedes that ETH is not a security."

Perhaps not the best solution, that can be argued, they can be used for nefarious purposes too, but there's definitely good engineering work in crypto field.

Where? I've seen a lot of bad engineering, especially in 'smart' contracts.

Plus, I don't think consumers should be protected from dogecoin --- no layman in their right mind invests in doge with the expectation of profit (from common enterprise). Bitcoin is more of a security than doge will ever be.

It does however have laws around registration of the security, who can and can’t purchase it under a given registration, disclosure rules, conflict of interest rules, and so on.

This sounds a lot like the SEC dictating what can and can't be traded in the modern day. We can't trade something if there isn't an exchange for it.

Influencers pumping the coin on Twitter is a common enterprise. You don’t think people bought DOGE because they hoped those influencers would continue what they were doing?

If kale and gold are securities under the current interpretation of the howey test, then the howey test needs to be rewritten.

This will a) Force people to learn self-custody & b) Force people to learn how to use decentralized exchanges.

It is, of course, nonsense. BTC effectively defines the term cryptocurrency, there is nothing about BTC which isn't found elsewhere in other cryptocurrencies, many of which are chain or code forks of BTC anyway. It's the biggest name, it was the first mover, but the claims that it is a separate phenomenon all of its own are relatively recent (or have increased markedly in recent months) and are IMHO hilarious.

That's not something that you need to wait to know about. That's what the word means.

It doesn't matter if you think bitcoin is amazing, and will take over the world, and is basically the currency of the gods. It doesn't even matter if your pipedreams about it destroying fiat currency come 100% true. Bitcoin falls within the category "cryptocurrency", and the attempt by yourself and other BTC fans to paint it as a separate phenomena is fucking ridiculous to observe.

If you truly believe that the first cryptocurrency is not a cryptocurrency, you might want to examine what has happened to your cognitive faculties. I'm not even saying that to be mean, you've stretched something beyond breaking point with the mental gymnastics there.

You've even said it in the post you linked to!

> And the only way to do that is via 1 single cryptocurrency: the very first, the only one

From your own fingers!

Seriously, this is embarrassing.

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/crypto-ceo-brian-armstrong-...

> The transactions reported on this Form 4 were effected pursuant to a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan adopted by the Reporting Person on August 26, 2022, during an open trading window.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679788/000120919123...

So I believe he very probably does not currently have any material non-public information, or at the very least is not trading on the basis of having it.

You obviously have material non public information as CEO, but you could just as easily lose by trying to trade that as win when there’s such a long delay involved. Everybody else gets to see what your trade is, with plenty of notice, and can front run you.

Knowing the market conditions for your trade is normal and expected. Taking away that information is a bad thing, a necessary evil at best.

And with it's ASIC resistant POW it's arguably more decentralized than Bitcoin (and almost all other) POW based cryptocurrencies.

I hate to ask you that, but you're trolling, aren't you?

As long as some suckers are trading actually liquid assets for the instruments on the sabotaged chain, it is economically rational for the miners to mindlessly rubberstamp the rules of the chain.

Which is exactly what we have.

Former Bitcoin Cash developer Amaury decided he wanted a subsidy to himself. He forked, forming his own extremely minority coin, Bitcoin ABC (now eCash) which pays him 8% of everything mined. Despite being very conclusively rejected, and the chain having undergone attacks, eCash still retains some value, and Amaury still gets to pocket a percentage of everything that gets mined.

The underlying code for that is the same as for BTC. So at any time, if the cabal thought cratering BTC would be worthwhile if they got to pocket enough of what remained, they could do it with complete impunity. All it'd take is the agreement of a very few people and a viable exit plan.

That's an interesting thing I didn't realize until not very long ago. If setting fire to 99% of the ecosystem allows you to pocket a fraction of the 1% that remains, and that works out well enough to not have to work again -- that's a very favorable tradeoff for a lot of people.

Foundry + AntPool alone make more than 51.7% of the hashrate. Next are F2Pool, ViaBTC and Binance with about 10% each.

So this "decentralization" requires what, the agreement of 2-5 parties.

Realistically, if the pools wanted, BTC core could be replaced because the software is mature and the big pools can trivially hire somebody to work on it if they had a need to.

The big exchanges probably also have some say.

But guess who doesn't? Anyone else. People running their "full node", or just random joes using the system don't really have a vote.

It's a very much top-down system with a few fat cats sitting on the top, and none of them were even elected, and quite a few are effectively anonymous.

Don't be disingenuous. Bitcoin Cash didn't exist prior to 2017, when it forked from Bitcoin.

By this logic, the U.S. dollar is millennia old, since it grafted onto an economy that used older currencies still on its adoption.

Shares in a ponzi scheme aren't worthless, but the only use case for running one is fraud.

Why do you think Wall Street is lobbying with crypto?

If you meant something else, I don't understand your question.

Quick, how do I:

1. Pay for groceries with crypto? Is the transaction cost higher or lower than with current systems?

2. Take out a loan to buy a car with crypto?

3. Get a mortgage for a house?

4. Get a huge loan to buy a container ship for my company?

Do you even <<know>> what the "global financial system" does, besides work with currencies (which is more or less the only angle covered by cryptocurrencies)?

2. I sold a car for ~30k USD in Germany 2 weeks ago. I wish the guy would have been able to pay in crypto, because bank transfer didn't work out (because of money laundering law between unrelated banks due to the higher amount) and he ended up paying in ... cash (yes, the irony, so much about money laundering). And now, I had to open a new bank account which will be able at some point to accept the money. It's not just time consuming, but all this is not free obviously

3. Well, that's a good point, since loans are created out of thin air... https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081415/under...

Crypto people love to point out these obscure experiments as if "it's happening". My BTC sits in a wallet.

3. Why is that bad? How else would you expect a loan to be created? Comments line this reveal an underlying ideology.

I worked for a blockchain startup, and it had the exact same concept listed here:

> Due to the nature of the Lightning Network's dispute mechanism, which requires all users to watch the blockchain constantly for fraud, the concept of a "watchtower" has been developed, where trust can be outsourced to watchtower nodes to monitor for fraud.

However... we were constantly discussing this. Was the network truly decentralized in this case? Watchtowers basically concentrate power in a handful of nodes, you're back to oligarchy.

Which means... why bother with blockchain and cryptocurrency anymore? What's the point?

> 2. I sold a car for ~30k USD in Germany 2 weeks ago. I wish the guy would have been able to pay in crypto, because bank transfer didn't work out (because of money laundering law between unrelated banks due to the higher amount) and he ended up paying in ... cash (yes, the irony, so much about money laundering). And now, I had to open a new bank account which will be able at some point to accept the money. It's not just time consuming, but all this is not free obviously

He could have just... warned his bank?? Also, what's with the jab against cash, yes, it can always be used for money laundering, it's not like, God-forbid, cryptocurrencies being used for the same reason, see sock-puppet transactions, anonymity....

> 3. Well, that's a good point, since loans are created out of thin air... https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081415/under...

Yeah, and what's wrong with that?

For the rest, there's no reason you couldn't do any of those things in a legitimate working peer to peer cryptocurrency in principle, regardless of the fact that at the moment people don't and the structures you engage with instead are staples of tradfi.

They do many things, but the ones I want to avoid the most are their mechanisms of control in the global economy. The fact they can lock your bank account and deny you access to global trade because you said something or did something they don't approve of is utterly unacceptable and this alone is enough for me to aim for their destruction.

Ok... let's see how a mortgage would work.

A smart contract for the initial loan?

Regular payments into the smart contract as the monthly installments?

What happens in case of default?

> They do many things, but the ones I want to avoid the most are their mechanisms of control in the global economy. The fact they can lock your bank account and deny you access to global trade because you said something or did something they don't approve of is utterly unacceptable and this alone is enough for me to aim for their destruction.

How exactly do cryptocurrencies prevent this?

Assuming you live in a world where everything happens mediated by decentralised ledgers and no central source of enforcement or power, an entity is dispatched to repo the house and auction it in order to pay out the initial smart contract financiers. It's a long way from here to there, I know, but there's no "impossible" about it.

> How exactly do cryptocurrencies prevent this?

Because you hold your keys and you get to decide what is broadcast on their behalf on the ledger, not a custodian. There is no central point to pressure or capture in order to execute the same attack as above in tradfi.

Yes, there is, the person (software system?) with the bat that's actually enforcing the smart contract in real life.

That's not the same as denying access to global markets, as long as legitimate cryptocurrencies maintain liquidity with global markets, that attack can be ruled out if you self custody. It doesn't rely on any physical state, it relies on you using a centralised service of custodial account management where a third party can direct that entity to deny service to you, or that service can independently decide to deny service to you. There's no centralised service to attack in a proper peer to peer system, they can't stop you interacting with the market.

It's the present day, not some future. You need real world enforcement of real world states.

I just realized! Cryptocurrency bros are pure function bros. Everything is pure and has no side effects!

Except for the fact that the world is a <<result of side effects>>. All that's nice about computers has to do with them printing to screen/paper, sending across the network, etc...

Similar story with money. All we care about is that effects they have on real life.

> that attack can be ruled out if you self custody.

Which puts a huge target on your head for any kind of real world malicious actor.

That's a fair criticism to the extent that any theoretical decentralised ledger process pipeline touches the real world, but the extent to which they do touch the real world, and the benefits available from each of them, varies enormously.

> Which puts a huge target on your head for any kind of real world malicious actor.

If the choice is between that and having a bank and its chain of dependencies as a tyrannical real world dictator, I'd rather have to deal with that target than be trapped in that tyranny. That risk can be mitigated, it can be compensated for, structures can be erected to address it.

If you're slave to a tyrant, you're simply immediately subject to whatever their whims are. That is completely unacceptable, even if it does theoretically reduce some risk for some people sometimes.

If you open that can of worms I think the question will very quickly be whether such an asset class should just be outright banned.

To me it’s still an open question if cryptocurrencies are inherently a (distributed) scam. At least the ones based on proof-of-work.

Both cash and securities are regulated in a way that ties them to the creation or storage of (real-world) value. Proof-of-work cryptocurrencies ties both the creation and trade of the asset with destruction of value (energy). Which inherently makes them toxic. Regulating cryptocurrencies to become non-toxic might make them de-facto illegal.

Did we go back to the gold standard during the writing of this comment? Last time I checked there wasn't any backing of fabricating new dollars except for the sheer trust in the US government.

This is not a problem when the promises of a nation state only need to last as long as the nation state itself.

I’m not sure how that’s useful. The capability to produce goods and services seems a whole lot more real to me in terms of value than gold (the value of which would collapse anyway if modern economy did).

In theory can have currencies directly backed by oil, wheat or copper if you don’t want fiat for some reason. Would still be more ”real” than gold.

> only need to last as long as the nation state itself.

1$ from the 50s is not worth much in the 80s and even less today. Seems like that should be a much bigger concern than the longevity of the state itself.

That is to some degree what USD is ("Petrodollars"):

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/072915/how-petro...

Wow that’s compelling.

> except for the sheer trust in the US government

Oh, you mean “except for” the single most powerful entity on planet earth

Most cryptocurrencies are just token offering schemes that meet those criteria, a few like Bitcoin can make the case they're not securities. the crypto 'industry' wants a new asset class to avoid scrutiny, don't see much reason to give them one.

https://policy.paradigm.xyz/writing/secs-path-to-registratio...

The real issue is that to legally do it, someone has to put their name on it, and that's not something many want to do for their pump and dump scheme.

>"Paragon Coin Inc. (“Paragon”) was a Delaware company that raised $12 million from their 2017 ICO of “PRG Tokens” as part of a scheme to integrate blockchain technology to the cannabis industry."

The "PRG Token" is just a share in the company. This is a security you should only be able to buy on a registered exchange. The business obviously failed beacuse blockchain in the cannabis industry is utterly useless, the company went broke, and the actual plan off selling their worthless tokens on a random internet platform didn't work out. So the SEC literally just did its job.

The problem is that securities trading is regulated, and the coin base model of playing multiple roles itself is illegal

If we are to look at the postulates of the Howey test it would probably pass them. I don't see them Trying to force record labels to register with the SEC.

Large record labels do of course have stock in their companies which is a security and is traded.

[1] https://www.songvest.com/how-it-works

[1] https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search/#/q=SONGVEST

There is actually alot of need. The propositions that Crypto caters for would become worthless if we applied securities laws to them.

There is no such thing as a free lunch/currency/...

Human society is hierarchical because otherwise we have chaos. Or worse, completely self-appointed, unaccountable hierarchies.

Human society abhors vacuum.

“Doing X on a slow distributed database” is not a get-out-of-jail ticket if X happens to be already illegal or heavily regulated.

The only technical innovation of cryptocurrencies is that you can now create a new unregistered penny stock at the press of a button and spam the regulators with violations. There's ~7000 equity stocks (you know, just stocks) in the US and there's somewhere >1,000,000 defi tokens.

This did not in fact achieve regulatory escape velocity.

Crypto is a dead ringer for 1920s securities fraud. Whether it's a new asset class is irrelevant. It's plagued with the same problems as unregulated securities shilling, which means they will share a common solution.

So Coinbase didn't comply, as they had no legal obligation.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilymason/2023/06/06/coinbase-...

This is the very heart of Coinbase’s operations. If they’re found to be a securities exchange, they won’t be allowed to mingle the broker and clearing house functions, and the company would have to be split.

No such thing as safe CEX under the SEC, I guess. I do wonder what they imagine a legally-registered CEX would look like... only accredited investors can purchase and transfer crypto? Or, if it were up to Gensler, Coinbase would only sell Bitcoin?

It’s been like that for months the now - dodgy crypto is positively getting murdered, finally, by regulators and as a result the die hards who don’t want to leave it behind are moving to the reserve currency of the economy, BTC.

Another way to look at this is that the SEC offered Coinbase the opportunity to stop doing something illegal and walk away before the SEC brought the hammer down. That was a pretty good offer. These are criminal offenses.

Coinbase didn't. So, hammer time: Washington D.C., June 6, 2023 — The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Coinbase, Inc. with operating its crypto asset trading platform as an unregistered national securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency. The SEC also charged Coinbase for failing to register the offer and sale of its crypto asset staking-as-a-service program."

Much of the US crypto industry had two great hopes for getting away with it. First, that they could get Congress to legalize what they were doing. Second, that they could get the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, instead of the Securities and Exchage Commission, to regulate crypto. The first possibility disappeared politically after the FTX scams were exposed, FTX went bankrupt, and politicians who accepted their campaign donations were in political trouble. The second disappeared when the SEC and the CFTC, with help from the Justice Department and the FBI, all landed on Binance, and started asking hard questions about where the customer's money was.

These companies are in deep trouble for a very simple and classic form of financial crime - treating the customer's money as their own. This is not about "tech". This is not about "crypto". This is not about "financial innovation". This is about plain old theft.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-102

There is zero evidence that Coinbase does that. Notably, they are publicly traded with audited financial statements every quarter, unlike FTX, Binance, and friends.

If Coinbase is cooperative and absolved thanks to their diligence, they'll be further cemented as the standard for others in the industry to follow as regulators play catch up.

Coinbase has issuer-side problems, too. Coinbase claims that their "staking as a service" offering is not a securities offering, but it looks a lot like a mutual fund. You buy in, and someone else manages the money. Just because the management strategy is pre-defined and passive doesn't matter. Passively managed mutual funds, such as index funds and ETFs, are still considered regulated investment offerings.

That said, isn't it a bit concerning that we have an agency that both writes AND enforces the laws? Why is this aspect unlike everywhere else in society?

I’m less familiar with the details, but it seems like the FTC, FDA, EPA, and OSHA all have significant rule-making and rule-enforcing power as well.

“Hey just buy this thing from me, and trust me that I will do something great with your money and eventually return it to you, I promise!”

Well, surprisingly there is a looong history of people exploiting a system like this to scam people. We learned, we have to regulate that kind of thing.

An investment contract exists if there is an "investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others."

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/howey-test.asp

If the words sound like that, careful.

1: Some of the deals are "Someone built this thing which is now out of their control. But this thing can be used with these tokes. Want some?".

2: Some of the deals are "I built this thing which is now out of my control. But this thing can be used with these tokes. Want some?".

3: Some of the deals are "I built this thing which is now kinda out of my control. I might be able to change it later, but only if the community stays behind me. Anyhow, this thing can be used with these tokes. Want some?".

The SEC argues that many tokens fall into category 3 and that 3 is close enough to a security that the SEC should have a say in this.

Sounds like SBF talking about "the box" on the Odd Lots podcast..

> “In the course of an investigation, the staff may share its own view as to what conduct may raise questions for the commission under the securities laws,” it added.

That’s insane.

The lesson here is that if you get any communication from the SEC, document it and reply back asking if that’s an official communication of the SEC or just the meaningless “view” of a staff member.

This was one of the first ICOs, before the phrase.

I don'like to like the SEC and I think a confrontation between the SEC, Coinbase, and other incumbents is positive. On the other hand I know that majorly the decentralization blah blah blah is just a distraction trick.

responses to crypto asset posts are such a weird blindspot in this tech centric community for over a decade now, when does the conversation evolve? why don't we talk about Solidity versions here, or design patterns, or node software here.

such an obvious forum for it but instead we get these non-sequitur responses

It's almost as if the "web3" product people actually want is to move dollars illicitly and sometimes to spend them gambling on a 24/7 casino.

We would all still be doing 2013-style cryptosecurities without them and most of the more refined infrastructure wouldnt have been developed

But this is a very shitty evolution of antifragility

It is still routing around those regulators, and the SEC will never achieve investor protection and the legislature should direct the agencies more holistically

If I send my crypto to coinbase, I no longer own my crypto. Coinbase now owns it and can do whatever they like with it. But they market themselves as providing crypto services and as selling crypto when in fact they are just selling numbers in their internal database.

So users of Coinbase are clearly being defrauded. They think they own crypto but they don’t.

The underlying assets are also not securities.