9 ms·

His analogy is pretty poor IMO. A more realistic analogy is: imagine if a group of people got together and bought a plot of land to mine gold. Then imagine th

• anticensor 7y ago
  It is called the futures and promises market.
  • simonh 7y ago
    Which has established rules and contracts guaranteeing and enforcing the rights of buyers and obligations of sellers.
• vmception 7y ago
  > And not only are they telling us we can't sell part of our non-existent gold to our friends, we can't sell it to people ANYWHERE. well they could, they'd just have to register with the government. but in this case, registering with the government isn't so simple because that "opts in" to a ton of other regulations which are usually okay, if the group of people weren't also trying to tie membership into their nightclub with whoever currently bears the right to own a piece of the gold mine. Now the regulations for investments are completely incompatible with general merchant services, regulations for consumer goods. The various governments have a chance to create a framework that works for both, but chooses to rely on the regulator for investments exclusively, or making it too expensive and irreconcilable to ask for clarification.
• tomc1985 7y ago
  > We aren't allowed to sell people something that doesn't exist? Seems reasonable to me
  • thesz 7y ago
    So kickstarter is a place for whom?
    • cryptica 7y ago
      The regulatory hypocrisy is clear.
      • pjc50 7y ago
        Kickatarter interests are not re-sellable or transferable. So they don't meet the Howey test.
        • cryptica 7y ago
          I have no doubt that the law is crystal clear, but does it make sense?
    • tomc1985 7y ago
      Yet another venue to sell people dreams. How many kickstarters actually succeed? At least they promise something material, which is more than one can say about this TON shitcoin
      • thesz 7y ago
        Our little conversation amounts, to me, to "we allow people to sell dreams as long as these dreams are allowed to sell by us". I cannot see how you resolve your allowance for regularly failing kickstarters and your allowance-not for TON. I see the value in TON beyond material. Compare it to Libra, to give you another point to discuss. For me, at the very least, TON could be a viable alternative to Libra - it is architecturally about the same PBFT (with useful twists) and, frankly, it does not possess Facebook-or-Libra-associated flaws.
• centimeter 7y ago
  You're describing "prospecting", or (less charitably) "wildcatting", which is a legitimate business. > We aren't allowed to sell people something that doesn't exist? You're allowed to sell rights to things that might exist in the future. If someone puts a ton of money into something stupid that's pretty clearly not going to pay off proportional to the expense, that's on them. > you're promising your investors [a return] This is somewhat different from your first paragraph. Overselling your confidence in the financial outcome of a bet is (usually obvious) fraud, but that's a different problem from selling a stake in a risky endeavor. Not defending Telegram's stupid shitcoin, but trying to get the Government to stop this (whatever your probably loosely-held idea of "this" is) is probably not a good idea.
  • cafard 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bre-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bre-X
  • shawndrost 7y ago
    And now we have come full circle. The government does indeed permit wildcatting or prospecting, but it requires that all investors are accredited. The same is true for TON and other bitcoins -- the govt is not trying to forbid them, but merely require the normal level of investor vetting that is in place across the rest of the economy.
    • centimeter 7y ago
      “Other bitcoins” doesn’t parse - did you mean “other shitcoins”? Bitcoin is a specific product, and shitcoins are a disjoint category. The government only requires people to be accredited for "ICO"s, not currency/utility "coins" like Bitcoin or Ethereum. As an aside, I believe the “accredited investor” category is mostly a subsidy of rich people. Exclude peasants from investing in the good high-return stuff and you can demand higher capital premiums.
      • mokus 7y ago
        Kleenex is a specific product too, but is often used as a generic term. “Bitcoin” might not be commonly used that way but it parses just fine to me.
• saurik 7y ago
  The "anywhere" thing is weird though as these people don't live in the United States, so the analogy is that you are a Russian citizen living in Europe and you buy a plot of land; now, the US government tells you you aren't allowed to tell people in Europe that you maybe have a gold mine and maybe they should invest in shares of your gold, because, in the case that you do find gold, someone in the United States might one day buy some of it, which is actually kind of ridiculous on not just one but two levels: that the US has jurisdiction over your behavior at all when you aren't yourself a US citizen, you don't live in the US, and you aren't even dealing with other US citizens, because theoretically the people you deal with might one day themselves deal with US citizens (which is an analysis I am just believing from this article: I haven't read the actual complaints from the SEC); but also the very idea that the US thinks that the shares of future gold that may or may not exist might still be a security even after you find the gold (assuming you map it out and know how much exists after you find it, which I think is a reasonable analogy for a post-launch distributed protocol project) because of this weird theory that they sometimes have that "once a security always a security" (which is based on some context I have outside of this article).
  • vorpalhex 7y ago
    That's not quite right. Imagine you're a Russian citizen living in Russia proper, and you want to sell prospective stakes. Russia rules that you can't do this because you're not accredited, and you're asking people to buy a kind of security. You then ask if you can sell your security to people in the UK. Russia repeats itself, more slowly this time: No, you're not accredited and you're trying to sell a security - stop it. So then you explain, "but this isn't just a security, it's a decentralized open security based on cryptographic principles and new technologies and there's computers involved!" And then Russia repeats itself once more, "No, you're not accredited, it's still a security, what part of this is hard to understand?"
    • saurik 7y ago
      I feel like our disagreement here is based on a different understanding of a fact that I might legitimately have wrong: my understanding is that the owners of Telegram are literally Russian citizens living in Europe; are they actually US citizens? (FWIW, a quick re-check of Wikipedia to verify my memory here is definitely making it sound like the Durov brothers are Russian nationals, but maybe they have now become official citizens of an island in the Caribbean as part of their "self-exile"? I don't think that Saint Kitts and Nevis is a US territory, though.)
• smsm42 7y ago
  What you just described is pretty much what nearly every startup in Silicon Valley does. Probably what 95% of startups anywhere do (very rarely, there's a startup where the "gold" is tangibly there, but it's a rare case). Of course, if they issue securities, they have to comply with securities laws. If that's what Telegram is upset about, then I don't think they have much of a leg to stand on.
• cryptica 7y ago
  This argument makes no sense at all. They never offered to sell the gold. It's more like they offered to sell a share of the gold mining venture. Where the token represents a share of the business. By that logic we should shut down every company in existence on the basis that there is uncertainty in their future. Especially now with the COVID-19, every airline company's survival is pure speculation; does that mean it should be illegal to buy shares of airline companies now? I don't care at all about TON at all. But in the context of corporate America, this is completely arbitrary.
  • djrogers 7y ago
    All of those companies that you’re talking about “Shutting down” are registered with the SEC, and follow SEC rules and guidelines for selling their securities. If telegram had done that with tan, this would not be an issue.
    • cryptica 7y ago
      The SEC is wrong and so is the notion of an accredited investor - The founding fathers would have been appalled at these ideas; they're twisted beyond what they could possibly have imagined at the time. These laws sound totally anti-constitutional. Doesn't resonate at all with the "Land of the free" idea. People are not free to start certain enterprises. They are not free to invest in certain enterprises. The only thing they are free to do is accept the fiat money which was printed out of thin air by their corporate masters. If you live in the US and you're not an accredited investor, I would recommend that you leave the country ASAP before the government puts chains on you.
      • JumpCrisscross 7y ago
        > founding fathers would have been appalled at these ideas Look at export-import licensing norms, and the limits on incorporation, in the time of the founding fathers. Enterprise is, on average, far freer today. > laws sound totally anti-constitutional They’re not. Congress has vast Constitutional powers to regulate interstate commerce. It used these laws to curtail securities fraud in the 1930s. Those are the laws being violated here.
• cryptica 7y ago
  >> you don't even know if there's gold on that land, but you're promising your investors that there is I think it's very clear in this case that there was definitely gold on that land. The only thing which was unclear was how much gold... But is there such a thing as an enterprise without uncertainty? The only enterprise that exists without uncertainty in the US is ironically the Federal Reserve Bank. It is the only institution in the world which can print as much money as it wants and give it to whoever it wants. Who is running the real fraud?
• znpy 7y ago
  > We aren't allowed to sell people something that doesn't exist? Have you heard of this thing called Kickstarter?
  • ooobit2 7y ago
    I get the comparison, but TON was intended to be an investment instrument. So, it'd be comparable if every Kickstarter was someone saying, "For your $5, I'll give you $7 if this works, and $3 if it doesn't."
• mc3 7y ago
  I think we can ethically sell things that don't exist to "sophisticated" investors - which is hard to define but probably based on net worth. Maybe limit the $ amount you can invest per person from "poor" investors to $1000 or something. But the question is, is it a scheme or an investment? That said people buying crazy options on sites like /r/wallstreetbets, or just betting on sports are in the same boat, so where to draw the line? I think it is better to err on the side of controlling such investment schemes though rather than let them run loose. The solution to the US controlling everything is to set up truly decentralised currencies like Bitcoin and keep a brand or controller out of that. Someone in the world can do this anonymously and it would be hard to shut down. Has anyone shut Bitcoin down yet?
  • ng12 7y ago
    The US already has a system for this: accredited investors. I believe the thresholds are $200k/yr income for several years or at least $1m in assets. This makes me wonder if TON ran afoul of the SEC somehow.
    • tptacek 7y ago
      They did, as you can read in great detail in the SEC complaint.
• burnte 7y ago
  > Sound completely unfair? Government overstep? Yes, if I want to try to create a thing I reasonably believe will have value, and I'm honest about it, there should be little regulatory issue. Considering how many other cryptocurrencies there are, I REALLY don't understand at all why SEC cared about this one. There are far more shadier ones around than TON. > We aren't allowed to sell people something that doesn't exist? We do that every day. Commodities futures and stock options. Speculative investments in oil, gas, wind, tech, medicine, cars, etc. SOFTWARE. Not only that, we allow people to pay other people with promises they have the right to buy a thing that doesn't exist at a price we set today (unvested non-voting stock options), because we THINK it might be worth more later, although we fully acknowledge it may cease to exist, or even never exist at all (unvested options in a company that never goes public, or sells, and your shares vanish).
  • dathinab 7y ago
    > I REALLY don't understand at all why SEC cared about this one. There are far more shadier ones around than TON. I guess it's because they believed that TON had the potential to actually become wide spread by it's Telegram integration. Which makes the regulators sound quite evil. But you can reformulate that as it having potential to cause large, wide spread amounts of damages. ;=)
  • jrumbut 7y ago
    The SEC is not preventing blockchain companies from selling securities, but only requiring that the same rules be followed that would allow me to sell shares of my gold mining outfit to the public. The problem isn't risk at all, like you said, plenty of securities sold to the public carry enormous risk. The regulations are in place not to prevent failed businesses but to ensure shareholders get their fair due when a business succeeds and have a basic set of facts when considering investments. Overstock, for instance, has been able to offer their securities on a blockchain. Their application is different from TON but it shows there is a path to doing this if you follow the rules.
• IAmGraydon 7y ago
  When did they outlaw speculation? The stock market? Selling people a future possibility, however likely or unlikely, has never been a crime.
  • alexashka 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme You should study a little history before making wild claims regarding 'always' or 'never'.
    • IAmGraydon 7y ago
      You should know enough about the topic at hand to realize the difference between it and a Ponzi scheme.