This literally changes nothing. Regulated companies already knew what the findings would be. Unregulated companies still don't care.
Something like a DAO contract that doesn't have an issuer (assuming the DAO had an issuer, not sure). Or a payout mechanism like zcash where the mining function pays out to founders wallets over time.
It seems inconsistent that ICOs are seen as securities whereas the underlying asset isn't. I think the differentiating factor is the degree of decentralization. If the SEC could shut down bitcoin they would. But they can't. So instead they'll go after ICO issuers who happen to be in the US. But many ICOs won't have to be in the US, or issued by humans for that matter.
Personally, the genie is out of the bottle. Value exists in the decentralized digital world, and it now has programmable properties. Trying to regulate securities has become the equivalent of regulating TCP packets. It can be done but at what cost..
I'm not sure why this would be inconsistent. I admit there's some confusion in the boundary between securities and commodities, but one can certainly have a hedge fund made up from currency or gold futures (neither of which is a security) and have ownership interest in the fund be a security.
(IANAL, none of this is intended to be advice or taken as authoritative.)
> But many ICO won't have to be ... issued by humans
If AIs are issuing ICOs, then I would imagine they would have to obey the law just like anyone else. Heck, very few if any securities are issued by humans -- they're mostly issued by corporations.
You could also think of bitcoin as an ICO. There's 21 million tokens that Satoshi sold, that people purchased with the expectation of profiting from. Boom, it's a security. If the financing model of a traditional blockchain is okay, but issuing tokens are not.. then programmers are about to get very creative with how get around loopholes.
> But many ICO won't have to be ... issued by humans
I mean the contract will be written by a person. But instead of having a central "issuer" (like a core team) the issuing mechanism is automated via the contract on the blockchain.
If a company makes a mistake, the SEC first goes after the company. "Unregulated company" sounds like "no company" [1]. In that case, the SEC goes straight after the individuals involved.
[1] Do you mean unregulated or unregistered? Unregulated means sole proprietorship. Unregistered could be an LLC or corporation that just never filed anything with the SEC.
Let me clarify this: Just because the US SEC wants something doesn't make it happen on the internet. They can do things with governments and companies, and that's about it.
If some random hacker in Ukraine decides to use a ETH or BTC or smart contract or create a new coin, the SEC isn't going to be able to influence that. There is no point of control there.
And that much better option is to just use the regular banking system.
Cryto currencies have massive costs and disadvantages, and there is no point at all to them if you take about the fundamental premise and purpose of them, which is decentralization.