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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

It might not change the overall ecosystem that much. Many companies doing ICOs are already locating themselves in friendlier jurisdictions, and making some effort to block U.S. contributors.

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What efforts are these? All I've seen are checkboxes on their web site making the user tick a box confirming that they aren't a US citizen.

Geo-blocking US IP addresses won't work either, because an ethereum contract can't refuse a transaction based upon its source IP address (it doesn't know it). So if an ICO publishes their ethereum contract address online (e.g. via a twitter post), they are implicitly advertising to US investors.

The most serious effort I've seen had a geoblocked website that worked with a Chrome plugin. You could get around it, without even using a proxy, but only if you could understand the smart contract code and figure out how to prepare the data it required.

To my way of thinking, if you're sophisticated enough to do that, you're sophisticated enough in blockchain matters to make your own investment decisions.

It's a common fallacy that people think "I'm good at X, so I must also be good at Y" It seems to afflict techies the most, somehow we think just because we can understand computers, we must therefore be skilled in other domains too, like investments...

Doesnt matter if we are skilled or not, we sld be able to make our own decisions.

I'm not claiming that being good at computers means I must be good at investing.

I'm claiming that if I understand smart contract code, I'm good at evaluating a white paper's technical claims about a project being built with smart contract code.

Also I'm claiming this makes me better prepared to invest in these projects than, say, a cardiologist. But the SEC would be perfectly happy to let the cardiologist invest, while restricting the programmer who actually understands the industry.

I imagine blocking U.S. contributors would significantly affect the ecosystem.

They're already doing it. It's near impossible to do it effectively, if the contributor is comfortable interacting directly with smart contracts, but they're doing things like geoblocking their websites, making you click a box saying you're not in the U.S., etc.

Most ICOs already try to block US contributors but it's usually only based on IP which can easily be gamed

Interesting. Do you know why they were doing this? Just in anticipation that the SEC would crack down?

Yeah it seems like people already knew it was a gray area so they did it as a precaution. I don't think this SEC notice changes very much.

Status prohibited US citizens from participating in their ICO and they still raised $100M.

Anyone tech savvy enough to contribute money to an ICO is tech savvy enough to connect to a non-US VPN before doing it.

Good luck fending off the SEC with an argument about VPNs when you have millions of dollars of US citizen investment in your coffers.

securities laws apply based on the investor's jurisdiction

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