Opening Remarks at the Securities Regulation Institute
sec.gov
sec.gov
This isn't a new thing. Previous generations of scams included "street railways", "real estate investment trusts", and "multi-level marketing". Read "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", which is over a century old yet will sound very familiar to anyone who's followed ICOs.
The history of scams should be taught in school. At least read the Wikipedia entry.[1] High school students should learn about small cons like the pigeon drop up through big ones like Madoff.
The SEC is mostly reactive. After the thing tanks and people complain, they go after people who acted like crooks.
And multi-level marketing companies, while they tend to be controversial[2], also include quite a few large publicly traded stocks.
[1] https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/basics/inves...
[2] See the feud between Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman over Herbalife and whether it is a scam.
1) Were public companies changing their names to reflect the "e"/"i"? If so which ones?
2) Isn't the "i" from iPhone/iMac taken from the word "internet"? Okay it's a product and not a company name, but where does the distinction starts/ends?
Could we expect an incoming "bPhone" (blockchain) or cPhone(crypto), dPhone(decentralized) .. it actually sounds cool, right?
1) blockchain adds overhead. Mobile is about efficiency
2) blockchains are only necessary for adversarial collaboration. Your phone is wholly owned and controlled by you, so there’s no need to host adversarial realities on it.
Blockchain is ONLY a public verified ledger.
A peer to peer blockchain is not public verified. This is running a server on your phone.
A bunch of companies are doing exactly that right now (can’t recall from the top of my head) and I honestly wish them all the best as the current walled garden situation is obscene.
Some, but because the money flowed differently it was more common to take successful business idea and start a new VC backed company with successful business + internet tacked on.
Existing companies were naming products with e/i, but again they got nothing close to the boost we are seeing right now with blockchain.
Some examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.Digital_Corporation Norris Communications > E.Digital_Corporation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com Cameron Audio Networks > Broadcast.com
On top of that everyone and their mother founded companies that did 'something with the internet' and all those companies had a '.com', 'e' or something similar in their names.
Personally, I feel like the 'i' was mainly popularised with the iPod.
And remember "Dot Com Guy?" Some dude in Dallas who as a publicity stunt pledged to stay in his house for an entire year and just live off of stuff ordered online? Today, that's quaint. Back then the very notion of ordering a pizza on your computer was like flying cars.
I remember that and someone already did this with Bitcoin, it's fantastic the way the history just repeats itself.
About the only thing you could buy online were plane tickets. You could reserve a hotel online, but it still went through a travel agent's hands.
In the middle somewhere a good example is Be Incorporated. During the 1990s Jean-Louis Gassee had founded this startup with VC money to pursue a new operating system and basically prove Apple (who he'd previously worked for) wrong. By the end of the century JLG's funding was running out, the VCs didn't want any more risk, Apple had chosen to take back Steve Jobs instead of him, and it looked as though Be would go out of business shortly, but the dotcom book offered a "Hail Mary" play.
Be re-wrote its history and produced IPO paperwork that emphasised this as an Internet technology offering in the heart of the dotcom boom. Be's future was now in the promising (but it turns out in the end, totally irrelevant and now forgotten) Internet Appliance market, they pivoted from their previous work (developing a personal computer operating system nobody was using), they went from talking about TCP/IP as a specialist corner case few users would care about to prioritising it as the main focus of their system, and so on.
It didn't work, Be Inc. ceased business after burning all the IPO cash and laid off all its employees without shipping any significant new products. But without the dotcom boom, that would all have happened much earlier, when the VC money ran out. Ordinary people who foolishly purchased Be Inc. shares in the IPO or shortly afterwards lost their shirts, and the VCs got their money back.
I disagree with your use of the term 'foolish' in hindsight.
We can imagine an entirely reasonable alternate universe where, by pursuing this 'Internet Appliance' idea, they ended up inventing the formula for what in our universe became the iPad. Apple's success was far from guaranteed at this time too.
This is an age-old phenomenon. Why do you think there's a toy wagon called the "radio flyer"? Radio was the high tech product of its era, and planes...wow!
People say this as if laws and rules didn’t work in the days of cash transactions.
I don't know why I have to keep explaining this, but cryptocurrencies can and will be regulated using exactly the same mechanism that basically everything else is.
The government makes some rules, asks you politely but firmly to follow them, observes carefully to see if and when you break them, and then beats you with a (usually, but not always, metaphorical) rubber hose until you choose to comply. Nothing about crypto interferes with this process, even theoretically.
Sorry, what? ICOs and other scammy behaviors _are entirely public_. A company visible to the public comes along and starts selling "coins"/"securities". How exactly is it that this can't be regulated? Just because it's crypto doesn't make it unregulatable, these are people in the real world doing bad things--not some opaque UUID in a digital ledger somewhere.
And let's suppose someone came up with a way of selling these coins anonymously online in a secure way. Guess what! Nobody would buy them, because why would you buy securities from an anonymous online source that could just as easily be a 13 year old writing the modern remake of the 1994 hit film _Blank Check_?
That's inherently the issue here. It's not a matter of sending money/value/currency/whatever anonymously. These are companies that are coming out in front of the public in the real world, talking a big crypto game, then disappearing into the void with millions of real dollars. Or perhaps not disappearing, and providing no value to the people that bought into the scheme (contrary to the advertising they used). Or any number of other things that the SEC would have something to say about.
Just because it's "crypto" doesn't mean that its intersection with the real world is free from scrutiny and the rules of the governments of our real world.
There are all sorts of industries that would be ecstatic if avoiding regulation was as simple as opting out.
If you are under American jurisdiction, you signed up for SEC regulation. Private American companies, offshore companies selling securities to Americans and perhaps even foreign overseas individuals transacting for securities in U.S. dollars are each, to varying degrees, under U.S. jurisdiction.
What the chairman is talking about are publicly traded companies suddenly turning to claiming blockchain-based pivots without substantial evidence to believe that they are being sincere and truthful.
This is almost a pump-and-dump scheme in just slightly different clothing.
You assume consumers don't have needs and are immune to incentives, and also that people running the coins are perfectly honest, and it would never cross their mind to architect incentives in such a way, as to predictably exploit those consumers.
Also, what 'dmd wrote.
> All of this has gone too far!!!!! It was fine when you paranoid dorks were out there scamming each other, please leave the normies alone!!!!!!!!!!!
I also copied this all into https://pastebin.com/e8vXE5Vi
This is what the SEC is saying too with different words.
People don't get a say on which race or gender (edit: sex) they're born as. That's partly why race and gender are protected classes. "People who own Bitcoin" isn't a protected class.
Sure, it might feel upsetting. But is it true?
It seems true. And that has merit.
But so does your side of it. So it's a balance.
I'm not sure why "don't be an asshole to whole groups of people" is so controversial, though.
Edit: My comment was tongue in cheek. It’s kind of funny that not only genders are like the twin towers, but even saying that sex is determined at birth can be a sensitive issue.
The basis of protected class is more visibility and history of non-germane discrimination than innateness, which is why religion is a protected class.
Was it also deliberately deceptive to interpret Trump's famous statement about Mexicans as a slur on the whole group? I don't think so.
I observe people of all sorts making ambiguous statements deliberately in order to express bigoted opinions while not engaging with those who may be offended.
None of this implies I think defending "nerds" as a class is important - but I don't think being offended is necessarily "deliberately deceptive".
So it is a lazy, elitist snob rant that asserts that she has no plans to explain it to us unwashed morons and we should just take her word for it. My general opinion of such attitudes is Fuck you, which is part of why I walked away from a National Merit Scholarship and dropped out of college in my youth.
I already said I would be interested in her explanation. But I am not holding my breath. Her rant suggests she can't be bothered to explain fuck all. She is too busy stroking her ego on twitter.
As I said, I would be interested in her actual explanation of blockchain. Her comments suggest she has no plans to give that.
Most of Twitter rants I post don't include the complete background of what I'm talking about. I assume the readers who are interested have some context. I'd like to think that at least some of them are useful nonetheless.
Remember a basic issue with things quoted on HN: they usually weren't written specifically to be discussed on HN. That's clearly the case here. Maybe you could direct any other concerns you have to the comment introducing Jeong's Twitter thread, rather than attacking Jeong herself.
Had she said "Those who are interested in understanding it can start with this white paper" and linked to it, I would probably be reading the white paper right now. But I don't actually know what white paper she means.
Last I checked, you aren't a moderator on HN. So how about you refrain from trying to police my behavior here?
I'm really not sure I understand how you get from snark about people showing up in her TL to cryptosplain Bitcoin to her despite her having read the white paper 5 years ago to feeling like probably you shouldn't have to read the white paper.
You've now heard it from two sources, me and Sarah Jeong: if you want to understand the background of what she's talking about, just read the bitcoin white paper.
Edit in response to your unmarked edit: Please kindly provide me the link to said white paper instead of continuing to lecture me and I will have a go at trying to read it.
I'm not in tech. I have terrible eyesight. Google customizes search results. What if they give me different results?
I would trust it coming from you. Not so much from Google.
Thank you.
Edit: Or anyone else here who knows which paper this is.
"Internet money with the usability of PGP and the stability of BART service."
As for BART, I only took the train a few times in my life so I can't really elaborate on that.
paranoid dorks are eating the world. Typical for a paradigm shift situation, the old world can only produce gasps of exclamation.
And perhaps companies shouldn't look like they are defrauding investors when there are big risk factors involved.
The issue isn't consumers meddling in blockchain currency. It's about consumers being dragged into blockchain speculation without their knowledge.
Grandma puts her retirement savings into some big, safe company. The suddenly the company goes from being an electric utility to being a blockchain speculator and goes bankrupt, wiping out her savings without her even having a chance to get out.
I have seriously wondered whether I should consider avoiding them. Not just because blockchain=bad, but because I was thinking about how their commitment to minimizing costs could backfire someday, if not immediately.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-vanguard-group-blockchain...
Will be interesting to see if they actually do anything because in the end it will end up with a ton of litigation that they may or may not want to do.
[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/iced-tea-company-cha...
Kodak went into their announcement knowing what happened to the iced tea company's stock.
7 Popular Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency "Slang" Terms via CNBC [1:35 duration]
If you want to be fully complaint with SEC to issue your tokens as a security you have to spend shitload of money on laywers and wait for approval for months if not years. In fast-paced world of blockchain, it's equal to suicide.
Another thing is deeply discriminatory concept of accredited investor. They said that it's to protect investors. In reality it means that most lucrative deals will be out of reach for not wealthy individuals. And I hate whole concept that the big brother prevents me for taking risks because they think I'm too stupid for thinking for myself.
And constantly referring to ICO scams is not excuse at all. They don't want to shutdown scammy ICO, then want to shutdown all ICOs including ones with exceptionally brilliant ideas.
SEC is not friendly at all and they don't want to adapt. If they were friendly and willing to provide lightweight regulatory framework for ICO and cryptocurrencies, they would be very welcomed by many in blockchain world.