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Comment by centimeter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

“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.

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.

Buggy parser; you wouldn't call paper towels or wet wipes Kleenex, right? Because that's what you're insinuating by calling other cryptocurrencies 'Bitcoin'.

Yes. And I call my vaccum a hoover and my adhesive sticky-backed plastic Sellotape.

If someone told me to pass the Kleenex where only paper towels are, my hypothetical self with hypothetical knowledge about the intricacies of paper products, I would probably roll my eyes and internally go “those aren’t Kleenex at all, they’re not even tissues, don’t they know the difference between long fiber and short fiber cellulose based paper products GAWD!” But in an effort to not seem insufferable, and because I know exactly what they meant, I would just pass the paper towel.

Your logic is flawed. Just because you can find an example of a specific product name being used as a generic term does not prove that a different specific product can be used that way.

In the case of Bitcoin, it most certainly will create confusion if attempt to refer to a generic group cryptocurrencies as Bitcoin.

lol, soooo what was wrong with this comment? Downvoters, you think that someone will know you mean the generic class of cryptocurrency if you refer specifically to Bitcoin??

Bait: cryptocurrencies should be allowed just like wildcatting, a "legitimate business".

Switch: securities regulation is unjust.

Those are both true, but unrelated. It's not a "bait and switch" when the comment thread changes tack.

No, you didn't even acknowledge the existence of securities regulation in your original comment, even though the whole premise of it was that things like Grams are, like "wildcatting", legitimate businesses. Only after you were challenged about the existence of securities regulation did you reveal your real position, which is that you believe those regulations lack validity.

That latter argument is, of course, your real point. You could have made it directly. Why didn't you? Why did you instead pretend that it was obvious that Grams should be lawful, because "wildcatting" is?

I was responding to the analogy about gold mining in my original comment. Why would I randomly bring up securities regulation? I think you might have lost the thread a bit.

The legislature is in place after the wild decades portrayed in the movie "The Wolf of Wall Street". In an indiscriminate freewheeling environment very few peasants got the good high-return stuff, but many had their savings wiped out by slick salesmen with promises of quick riches.

> the wild decades portrayed in the movie "The Wolf of Wall Street"

Basing your legal theory on fiction movies is not a great move.

The parent referenced a time period. They did not base a legal theory on a work of fiction.

Requiring accreditation has always seemed like a well intentioned policy that mostly locks in inequality, so I guess I'm opposed to the government's ruling whichever way you slice it here.

There’s a piece by Matt Levine of Bloomberg’s “Money Stuff” on this. You might find it interesting: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-09-24/earnin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bre-X

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