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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that there is no mention that he has been charged of being involved in a Ponzi scheme in the headline - just "Cryptocurrency Scheme".

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Is there a cryptocurrency token sale that's not designed to defraud the buyers?

There are a couple of "token sales" (they don't call them that) that only allowed accredited investors to invest, and had their "token sales" registered with the SEC before they went live with them. If those were designed to defraud the investors, I'm pretty sure SEC would go after those first.

Yep. It comes down to information asymmetry. Harder to trick and scam accredited investors

Most token sales make good money with very low effort scams

Sadly a lot of token sales were pump and dumps through VCs, so even this is not true. SEC registering looks like a better filter for now.

But here the VCs are the criminals and the predators not the victim of the scam. VCs are more sophisticated to avoid being the victim

Yes, I just wrote this to express that even sophisticated investors take part of worthless projects.

> Harder to trick and scam accredited investors

Not necessarily, accredited investors are dentists and successful pool-installers.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-09-24/earnin...

Of course, any SEC-registered token probably won't be allowed to do anything interesting so there's no point in investing.

By interesting I assume you mean a scam since I've never seen anything technically interesting from a token sale

Yes, Blockstream has a token that represents Bitcoin miner shares.

The most important thing is to wait until the token is registered by SEC, so far all scam tokens skipped that step.

It’d be tricky to define criminal criteria based solely on running a Ponzi scheme so there isn’t a “USC Section #” crime called “Ponzi Scheming”. They just charge the various illegal parts of the scheme separately. His charges:

Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud—Title 18, U.S.C., Section 1349

Maximum penalty: Twenty years in prison, forfeiture, restitution, and $250,000 fine

Wire Fraud—Title 18, U.S.C., Section 1343

Maximum penalty: Twenty years in prison, forfeiture, restitution, and $250,000 fine

Conspiracy—Title 18, U.S.C., Section 371

Maximum penalty: Five years in prison, and $250,000 fine

Operation of Unlicensed Money Transmitting Business—Title 18, U.S.C., Section 1960

Maximum penalty: Five years in prison, forfeiture, and $250,000 fine

Money Laundering Conspiracy—Title 18, U.S.C., Section 1956(h)

Maximum penalty: Twenty years in prison, forfeiture, and $250,000 fine

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/founder-fraudulent-cryp...

I'm not sure what you expected. If operating a Ponzi scheme didn't involve doing anything illegal, it'd be legal.

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