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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

> Well, it is something of a he said/she said between Coinbase and the SEC.

Not really. The law has been exactly the same since the 1940s. Apparently though Coinbase has decided to go all in on SBF's strategy of pretending to be too dumb to understand the law.

Coinbase arguing that they should be allowed to sell illegal unregistered securities because the SEC said they could sell securities is like CVS arguing that should be allowed to sell cocaine because the government told them they could be a drug store.

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Well the SEC certainly has one point of view.

Unfortunately the CFTC has another view and they both can’t be right so which part of the federal governance applies here?

https://www.cftc.gov/digitalassets/index.htm

This ambiguity is why clarity is needed. In the famous words of Matt Levine everything is securities fraud.

It seems obvious that some legal clarity is actually required here.

> Unfortunately the CFTC has another view and they both can’t be right

Of course they can. Whether something is a commodity has absolutely nothing to do with whether something is a security. They are completely orthogonal concepts.

Wait, what? I thought a commodity was corn and a security was stock and everything in this discussion was about arguing which it was closer to.

What is a commodity then?

The above is obviously false. This is why you should not learn about finance and economics on HN, many users have no idea what they write. Something is either a security or a commodity, these are legal terms and treated differently by law. The status may be undermined but it can not be both.

Why can't they both be right? Futures aren't securities except in certain cases, and if bitcoin is a currency then bitcoin futures wouldn't be under SEC jurisdiction.

“Commodity” is shorthand for “non-security commodity” in CFTC-speak.

Do they trade commodities or contracts to deliver commodities?

Or Nasdaq claiming that moving orders from paper ledgers to computers means they’re no longer a securities exchange. Because reasons.

Reminder: One of the founders, and longtime chairman of the NASDAQ was one Bernie L. Madoff.

I remember that guy -- he's the one who also pioneered PFOF (pay for order flow).

I thought SBF's strategy was that everybody other than him is too dumb to understand the law.

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