at the same time SEC don't tell them what to do or not? Such a weird agency
Besides, it's not the SEC's job to give free legal consultation. Nowhere in our legal system does the government have an obligation to send experts to consult with violators to help them stop violating the law. These companies have lawyers who are supposed to keep them in compliance.
(Conbase was a typo, but I'll leave it.)
"Free"? They are literally funded with tax money. They work for citizens and companies. It's their literal job.
It's like saying "you can not ask a policeman about if you can use this kind of trailer on your car, he is not paid for that advice"
Their job is to find some portion of things that are definitely illegal. They don't need to have comprehensive knowledge of the law, just enough to know that the things they are enforcing against are definitely illegal.
If you're asking the police whether something you're doing is definitely legal, you're asking the wrong person.
In this case, from what I've seen, SEC can not even say what is "definietly illegal" like you say. So they can not be trusted
Coinbase hired expensive lawyers who told them "we think if you do it this way it's not a crime", the SEC disagrees, and it's up to the courts who is correct.
Arguably the SEC doesn't actually make the rules, and is only tasked with enforcing them, and thus they can't actually give advice on the law because their interpretation of the law might not be correct!
anyhow, then they can of course give you advice what NOT to do, and will do. Otherwise, as i said, how can they enforce something unless they know about it? I don't even get your point, it honestly sound quite stupid ?
>Arguably the SEC doesn't actually make the rules,
Sure, but they should at least tell which rules they follow? I don't get how so many people on HN seem to favour SEC here, a community of programmers who use logic at work
>Rather than initiate new rulemaking, Chair Gensler has repeatedly stated through speeches and testimony that the vast majority of digital tokens are securities, and has asked issuers and exchanges that offer, sell, and trade them to come in and register. We disagree that the majority of digital assets are securities. For those digital assets that are securities, registration under the current rules is, for many market participants, either not possible or not economically viable given the associated and unnecessary compliance burdens. Additionally, when existing regulations are unworkable, some market participants may be less willing to invest the resources necessary to follow the rules. Failure to resolve these shortcomings leaves investors unprotected due to a lack of regulatory clarity, prevents market participants from leveraging the efficiencies new technology can offer, and materially impairs capital formation in the blockchain technologies that underlie digital assets. This is wholly inconsistent with the SEC’s mission.
https://assets.ctfassets.net/c5bd0wqjc7v0/5NRidtW8lvwVEfSHpn...
The SEC has been clear that most cryptocurrencies are securities and must be registered. Coinbase was well aware of this. There is no confusion and no lack of clarity. Coinbase just doesn't like the rules.
This is all hypothetical, since the SEC has given clear guidance for years. Coinbase ignored this guidance because they didn't like it.
How should this "outside council" learn the rules, if they can not ask the ones making or ruling with them? You are just shifting the problem down one notch
>since the SEC has given clear guidance for years
So Coinbase is lying about no guidance?
I do agree that things should be this way. In some countries, it is much more clear. In the US, it is very much not like this. Nobody can list everything that is unlawful. You can only pay for opinions.
It sucks, but it's not some unique quirk or the SEC or whatever.
Whats the law book for then?
The CFTC and SEC don't actually have to agree about something for you to be found guilty of a crime.
This is not a new problem, nor a difficult one.
Please point out a single time where Gensler makes a claim even remotely similar to this. The SEC does literally everything else except for giving guidance on which cryptocurrencies are securities.
The point of overturning Chevron is entirely to handicap the government in it's ability to regulate anything.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/sorry-crypto-world-sec-isnt-ba...
It acts like a security, smells like a security, trades like a security, but it's NOT A SECURITY, so give me new laws for this thing I won't define!
Do you think, perhaps, that the SEC not providing answers is just allowing more time (rope) for the crypto co's to hang themselves with?
Separately, yes, there are also instances of straight-up corruption. It's totally divorced from reality to suggest that collaboration is "only because" of corruption though.
NIH researchers (and their funders, US taxpayers) should be getting paid more in royalties from commercialized research.
Similarly, if your actual goal is to reduce the occurrences of "bad behaviors" (which is presumably the whole point of creating these rules to begin with), then it doesn't seem that unreasonable to have someone try to lay it out clearly, right? If for no other reason than maybe a bunch of people negatively affected by these behaviors would have been spared since there wouldn't have been this grey area to operate in for so long? That's who we're ultimately doing this for, right? The public that is hurt by securities that are misrepresented? Now, if your goal is to punish people, then yes, the current system makes more sense.
The problem is that a whole generation of wannabe start-up bros, starting with Uber the latest, just cannot be bother with learning and respecting rules it seems. Most of those flog to crypto lately.
To separate this from the emotionally-charged subject for a second: just look at Google vs. Oracle. It took over a decade to decide whether APIs are covered by copyright or not. And the reality is that that was closer to a coin toss than any of us would like to admit, since it was trying to apply a law that in no way imagined something like APIs to APIs, and relied heavily on the judge/etc being able to wrap their heads around it. The verdict could have easily gone the other way. When it comes to how regulations apply to new technologies, the uncomfortable truth is that there is no "objective truth" to the law, and unfortunately comes down more to how much money the parties throw at the problem and legal process. I am sure on the Oracle side there were plenty of people talking just like you: "these people don't respect copyright and flagrantly copy APIs that are obviously protected IP and they think just because they're in hippy open source land the law doesn't apply to them". The reality is that until the verdict, there effectively was no rule around copyright and APIs.
For an opposite example: look at the famous case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty (1980). The patent agency rejected an application for a genetically engineered bacteria that could break down oil, saying you can't patent living organisms. It went to the Supreme Court, that decided 5-4 that they could. Are you going to sit here and tell me this was obvious from the beginning? Given that the patent agency had the opposite opinion than the Supreme Court, and that the Supreme Court was basically split 50/50 on the decision? Do we think they made the right decision given no background in biology? Do we think Chakrabarty was a wannabe biology bro that didn't care about the law, given that almost every lawyer at the time would have told you was commonly accepted did not allow patenting living organisms?
* > tonsbof law firms, counsultants and experts out there explaining the rules and how to follow them.*
Hopefully you see now that a ton of those law firms are out there telling you "I think we can win on this, it has happened many times before, and the reality is that law really isn't written until we make our case".
The regulations are designed to protected the general public from companies doing the wrong thing in the name of profit even when the intentions of the people running those companies are good. It's a check on the dark side of capitalism. Are sometimes those rules too complicated or too overbearing? Yes! Are there also people out there just to improve that? Yes, and some of them work in the regulatory agencies!
It's a messy, frustrating process that on the whole seems to be doing a decent job. Most people in US have access to clean water, generally don't have to worry about tainted Advil, or worry their life savings are going to evaporate by just storing it in a bank.
I don't know enough about the specifics of the Coinbase suit yet, but the crypto industry in general seems an awful like the banking industry of the 1800s and early 1900s in the US. During that time there were plenty of companies and people doing the right thing, but there were enough bad actors that something needed to be done. The SEC was born.
This is very likely fallout from FTX, but not because of some nefarious plot against crypto but rather the SEC realized there is a financial sector they need to focus on more closely. A SEC lawsuit is also a starting point for a serious discussion, not a criminal indictment. If the SEC believes there has been criminal behavior, they refer that to the DoJ. The likely outcome if Coinbase has been trying to do the right thing is some sort of settlement (fine) + direction on what to do differently. Then Coinbase will continue on like normal with whatever changes the SEC wanted.
So again, what shall the SEC enforce exactly? If you don't see the endgame here ...
I assume you aren't asking that person to "explain" all of securities law in a HN comment
explicitly saying they are is not necessary for them to be.
But when it actually comes time for court filings, which are what really matter, they instead acknowledge that they know exactly what the rules are, but that they "disagree". And why do they disagree? "because for numerous tokens, regulation would require undue effort or not be financially viable [for Coinbase]".
"Your rules are not profitable for us", essentially.
You could say that the conclusion is then that it’s all illegal full stop and that all cryptocurrency related businesses in the US should cease operations immediately. But if that’s the case, you’d hope that would be clearly expressed somewhere. Right now, the rules (or rather, the probabilities of facing adverse legal action) are being inferred after the fact by analysing patterns of enforcement action.
They also haven't been clear or consistent.