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Comment by xalava | Hacker News Reader

The SEC has been consistently saying that most crytoassets were securities. The only acknowledged exception, for which it had contradictory statements, is if a protocol is "sufficiently decentralized" such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.[1]

On the IPO, the registration is independant from such pursuits as the SEC raised during their approval. [2]

That said, there would have been better course of action to protect consumers, such as establishing an appropriate regulatory framework, but I may be too European.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/speech-hinman-061418

[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679788/000000000020...

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The SEC saying it is very different from a court saying it. The executive branch can say anything it wants to, but it's the judicial branch's job to interpret the law.

And now the SEC is going to court, what more do you want?

The outcome of the court case.

Are you concerned there might be some settlement instead?

Important nit: they ruled Ethereum was a security, as the initial issuance was at least partially a pre-sale. They just decided in that one case to explicitly not go after Ethereum. The only non-security exception they've named was bitcoin.

Which seems like kind of an arbitrary distinction anyway.

Suppose you create a new coin under similar circumstances as Bitcoin. No pre-mine. But it's a new coin and nobody cares about it, so nobody is mining it, so you can go mine it yourself and get all the block rewards for a while. Then once you have a lot of it you go about promoting the coin and developing the technology which causes it to be worth something.

In theory the difference is that anybody else could have mined the coin from the first day too, but at that point nobody else had any reason to think it would ever be worth anything.

If you're looking for consistency and logic in regulator rulings, I'm afraid you're going to be left wanting.

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