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Comment by mahyarm | Hacker News Reader

So why create a new bitcoin derivative to do something like creating a divisible bearer reddit stock certificate held in trust vs. something like open transactions or a webservice? Especially since it would be a relatively small network easily taken over by some large mining pool if it ever became useful. Your prone to the US legal system requirements in this case since I'm guessing reddit is a US corp.

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Had I been consulted before "reddit is issuing shares on a cryptocurrency" was announced, I would have suggested doing something with less legal headaches first. It would take a $100 billion dollar company, much larger than reddit, to actually make such a project legally possible.

Could you go into detail what the major legal hurdles were in this case?

Issuing shares to millions of people would have made reddit a public company. reddit did not want to be a public company. This is a contradiction.

I did not realize Reddit Notes (crypto or not) are supposed to be "shares" of anything? Much less shares of Reddit as a company.

It's been said many times since the beginning, including in this article:

>Announced in September 2014 as part of a fundraising round that raised $50m from VC firms including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, Redditcoin was a key part of an audacious plan by Wong to give part of the company’s equity back to users.

>Wong wrote in a blogpost: “The investors in this round have proposed to give 10% of their shares back to the community, in recognition of the central role the community plays in Reddit’s ongoing success.”

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