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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

This blog has more details: https://medium.com/@eiaine/how-startup-growth-hacks-resulted...

It's a funny read....

Another thing I learned: If you’re gonna try to make yourself look like a legitimate financial institution, you’ll be prosecuted like a legitimate financial institution. And when that happens, you sure as shit better have the legal resources of a legitimate financial institution.

The Commission accused us of acting as unregistered broker-dealers, selling security-based swaps, offering swaps on an unregistered securities exchange.

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And this:

"Without a corporate barrier to protect us, the penalty was personal. How high would the fine go if we did not settle?"

Doing this without an incorporated company is just clown shoes. Surely they must have had one, but a quick skim of their TOS doesn't reveal a company name or Doing Business As entity. I don't understand why an SEC fine would be against the people and not the entity.

> I don't understand why an SEC fine would be against the people and not the entity.

Are you sure that it's really not clown shoes? I mean, ordinarily I'd agree that surely no one would be crazy enough to run a securities exchange without incorporating, but the quote you linked from their post seems to imply otherwise.

It's possible. Years ago I knew a few security folks who were moonlighting as independent security consultants. They did an assessment of a financial institution, caused some downtime, and there was a lawsuit. Turns out they hadn't incorporated and it was pretty terrible for them.

Let this be a lesson. Always Always Alway create a business entity. Separation == protection

The best is this blog post: http://sandhill.exchange/blog/sec-analysis

In total, these [U.S. Security and Exchange Commission] users have spent 64 hours, 6 minutes, 26 seconds (and counting!) engaging with our site between March 10 and May 14. Over 96 hours if you include time on the blog and the founder’s personal website. This is more time than our team spent building the damn web page. We have clearly achieved product-market fit with this demographic.

That blog entry is now gone, replaced with a message that says "Censored :(" and a rip off of the Bloomberg Business 404 animation.

Google cache still has the blog entry [1].

Their Medium article also has been replaced with a message claiming it was censored. Anyone know if they were really censored (e.g., had these taken down against their will, or were ordered to take them down against their will by someone they had to obey), or did they just realize how bad these made them look, and are trying to retract them and possibly using the censored claim to make it look less self-incriminating?

[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3MUEzNa...

Their lawyers probably read the article and shit bricks. Admitting that all their financial data was fake ... jeezus is there anything the SEC hates more than people presenting false financial performance?

The SEC could have read that too, and what they thought was a another prediction market they realized was an attempt to defraud users because to quote them, "Nobody wants to play in a market with zero users, we realized. So we gave participants the illusion of liquidity."

SnapShillBot on /r/buttcoin got a copy of the Medium post: https://archive.is/DOVJZ

I got an archive of the "SEC-analysis" post: https://archive.is/qVNUQ

+1 this was also quite funny: http://sandhill.exchange/blog/sec-analysis

Takes a certain amount of arrogance or cluelessness to see a bunch of visits from the SEC and decide they're looking for jobs or otherwise impressed with your "engagement".

Pretty sure that's the joke...

That article was published today. I'm guessing this is just a cheeky swat back at the SEC. Especially since the original article prefaces the link with "Your tax dollars at work."

Oh, wow. Takes a lot of cluelessness to not notice it was a joke.

A "prediction market" letting you gamble Bitcoin gets cluebatted hard by the SEC. These bozos weren't even incorporated. Of course, it's just class discrimination by the financiers, and resentment of "Startup Growth Hacks".

The writeup on Medium is gone now. It is replaced with the text "censored ☹". Google cache still has it [1].

[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lZJ66p_...

Facebook says, “Move Fast and Break Things.”

I don't think that Facebook meant to break "things" like big time securities laws (without even consulting a lawyer or, presumably, even incorporating the business). Maybe no one has done it before because it's illegal--not because it's so innovative.

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