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Comment by shawnee_ | Hacker News Reader

... where people could throw pocket change on valuation wagers.

We never had any intention of operating in a regulated industry, nor do we have the resources required to do so.

"Oh, it was just for shits and giggles" ... when there's real money involved?

A peek at archive.org shows the sales pitch at the time of the SEC traffic / tracked visits. I'm not seeing anything about "for entertainment purposes only" here:

The mission of Sand Hill Exchange is to democratize startup investment.We believe the startup ecosystem benefits when everybody can participate in startup growth. Our vision is to extend the power of public markets to private companies.

[source: https://web.archive.org/web/20150315015146/http://sandhill.e...]

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I love this bit, "Sand Hill Exchange is backed by notable Silicon Valley investors, providing sufficient capital to guarantee deposits."

Yet, in a comment in this thread, a $20,000 fine was financially ruinous.

I hope they immediately refunded everyone their BTC, this is how 'innocent' people end up running Ponzi schemes.

They said that they had $10k in the bank; $1.5k had been 'invested'; and the fine is $20k. So... yes?

$10k in the bank is hardly "Sand Hill Exchange is backed by notable Silicon Valley investors, providing sufficient capital to guarantee deposits."

Because they got fined $20k, and now they have no backing for the $1.5k of deposits they have taken.

If you squint you can see that they may have felt it was legal to host investo-gambling if they weren't making and profit directly tied to trade activity.

Most of our users at the time we got investigated were physically located in the same office space as us. We gave them a printout with the league rules and fielded questions in person. Based on their feedback and questions, we were updating our FAQs and peripheral pages.

The archive.org will show most of our content pages were in a permanent state of flux -- the only constant page was our terms of service, which quite clearly called us a "fantasy contest"

But c'mon, it's not a fantasy contest if people are putting up real money, even though they're not buying the actual stock certificates. This is clueless to the point of being obtuse.

Also, you were promoting it publicly on at least one occasion a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9642186

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