I responded on Medium about Kik’s case with the SEC:
KIK’s sale of KIN tokens took steps to avoid classification as a regulated sale of securities: […]
Thanks for bullet pointing the key differentiating facts of Kik’s case which I was unaware of.
The Supreme Court has affirmed numerous times that the Howey test is central, overrides any obfuscations of the economic reality, and that if there’s an implied investment contract defined by a centralized party securing value in exchange for an expectation of increase in value for those so secured, then it’s a security regulated by Securities Act so as to “protect investors” from improper disclosure such as forward looking FOMO, from manipulation schemes, insider trading, etc..
That’s the sugarcoated justification to feed the snowflake fantasy of the enslaved plebs. Yet EOS received only a $40m wrist slap because … because (and the following are contemplated as speculative inquiry not statements of proven fact) ostensibly for one it was a common practice for ICO issuers to buy the auctions from themselves to drive FOMO and manipulate pricing, thus may not have actually raised $billions? And ostensibly because they lawyered up and Brock Pierce et al’s affiliations? Because the SEC is in Goldman Sachs’ back pocket? (see the section Footnotes in the following blog)
In reality as all things related to Weberian authority such as government and law, securities (and nearly all) regulation is a scam enabling those in control to enslave the sheepeople with a monopoly or beneficial position over IPOs, markets, investment, etc..
In short, if the SEC wins, the “Main Street” investors holding KIN lose.
The SEC already has a perception problem. No one denies that protecting the “Main Street” investor and overseeing orderly markets is a very worthwhile goal. The problem is that in pursuing that goal, the SEC has created a perception that they are against innovation.I posit that witless Millennial snowflake “innovation” delusion will soon evaporate and the SEC will be bolstered by 1000s (10,000s?) of angry FOMO fools who lost it all and perhaps begging the government to do something:
We have echoes of the development of peer-to-peer music sharing. That new technology also disrupted the established methods. At the height of folly, the RIAA[7] brought over two hundred actions against otherwise law-abiding individuals, in many cases seeking tens of thousands of Dollars as punitive damages for very limited copyright violations. Although on the facts most of those cases did involve violations, pursuit of those actions was obviously on the edge of ridiculous. We now have new business models in respect of music distribution.
Nothing was disrupted. The powerful are back in control of content sales and taking 99% of the wealth. Netflix, Disney, Medium, Apple, Spotify, Google, Amazon, etc…
Your expected resolution is the inviolable power-law distribution of wealth and control:
The activity gets sucked back into the paradigm of regulatory, tax, and other forms of recapture per the Weberian definition of authority being a monopoly on violence. Our masters are tending to us their flock of sheepeople and preventing their flock from unnecessary “wasting” resources on “irrelevant” personal desires.
These damned facts are verboten in the ivory propaganda halls of universities.
Disclaimer: I’m a non-erudite, impoverished aging hobo, formerly a hacker, not an attorney, have no credentials, not very smart, and my retired father who graduated top of his J.D. class was a division head attorney then general counsel for the major oil companies and afaik specialized in contract and environmental law. My only credentials are my father’s and Isaac Shelby’s genetics, lol.
Follows are alternative links for my Steemit blogs cited above:
RE: A Utility Token is a Unicorn