SEC Formally Sues Cryptocurrency Company Ripple (axios.com) 40
U.S. securities regulators on Tuesday sued cryptocurrency giant Ripple, and both its CEO and executive chairman, for allegedly selling over $1.3 billion in unregistered securities. Axios reports: Ripple on Monday had publicly disclosed that the lawsuit was to be filed imminently, and said it does not believe its tokens needed to be registered. XRP, the cryptocurrency created by Ripple in 2012, has the crypto industry's third-largest market cap at around $22 billion, behind only Bitcoin and Ether. In a separate article, Axios' Dan Primack writes that this lawsuit "could put a chill on some crypto industry investment, as Ripple has no interest in settling fast and moving on." He adds: "It also could mildly complicate the upcoming IPO for Coinbase, where XRP-to-dollar activity made up 15% of trading volume over the past 30 days (per Nomics)."
One word.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Not Trustless = A Security (Score:1)
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In a democracy, that's the fault of voters who thinks regulation for large finance companies will affect them when they get their lottery winnings.
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ETH is not centralized. At all. Nor are many, many other tokens. Stop spreading FUD.
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Most decentralized tokens have premines. Boohoo.
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ETH's price of $578 as of this posting would like a word with you. It is far from dead.
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The node/miner configuration tells you whether or not the coin is decentralized. You're a hopeless Bitcoin maximalist and will never listen to reason.
XRP is centralized since it does not farm out txn verification to miners, nor does it rely on node operators.
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As much as I dislike XRP, it won't help XRP holders much. They'll be out a lot of dosh unless they can unload their bags and move into a different token.
The real problem here is that exchanges which specialized in actual cryptocurrency allowed XRP to co-exist with other tokens for years, despite XRP tokens being issued by a corporation (Ripple) that held absolute control over their network. The exchanges should have known better than to traffic in anything that wasn't even remotely decentralized.
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If I remember correctly, the goal is for XRP to be decentralized "some day", the protocol allows it but they just haven't actually gone through with it yet. Not sure what they are waiting for, perhaps this lawsuit will finally make it happen. ("See, we were planning to do this all along!")
Kind of interesting to see, though, how the government has effectively halved the value of XRP in order to protect those poor innocent investors who are holding XRP.
From Wikipedia (Score:2)
From Wikipedia:
"Released in 2012, Ripple is built upon a distributed open source protocol, and supports tokens representing fiat currency, cryptocurrency, commodities, or other units of value such as frequent flier miles or mobile minutes"
Sounds like they are selling securities but courts are complicated.
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> Sounds like they are selling securities but courts are complicated.
Ripple doesn't sell any securities. Other people can use their network to represent anything they want, from camels to oil tankers to popcorn.
XRP's are the unit of accounting and they have a hard limit. Some people think they have value that is worth exchanging fiat for.
The real story is Ripple obsoletes much of the current international banking system and may countries' banks are using it to transmit information representing their cu
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Re:Yeah, fuck the SEC (Score:4, Interesting)
The difference is simple, he failed to pay brib, er protection mo, er campaign contributions to the right 'representatives.'
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They did the same shit when the Clinton Administration shook down Microsoft. Was Microsoft certainly guilty? Yes. Was it politically motivated. Also yes. They had never engaged in lobbying. As soon as the next campaign cycle they started paying the right people and the Bush administration settled.
There is a reasonable middle-ground here.
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What is the difference between a 'security'
The article specifically mentions "unregistered securities", not just plain "securities". Did you take that into account?
At what point does my imaginary piece of copyrighted code or data become a security
Ain't no one worth $22billion from doing that, and ain't no one selling $1.3billion doing that. If you could, you would want regulators to look into that to make sure there weren't shenanigans going on because that is a lot of money to move around that could fuck up the economy if something goes wrong and it Ripples out to the rest of the economy,
prevent upstarts from breaking in
$22 billion market cap and $1.3 billion in
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Lets pretend for a moment that I am a software company and I am dealing in the exchange of software volume licenses and offering buy backs and exchanges. At what point does my imaginary piece of copyrighted code or data become a security?
At the point when you securitize. It... that means chopping up the ownership interest of your asset into units and selling those units as transferrable shares of the ownership in the asset, such as your code, or the copyrights to your code, rather.
See, definitions:
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What is the difference between a 'security' such as a stock or bond or some commodity being brokered and say a 'software license'?
A Security is a fungible and tradable financial instrument used to raise capital in public and private markets.
A share of stock is an usually an equity share in a business that entitles one to both a share of profits and a say in the company.
A bond is a fixed income instrument that represents a loan made by an investor to a borrower (typically corporate or governmental)
A software license is a contractual agreement between one and the owner of a software program that allows one to do certain things that
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I know Brad Garlinghouse, he is a good man, one of the damn few and fine CEOs I have had the pleasure of knowing. What this tells me is not that Brad is any more of a criminal than any other capitalist
Being a good person and a great CEO won't stop someone from failing to recognize and comply with regulatory requirements. Simple ignorance will do that quite well. I have seen people get in trouble with regulatory agencies because they started off doing one thing and added other things over time resulting that resulted in accidentally having something they added having been previously banned by regulators of the first thing they were doing.
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Re: And in other news.. (Score:2)
Other than cryptocurrencies, howe ever galactically revolting their existence might be, Beanie Babies got an actual physical worth.
As a wise person once said: "Reality is that, which, if you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.".
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Banning Ripple? (Score:2)
It's the big one! Can you hear that Elisabeth?
. . .
If the coins don' look like gorilla cookies, I'm gonna be disappointed.
No soup for you! (Score:3)
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XRP is going down (Score:2)
https://www.coingecko.com/en/c... [coingecko.com]
Ripple? (Score:2)
I was going to start a "Cryptocurrency Company" but I couldn't decide whether to call it Olde English or Mad Dog 20-20.
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