Quote from: chryspano on September 04, 2017, 02:31:28 PM

Quote from: smooth on September 04, 2017, 09:55:12 AM

Where is the blog post stating this was a pre-planned scheme to raise money from investors to pay for development?

Here are hundrends of them https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=159.0

Alts, sure, maybe some of them are also disguised investment schemes.

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I can't see how coins like Litecoin or anything else, falls under a different category, maybe the "Chinese guy" that launched/created Litecoin will get away because he didn't use any of his "premined" coins for development, lol Grin

or maybe because he kept the "development part" a secret, I'm sure they will ignore him! Cheesy

He didn't have any premined coins nor did he deliberately act to suppress access and participation by other miners so as to accumulate some (or maybe he did, but at least he didn't admit it; then proving it becomes a more significant issue). Even if he did, the magnitude would be tiny. Litecoin and all of its miners has not even by now years later mined as large a share of its coins as Steem's developers did in the first week. The facts are enormously different not only in magnitude but to the extent that magnitude difference is so large it clearly becomes a potential difference in kind.

At some point this becomes frankly laughable. If the devs can withholding information and obfuscate things for a week such that they can mine most of the coins, can they do that in a day? An hour? How about a millisecond of "mining"? At what point does it become a de facto premine/ICO?

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Quote from: smooth on September 04, 2017, 09:55:12 AM

In fact it doesn't even raise money for development. One of the big issues with BTC has always been how to pay for development.

That's only one "interpretation", my intepretation is that the btc development is paid by the success of btc and by those that buy btc.

If you look back in the history of Bitcoin you will see that there was indeed discussion along the lines of whether that could make it an illegal security but it seems that history (and the SEC, and the SEC's non-US counterparts) has passed by that interpretation and concluded in the negative.

Once you introduce different facts into the scenario you reopen the question. Steem's facts are quite different, including the documented intent and actions of its creators.