I’m not clear if you also intended your reasoning as quoted to also apply to the proposed idea wherein a company could take investment in exchange for shares which are securities. Then launch a decentralized ledger with a pre-mine but never sell those pre-mined tokens until it had completed all its managerial efforts. It is suggested that the said tokens would not be investment securities when sold, because there is no ongoing development by the issuer after an investor buys them. So it side-steps the Howey Test. Of course the shares remain securities, but the tokens are not. The company can then distribute the dividends to the shareholders. It is a different structure, because the investors in the shares get dividend income instead of capital gains. The investors in the shares never receive tokens.

Note the company could award some of those tokens for onboarding, because the individual onboarding does not pay anything to the issuer, thus there is no investment contract. The FinCEN implications of this idea were also analysed at the blog.

So this is how to redo Steem 100% legal.

This idea is obviously donated to the community as open source. With the ICO paradigm threatened, it seemed like it was an important juncture to share an idea that was originally intended to be proprietary until launch, so the community has another way to finance development.

The other legal model is proof-of-work distribution and donations for development. But then there is no way to do onboarding. Proof-of-work distribution doesn’t distribute tokens broadly. The tokens stay stuck within the same small group of nerds, professional miners, and eventually the capitalists (and their bankster financiers) who control the only two ASIC foundries in the world. If we want to disrupt the centralized Internet (e.g. Redditard, SuckerBook, Wankerpedia, GitHo, YouTurd, etc), we must distribute the token more widely than nerds with GPUs.