All offers were made prior to FinCEN guidance regarding Bitcoin, were made in good faith, and were intended exactly as stated on the site -- to be traded as an educational and entertaining exercise. Oddly enough, were I to willy-nilly shut them down now, I can be almost certain that some people WOULD hold me responsible for their losses. Thus the FinCEN guidance puts me in a catch-22 with the SEC and there are lawyers working on figuring this out. However, if you have lost USD on any of these;
Burnside, you have this odd patchwork of Securities law understanding, I thought you would get this resolved with your lawyers but some of the stuff you say just doesn't make any sense regarding the inevitable dilemma you are in.
the SEC doesn't care about FinCEN, they care that you are offering securities, unregistered securities
that have not applied for an exemption. The SEC does not (technically) judge the merit of an investment, they only look to see if the right amount of disclosure is taking place.
it doesn't matter that your registration is in belize, they will tell an administrative law judge (a rent-a-judge who works in the sec building) that what you do is affecting interstate commerce and that will give them federal jurisdiction and enough rationalization for the federal judge to sign the "emergency asset injunction" which is a court order to freeze all applicable assets, including your computers, wallets, etc under penalty of contempt of court.
You can be using a myriad of disclaimers and plausible deniability to get around this. Given that your exchange does not have the capabilities to verify that customers are american citizens.
Anyway, nobody panic. we can work with the SEC, but it would be so much easier if your computers were not in the united states, to go along with your disclaimers.