First of all, people in the US were able to play online poker for years without any trouble.  What changed is that the US made it illegal for people to help transfer money for US citizens for the purposes of gambling.

That meant that you couldn't transfer money from your bank account (in the US) to a poker site directly, because in order for that to happen you had to do business in the US, and that basically made it impossible for regular people to play.

Secondly, the US government may get involved if people are being actively scammed (ala pirateat40) and they may try to get someone extradited. On the other hand, if all they did was issue securities that were legal in their country it seems unlikely they would care.

All of this legal theorizing about securities registration applies equally to Freidcat and ASICMiner. Are the people in here really claiming that the US government is going to hunt down Freidcat and try to prosecute him for issuing unregistered securities?

Those legal concerns apply equally to all bitcoin stocks, including ASICMiner, as well as ActiveMining (which at even greater risk given the fact that they're US based) - Those legal issues were the same before anyone ever heard of Labcoin, and they were a background issue.  Everyone understood them (or should have) when they bought the shares.

Yet, suddenly everyone is complaining about this stock in particular because it isn't performing well. If the price haddn't tanked I doubt you'd see nearly as much speculation about it.

Either way, assuming that US law applies to everyone around the world and that the SEC has global jurisdiction is just ridiculous.