Quote from: NewLiberty on March 11, 2014, 05:02:40 PM

Quote from: Clobered09 on March 11, 2014, 04:17:12 PM

Quote from: Viceroy on May 27, 2013, 06:19:09 PM

As a small business-person you are NOT ALLOWED to ask anyone in public for funding. It's against the law. I cannot say to anyone in this or any other forum something like: "hey I want to borrow bitcoins from you and I'll pay you back with interest". To do that is ILLEGAL.

This is inaccurate. Privately negotiated lending does not have to be registered per se in the US, even if the initial solicitation is public, so long as it doesn't otherwise qualify as a security under the '33 and '34 acts. The catch-all in the '33 acts definition of "security," the investment contract, is not broad enough to cover private non-standardized lending (as broad as it is).

There are exceptions to each of the ANYONE blanket statements made in the OP.
Some but not all business transactions fall within these regulatory governance parameters.
Most private business transactions are just that.

Well yes, there are always exceptions and OPs statement would have been overly-broad and inaccurate even if he had said it exclusively about equity funding. That said, what I was trying to point out was that when it comes to raising capital, equity financing by default creates a security, while debt financing does not (it can, it just doesn't do it by default). Registration requirements for offerings and sales apply to all securities unless explicitly exempted, so it's probably fair to say "As a small business-person you are not allowed to ask anyone in public for equity funding" even though there are some very unique types of equity funding that don't create securities and there are some equity securities that are explicitly exempt, because as a general rule that's correct. With debt financing, registration requirements are the exception rather than the rule, and so saying it about borrowing with interest is flat wrong, it's nether absolutely true nor even generally true, only sometimes true.