The SEC would have to prove NXT was shares. As has been pointed out shares don't get trade as currency. Since soon millions of NXT will be traded as currency, then how is your SEC lawyer friend going to make his case.
Your argument is a stretch at best. Eriks shares were never used as currency.
Just because you don't think it's a currency does mean its not.
The case against currency IPOs is weak at best.
So if Eric issued his shares as colored coins he would have been OK? You're telling me that an individual is free to sell shares to the public as long as he calls them coins and as long as those "coins" can be used as currency?
I am genuinely interested because it would be useful for a start-up company to issue colored-coins to raise money for product development, and then issue dividends directly to those colored coins. The colored coins could be traded like regular bitcoins, so they would be "currency" in that sense (but really the colored coins represent shares).
I don't think that would fly with the SEC. And for the very same reasons, I also think the Nxt launch would be considered illegal by the SEC as well. In fact, I think earning money by "staking/minting/forging" could be deemed unlawful without SEC registration because this is akin to dividends issued to shareholders (and PoS supporters say this themselves) which falls under SEC jurisdiction.
So IRS says Bitcoin is property in black and white but when you inject a little color into them they've gone full circle from currency to shares?
Do you feel "premined" proof-of-burn distributed currencies like counterparty would fall under team america world police- securities division purview?