Thank you, nutildah, for not escalating this spat further downhill. I know my habit of climbing up the mountains on the horizon, and looking beyond them to see what might be coming, does make me a grade-A oddball around here. But I can tell you, and everyone else, that I'm worried about the securities regulators deciding that they do indeed have the prior authority to regulate the Asset Exchange.

To be honest, I bought the dead-tree version of Ontario's securities-law regime (3,400+ pages!) because I'm planning to pick through the entire thing (!!) to find one or more serviceable loopholes. What got the worry-wart app in my head running was definition (i): "any profit-sharing agreement or certificate." That's actually broader than, say, "any certificate or agreement evincing partial ownership in a company."

If (i) were the latter, feeshares would be safely out of scope. As it stands, though, feeshares might not be safely out of the Ontario regulators' purview.

The trouble with a complex basket of a law like the securities law is:

- if you want to find out what you can't do, it's a relatively easy chore. All you need is little more than a skim-through of the definitions and an "Executive Summary" of the whole thing.
- But...if you want to find out what you can do, you have to read through the Whole. Damned. Thing. And you have to read through it carefully (i.e., more than once.) And, for many intriguing loopholes, you have to read even more - like going through earlier decisions by the regulators in related matters to get a feel for what they consider "reasonable" when they come across a grey area.

No wonder most securities lawyers live in fancy homes...

Speaking of securities lawyers, I can see myself forking over four figures' worth of fiat some day to a real one in exchange for a legal opinion clarifying the legal status of the Asset Exchange. That's part o' my responsibilities as head dev for NFD, but what I find - whether though reading, paying or scrounging in the professor circuit - I will share freely and openly with the Nxt community. Fact is: with respect to regulatory matters, we're all in this together - so it's actually in my interest to share what I get with the Nxt community.

But this matter, at the moment, is a long-term beyond-the-horizon worry - so I'm quite content to let it drop and revert to shutting my trap.