Quote from: Este Nuno on September 03, 2014, 06:14:05 PM

Quote from: aminorex on September 03, 2014, 05:32:12 PM

Quote from: NewLiberty on September 03, 2014, 04:20:01 PM

Poloniex is registered with USA FINCen nationally as an MSB in the state of Montana.
If they stay in compliance, and don't get in hot water with the SEC, they should be OK unless the legal landscape changes.

True. But I think the "ICO" is very clearly in violation of the law. This creates a liability when they are sued by investors who lose money as a result.

Well, it's almost certainly not "clearly" in violation of the law considering it's uncharted territory in general. I'm not qualified to argue the point, so I won't. But I think you would probably agree that it's a complex subject that would end up resulting in at a minimum serious debate between pro-freedom legal minds and those of the government(who might not even consider such offerings an issue).

The closest thing that we've seen thus far is Erik Voorhees settling his case with the SEC after he sold his fully functioning company via shares on MPEX. The SEC very likely wasn't 100% sure they would be able to win in court considering he sold SatoshiDICE for something like 13 million dollars at the time, yet settled with the SEC for $50,000 if I remember correctly. And the only similarity here is that the shares were bought with cryptocurrency. The offering itself wasn't a cryptocurrency, unlike Qibucks which is.

I don't think you can really compare decentralised cryptocurrency offering to securities, but I might be wrong about that and perhaps the SEC does see it that way. My gut feeling is that they don't, but Poloniex's lawyers will be the final word on this, and I hope things will continue as usual in our community without the ever present gaze of the SEC or any other governmental agency disrupting what's being built.

There have been several IPO/ICOs already. QBK is just a recent one. There was LCL (Limecoin Lite), XBC (Bitcoin Plus), MIL (Millennium coin now), as well as those mining shares if they count. People definitely lost money on them (the IPO/ICOs) as well.