I have to say that the way that both Bitfunder and BTCT have handled things is absolutely atrocious.
If they are pretending that the conditions that are forcing them to shutter their doors didn't exist when they set up their exchanges, they are either liars, unethical or incompetent.
Each of them has created large quantifiable financial losses for people who had relied on their assertions and now they want to shove that responsibility off onto another entity. I'd love to see even a redacted version of the Cease and Desist letter either of these exchanges received. Because, I don't believe one exists. They've scared themselves out of doing something that they should have known was scary to do in the first place.
Acting like all the rules around issuing securities just happened is a joke. They were in place for literally decades and closing in on a century before these exchanges were ever conceived.
They knew the risks of running one of these things, if they weren't up to it they should have never started.
Inversely, you also knew the risks going in.
You knew that you were investing in illegal, unregistered stocks. Or rather most here did.
If you did not, it wasn't for lack of warnings from fudsters, trolls & other sane adults.
http://s21.postimg.org/7jci73q0n/Capture.jpgOf course I knew the risks. And I mitigated them to a large extent by not exposing myself too much to the "securities" sector as a whole.
OTOH, just saying "inversely" and not addressing the actual argument I put forward isn't an answer.
The exchange operators can't have it both ways, if they didn't understand the risks of running an exchange, and that in doing so they were putting themselves at risk and only woke up to this fact because they've only recently hired lawyers, I'd say that they are downright incompetent and shouldn't be trusted by the community should they try to do something going forward.
If they knew the risk and just got cold feet 6 months into the venture, then I'd say that speaks volumes as to their ethics. If you were aware of the risks going in, then why did you even start it in the first place if you were going to run away at the first hint of trouble?
Either way, neither has handled these things as they should have, both while operating and in shutdown mode. I'm not saying it is easy, I'm just saying that they signed up for the task, and there is an implied type of responsibility there. As you made clear, the risks were known, shutting down now is either an act of cowardice or incompetence.
It might be both, but it can't be neither.