Remind me who the SEC are supposed to be serving again? The people of the US or its financiers?
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If I have to worry about the SEC linking me to my Safe coin, then this is the wrong tech!
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You have nothing to worry about. It’s only MaidSafe themselves who could be affected by an SEC prosecution. The SEC doesn’t come after customers, it responds to their complaints generally.
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Fortunately, people aren’t expected to know the laws in other countries, let alone be expected to adhere to them. I for one am rather pleased about this, as there are some rather unpleasant laws out there in other countries about the globe.
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I don’t think Captain America world police agrees with you.
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I wish that were true. I bet Julian Assange wishes it too. 
Sadly, if you conduct any business in another country, or sell any product or service to citizens of another country, or indeed even just break certain laws from the safety of your host nation, you can indeed by tried by their laws and you are subject to your own laws RE extradition if that happens.
I’m grateful for the fact we don’t currently have any issues and the SEC don’t seem to be on the war path just yet. I would not get complacent about being out of their reach though. Kim Dotcom has spent a small fortune on legal defence in the last 2 years and despite living in NZ (top 3 on freedom index) he has not been out of the reach of the US legal system.
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I doubt they will be sending in the aircraft carriers over this one!
Are you suggesting that the US would attempt extradition for breaking some vague financial regulations? I doubt it some how.
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Traditionally they don’t pursue civil cases to that extent, but as in the case of Kim Dotcom (some copyright regulations that he himself didn’t even break, only his customers did), they certainly can and do when they want to find an excuse to attack someone or something.
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Remember that behind legal enforcement is always a human being with a purpose. If the purpose is to attack SAFE then laws are exploited to fit that design. Laws are tools for people with power to legitimise their dominion over everyone else.
Mark said it well imo
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Is your worry then that you do not believe that MAIDSafe has competent legal counsel to protect their/our interests? While we agree on most things, I just sometimes do not understand your obsession with compliance issues. We are trying to leave governments in our rear view mirrors where we can ignore them, and yet you still seem concerned about inept governments (at least with respect to emerging technologies, such as the SAFE Network, which will defeat them).
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Not at all. Although I do think their resources are limited (as our most modest sized companies), so it is a traditional attack vector for big boys to squash a new threat.
I’m not sure I’d go so far as obsessed, but I do worry about what will happen when the system tries to reject SAFE. I find it very hard to imagine the world immediately embracing this level of disruption and this big a change to the playing field. I probably do spend too much time worrying and playing through any attack vectors I can think of, but to be forewarned is to be forearmed. I think it is healthy and important for us all to discuss these things and be as aware as we can of where the road might lead.
FWIW I am only worried about this in the context of a pre-release SAFE world. Once the genie is actually out of the bottle most of my worries evaporate - MaidSafe become a pointless target if even they can’t shut it off. I guess it is much like a birth (my wife is two days overdue 
), you worry much more in the early stages, there’s much more that can go wrong and the thing you care so much about is at its most vulnerable.
Compliance and securities law is an easy avenue of attack in crypto because much of it is quite subjective - as you can see from the Howey test.
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I truly believe that we should just relax and stop worrying. By the time governments realize what happened, how much our world has changed, and how little control they have over us with this new tech, it will be too late for them to stop it. That is, if Maid is able to fulfill and deliver what they promised and what we are all believing in.
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without blowing smoke up his rear end, I don’t think @jabba is obsessed on this topic, I think he’s just very realistic and honest given the precendents we have to go by.
whilst I 100% share @tjf’s view about leaving said and sundry in the rear view mirror with SAFE it would be extremely negligent of the community to not have our eyes open and end up being the deer caught in the headlights. it is very unlikely but still a possibility.
I guess the benefit you have with this forum and not like others is the Community here is largely a group of people that have been through the ups and downs of not just Crypto’s rise but also Software development in general. Time gives perspective, even if that means remembering to slow down and check your blind spots every now and then.
If nothing else this thread might be a good little reminder to some of the less patient members here as to why we sometimes get a bit preach like about sacrificing a short term gain until we are locked and loaded…makes a tonne of sense when you think about it 
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I think you are probably right. But last year I would have felt more certain of it. Now I see a lot of money and eyes on crypto and it does make me worry more. Who’s to say that SAFE won’t hit a $5bn cap in 18 months with testsafecoin out there and the whole planet going crypto nuts? If that happened then the world might suddenly realise before SAFE is really ready or had a chance to grow big enough to defend itself from well-funded attacks (legal and/or technical).
As I say, I am worrying for the sake of it and generating my own nightmare situations that probably won’t unfold. It is useful for people to discuss this stuff though., What if the SEC starts canvassing investors to see if they ‘expected profit’ from MAID or wanted SafeCoin etc? At least now a couple more people might give the right answers 
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“Si vis pacem, para bellum.”
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Rather how does it?
There is no avenue for it to provide profit. The is no dividends, no capital gains of further MAID to be got from it. Yes capital gains from holding it, but you get that from your home too. Its not gains promised in terms of more MAID or other coin, you have to sell the coin to get anything and that is NOT profit from holding the coin. You don’t profit from the company Maidsafe (no dividends or special handouts of any sort. Profit != profit as far as financial instruments is concerned, its how you profit, selling the coin is one sort of profit but the SEC is interested in the profit where HOLDING the coin gains you profit that you can use while holding the financial instrument (eg dividends).
Another violation is where you sell something and claim that you can make millions from it, but you can’t. IE FRAUD.
So rather you have to define how it could possibility be a financial instrument that gains you profit.
And I’ll add that exchanges listing MAID and you buy MAID at a lower price than you sell it is not an avenue of (financial instrument) profit. That is simply capital gains from buying/selling an object and not a financial instrument that gives you profit.
MAIDSAFE at no time said you would get anything other than the product that MAID is a promise for. Its a promisry note and not a security.
You can trade anything on some market/exchange somewhere. Just because an exchange trades something does not make it a financial security under the SEC legislation.
You can trade oranges on a exchange, or Fish as in the fish markets, but they are not a financial security.
After listening to that ex-SEC lawyer I cannot see how MAID could be considered a security. It is the last 1/3 of that talk where the real nitty gritty of what might be considered a security and in the opinion of that ex-SEC lawyer there are a lot of coins that do not fall under the financial security. Like a coin that only holds value (eg bitcoin), ones that do not offer an incentive of profit have little chance of being touched, and a few other points that MAID does not fit. Fraud is the other avenue that the SEC will touch some coins.
I cannot see how MAID fits any of them.
This is quite possible, but not being a USA company they would need to justify that stance to their superiors and that is where it would end. MAID was not designed as a financial instrument, not presented as such.
The profit is just like anyone who buys goods and tries to sell them at a higher price. EG fish markets/auctions food markets, gold markets, promissory notes, etc Nearly everything is traded on some market, so that cannot be used to show MAID is a financial instrument. Just because financial instruments are traded on exchanges does not make the reverse true.
tl;dr
@Jabba, I do understand your concerns, but after listening to the whole of that talk by the ex-SEC lawyer I cannot see how MAID fits any of the SECs criteria for a financial instrument that fits their legislation. Even if some lawyer in SEC decided to go after MAID (falsely) then that person has to convince the 5 that its worth pursuing and that is where a false claim against a non-financial instrument comes unstuck. The SEC needs big returns and MAID is small fry. So on two groups the 5 would reject a violation litigation to proceed.
Oh wikileaks knew they were breaking the secret acts of at least 5 nations and was hitting at the very core of the US government. So no his case was nothing like a SEC case. And the file upload site was supposedly a mechanism for distributing copied copyrighted material which is a federal offense and since he was “doing it” in the USA (their servers) then they had a “right” to try and get him according to their own federal laws. Didn’t NZ disagree though
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Agreed, I think @Jabba is pointing out what sometimes seems to me a lack of realism around potential threats, complacency really. I don’t worry about it at all, but I still read up on the issue and follow developments because it could become a problem and it is always best to have understanding in advance of an issue rather than be caught unawares.
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There is a big difference between buying a product or resource and then reselling that later on for a profit, compared with selling something that derives its value purely from the promise of work being done by a group raising capital. The whole point of securities law is to ensure that where there is no inherent value beyond an ‘expectation of profit’ that there is regulation of the body setting expectations.
MAID is absolutely a financial instrument. It’s sole purpose was to raise capital and its entire value rests on the future work of the MaidSafe team. If you think through the Howey test then it becomes quite clear (imo) that the only point of contention is whether or not the investors have an ‘expectation of profit’ prior to utility. N.B the expectations of the investors are what are in question here, not the specific ‘promises’ from MaidSafe…
That’s the whole point, you home has inherent value. It is not a security, it is an asset. MAID is not a good, service, asset or equity. The sole value of MAID is DEFINED by its liquid market and that derives 100% of its value from the work done by the core team (not market demand for something like property, a service, or a means of exchange etc which are all independent and not solely reliant on the creators). The value of your house or any non-security would be defined by the market demand for that thing. In the case of a security there is no market demand beyond that created by the promise of future achievements/goals/products etc.
This is an interpretation I have not heard from anyone else. If you can’t consider the capital gain as profit then almost no cryptos have anything to worry about. If that is the case then can you explain why filecoin created SAFT and coinlist? Are you simply working under the assumption that all those lawyers and specialists are wrong and throwing money away?
"As outlined in the paper, SAFTs are designed to be sold to accredited investors as a means of funding development in a way not dissimilar from the way equity changes hands in traditional venture capital. In a SAFT sale, no coins are ever offered, sold or exchanged. Rather, money is exchanged for traditional paper documents that promise access to future product.
“The developers use the funds to develop a genuinely functional network, with genuinely functional utility tokens, and then deliver those tokens to the investors once functional,” the paper reads.
By ensuring that no token sales take place prior to the funding, the authors of the SAFT paper argue a key hurdle is overcome: namely, that any resulting tokens created are less likely to meet the definition of a security as put forth under the Howey Test, the standard created by the U.S. Supreme Court to judge whether offerings are securities."
Securities law is quite subjective. I have never read any legal reference to the need to retain all of your stake while claiming a profit in order to qualify. If you can point me to a securities law that does indeed make that stipulation I will certainly sleep a little easier. I’ve looked quite hard and never found any such regulation. It certainly isn’t implied in the Howey test, which seems odd if that is the litmus test for securities.
The fact that you keep repeating this makes me think you haven’t really taken on board what I was saying about ‘why’ the SEC was created in the first place and what it is there to do. It is not there to regulate the sale of assets or resources. It exists to protect the market from unregulated claims of profit derived from things with no inherent value beyond the promise of the creators.
But again, that’s exactly the point. Bitcoin is a utility. It is useful as a store-of-value. If is certainly NOT a security because it already exists and its price is defined by its value to the market, not the promise of value to be created in the future. Bitcoin was also mined, not ‘sold’ to people with expectations. MAID is not a store-of-value. I think that is quite easy to argue. MAID has no value as an omni asset, ALL of its value is derived by the expectation of future value created by the team. It was also sold to unqualified investors and it was sold to US investors. All of those investors are able to profit from it before it becomes a utility. Whether they ‘expected’ to or not is another matter.
Filecoin and others using SAFT are not just wasting millions of dollars and creating months of work for themselves for no reason. They only took qualifying investors, they refused US investors AND they are only issuing SAFT agreements until filecoin is live. They pay no dividends. Likewise ICOs (for non-dividend paying coins) that are refusing US investors are not just being ‘paranoid’ and throwing money away. I am of the opinion that these guys are being very shrewd in lowering their risk exposure in such a disruptive environment.
If the powers that be come to realise what SAFE is before it has launched then I could imagine they would treat it as a far greater threat than Julian or Kim. At the end of the day it does pose a far greater systemic threat than either of them. Ok, so it’s not likely that anyone with any power is that smart or well-informed. Not likely does not sit very well with me when I am looking ahead several years though. If SAFE is still vulnerable in 2 years then the chances of us being attacked in some way will have increased substantially imo.
He was an ex-German arrested in NZ as a NZ citizen by NZ police who were just doing ‘what they were told’ by the US feds. He had US customers and some of his servers were in the US, some in Canada, that’s all. This is the reason there was a second big case to try to find out why and how the NZ police force were so easily called to heel by the US feds in a civil case with a foreign citizen residing overseas. I highly recommend watching the recent documentary about what happened. I think you might be slightly less confident when you see what happened with Kim. The studios called up Obama and told him they would cut off funding if he didn’t shut Kim down. They simply twisted laws and procedures to fit their plans, setting new precedents and they got NZ police to break NZ laws RE privacy and ‘reasonable force’ etc. They have cost him a fortune in legal fees (broken him), taken most of his assets and bank deposits, and it still looks like he could indeed be extradited.
Obviously the chances are that no one with any real power will realise what SAFE is until it’s too late. I do think that likelihood has decreased though now crypto is in the limelight and I think we do need to worry a bit and stay aware of where the angles of attack could come from.
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This is what the ex-SEC lawyer disagrees with. Just because an ICO is to raise funds for future work does not mean it is a financial instrument under the SEC legislation.
Anyhow since you firmly believe that it is a financial instrument and I do not I feel its of little benefit to others to continue because we will end up in circles and only a determination by the SEC will change views. Anyhow I suggest you listen to the talk with an open mind, because I too did feel deep down that MAID was a financial instrument, but safe from the SEC. The talk changed that.
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