OK, since you didn't answer my question to you that I asked right before the post you're replying to, I'll ask again, what premine? I'm going to assume you mean the money mined at the start that was publicly announced before hand and that was used for the crowd sale in 2016. Is that what you're referring to?
If that's what you mean, it does not violate securities laws.
There is an exemption for the Howey Test if you cap fundraising at $100,000. Bryce did exactly that. He's worked with regulators from the start. There's photographic evidence. There's evidence on the SEC website.
If you have access to some other information I'm not aware of, do tell.
The TAO Network has made 30 million TAO tokens available for the ongoing month-long crowdsale. Rest of the tokens are allocated for development, marketing and community building exercises. The platform has announced that the value a TAO token will not be more than $1.00 during the crowdsale. Participants in the crowdsale shall receive a 25% bonus on their deposit if the deposit is made prior to Friday, August 5th.
You might want to re-read that a little more carefully. "Not be more than $1.00" isn't the same as setting it specifically to $1 the way you're representing it. The amount paid per Tao was proportional to the amount raised, and it ended up at approximately $0.003 per Tao, which is a long way from $1.00
Whether it was capped or only raised ~$100K is irrelevant to the question of whether it qualifies as a security.
It does not.
Am I understanding you correctly that it was dumb luck that made him not break the law, then?
Or did he deliberately not market things as well as he could have?
Based on comments he's made, yes actually I'm pretty sure he fudded himself on purpose to keep most of crypto at arms length and get people to ignore what he was doing. I think he also intentionally let it languish on small exchanges nobody uses for the same reason, and to keep the shady ICO money away from the network so it stayed clean.
For what he has been doing it was much more important for him to appeal to the people in the music industry than to the crypto industry. And to people in the music industry, most of the rest of crypto looks like a huge scam.
Which regulation are you referring to, by the way?
The discussion was whether the Tao ICO needed to be registered as a security and whether it was done legally. Only raising ~$100,000 puts it well under the minimum for it to be exempt. I believe this is covered by Reg D -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_D_(SEC)#Rule_504
lol 
kek 
wheres this imaginary exchange? pfttt bwwahahaha
