I was about to invest some money in the stockbet token sale when in the very last second it caught my eye that US and Chinese citizens are not included in the sale.
Now will the company not loose out on a huge and affluent customer base by excluding these two nations and will this not hamper any future success?
I guess there will be legal reasons for this, but nevertheless I am a bit worried.
Until I saw this I was quite excited to join the token sale, now not so much anymore.
What is your opinion?
This is the response from Stockbet customer service regarding the restrictions of US customers. It sounds legit:
The SEC warned the community that the DAO (investment fund on Ethereum) is a security. After this warning period, they have charged two ICOs with fraud:
http://fortune.com/2017/10/01/sec-ico-fraud-charges/We do not know for certain that these are the only ICOs that regulators have charged or how many more they will charge.
Even though we are not committing fraud and we do not believe we are selling a security, we wanted to be conservative and not take the chance that the SEC finds something wrong in our argument. We believe that we have a huge opportunity, but we are restricted by this risk.
Maybe we are overly cautious. There have been hundreds of ICOs that were selling securities. Regulators have not charged them yet.
According to the Fortune article:
"The SEC, though, doesn’t seem to be looking to shut down ICOs as such. The agency’s targeted and graduated approach to regulation could help scare away fraudsters, while preserving the positive features of the technology, particularly its ability to raise funds globally with little friction and few fees.
That could give the U.S. a big edge over countries, now including China and South Korea, who have taken more draconian measures to suppress the technology."
So, as far as we can tell, regulators still have not charged any ICO for selling securities. This is extraordinarily lenient of regulators, which have charged much smaller dealers for selling securities in the past. We might reassess our policy.
Selling StockBet Tokens and betting on StockBet are two different things. The intention is for us to build the StockBet Platform software and release it as open source software to the community. The community will then let, or not let, U.S. customers bet on the StockBet Platform.