http://gigaom.com/2014/06/03/sec-charges-owner-of-bitcoin-sites-for-selling-unregistered-securities/In light of this new article, I wanted to post about the legal status of Sia and Sianotes. Nothing that follows is a legally binding statement, we are working with our lawyers to get something that is legally binding. Cryptocurrency is a tricky field and it's taking a long time for us to get the legal statements we want. I believe we talked briefly about securities, and I believe that we were reassured that Sianotes are not securities, but we will be discussing the subject again.
I'm now going to list a set of statement that are similar to what you might see from the legally binding statement. None of the statements contained in this post are legally binding as they have not been reviewed by a lawyer. I'm expecting the legal statements to be similar, however it's hard to predict as I am not a lawyer.
Sianotes are not corporate equity.
Siastock is not corporate equity.
Sianotes have no cash value.
Siastock has no cash value.
Sianotes are owned/managed by Nebulous Incorporated. All liability falls upon the corporation and not upon myself or Luke.
Sianotes will eventually be converted to Siastock.
Siastock will be a source of income. Therefore, Sianotes represent a promise of future payments.
Hosts on Sia will have an income, part of this income will be taken as a fee and distributed among the owners of Siastock.
Host income is defined as 'payment for storage provided.' The only income that is taxed is income from offering storage. Other potential fees such as transaction fees, bandwidth fees, and computational fees are not included. Also not included are transactions sent directly to the host account.
1 Sianote is the promise of (1/10,000 * 0.039) of all host income, or 0.00039% of all host income.
Sianotes may not be redeemed until the completion and launch of Sia.
Sianotes do not apply to any alphas, betas, or test networks.
If there have been any misunderstandings (such as the expectation that you were buying corporate equity), please contact me.
We want Sia to be a legally recognized and supported product. We are doing everything we can to make this possible. I had hoped to make a legal statement without making a non-legally binding statement first, but I feel like it's an important issue and the legal statement is taking too long to construct. Especially if we have to register with the SEC or something, we could be delayed multiple weeks.
In the mean time though we've got lots of time to code. Most of the delays are scheduling and waiting for responses. The codebase is coming along nicely.
I want to say one last time that nothing in this post is legally binding. We're doing everything that we can to protect ourselves and Sia from legal prosecution and potential lawsuits. These protections must be applied carefully, and that takes time. Luckily, thus far it has not been very expensive or time-wasting, it's just been a slow process.
Thanks again for all of the support, we hope to have more updates soon.