Topic: So, stock exchange is not allowed in usa using bitcoins? (Read 11631 times)

+1

This exactly. BTC had nothing to do with what happened to GLBSE, and what will (I personally hope) eventually happen to Silk Road and other illegal sites. Doesn't matter what currency they are using, they were and are doing illegal things. Businesses selling legal products and services, and charities accepting legitimate donations have never had legal problems because of BTC as far as I know. MTGOX legal cases seem to be going in their favour.

Bitcoin will be in a lot of trouble for a long time if all it's known for is selling drugs and laundering money. We need a lot more real business and charitable successes if we are going to make BTC a legitimate, accepted currency... which I see as one of the main goals.

I understand the idealism of running an underground site like Silk Road with hidden money, but I don't think that's really what bitcoin is good for. When the US really puts effort into shutting down silk road, they'll do it. I'm not trying to be a buzz kill, I am not a drug prohibitionist, but using BTC for illegal drug dealing is not only bad for bitcoin, it's fucking dangerous for the people who buy it, and there are 30 year federal prison sentences waiting somewhere for a few really smart college stoners who had a brilliant idea one night. While we are all still physically governed by the laws of our respective states, we should work to end drug prohibition, rather than trying to use bitcoin to skirt local laws.

You summed up GLBSE perfectly. He was in the right place at the right time and exposed what turned out to be the massive potential of a BTC securities exchange, but how he expected to run something so complex without visiting a lawyer first I can't understand. Expense number one when setting up a financial services company: legal fees. It was such a great platform and such a needed tool that people jumped all over it without thinking it through. He had no plan to operate a legitimate security exchange in the country he was based in, let alone the countries of the people he was allowing to buy securities. It's an extremely regulated market globally for obvious reasons, and GLBSE went into it with a script and a virtual office. As mentioned we need either a tightly regulated exchange where everyone plays by the rules, or a totally anonymous one where everything is hidden, and people have the risk of being shut down at any time. I think the former would be better for BTC, but the market will probably create both. Hopefully we'll have many exchanges so we have competition... or someone can crack the code of creating a P2P exchange.

The low priced ones probably have a history you don't want to be involved in, like being shells from former pump and dump scheme, have outstanding judgments and/or liens against them, or have some sort of poison pills in their charter. Which means whoever buys out the shell is on hook for paying a lot of money. It could possibly ruin you no matter how much money you have.

One of these in good condition probably costs 150,000$ at the very least, and because of the way economics works it would probably cost you much more than that to form one from nothing.

Given the standard trust level he established I waited till I could get to get a secure VM running before following the link.

Very interesting, some listing are as low as 40k, some have I story and capital as well. Thanks for pointing it out. Not that I'm in position to take advantage of it, but others might be able to see a business plan that would work.

I'm glad I didn't have to buy Pizza in your neighborhood!

I only read the first two listings. They said less than 100,000 of some kind of fiat using a $ so I am thinking maybe USD.

It was such a nice power of ten number I stuck with powers of ten.

Also, were pizzas really ten grand each or was it two pizzas for ten grand?

So yeah I fudged the math. Who'd'a thunk anyone in a math-meets-finance forum woulda noticed?

-MarkM-

P.S. Plus, my internet marketing copy skills must be rusty as you don't sound like you followed the link.

P.P.S. Lets blame that on the author quoted. Its his copy's link, afterall.

Wow, obtuse much?

So you are thinking $120k range?

Seems like the cost/benefit ratio should tip over that before too long, I wonder how much pent up demand will cause weirdness in the meantime.

A clean, legal SEC-registered OTCBB shell company for less than the price of a pizza! That is actually quite cool.

Diclaimer: Pizzas have depreciated drastically, I hear they are a lot less than ten grand now.

-MarkM- (Yes in bitcoin of course. This is a bitcoin forum, isn't it? )

WHAAAAT?

Congrats, you just got my first ignore for that gem.

I do not now, nor have I ever been demonstrably shown to have rectal-cranial inversion syndrome, and your personal, unwarranted attack is both nonsensical and uncouth.

The Securities and Exchange Comission is charged with ensuring trust among parties, it may not be perfect, but it allows me to trade real money with a lot of confidence that all my investments meet certain minimum standards.

The Madoff's of this world (who manage to work inside the lines) are a lot less numerous than the Pirates (who would be sunk in 10 seconds in a wall street brokerage.)

Enjoy your ignorance, I won't be sullying your fantasy world any longer.

There is no trust when there is SEC. Why are you hiding your head in your ass?

Swing and a miss.

MarkM has an application that will allow his customers to perform trades with the securities that are issued by the guys taking tests. If a few other firms open up they can cooperate on an OT trust web.

They just have to do it INSIDE the existing framework if they don't want to face potential Jail Time in addition to being shut down.

The trick in the real world is to find a grey area on the edge of existing regulations and get a bunch of folks to put a bunch of money behind it. This money translates into influence and gets regulations updated to affirm the grey area operation as legal. This is what happened with Kickstarter, and within the next decade we should see a few more steps forward, but no government in the first world is going to tolerate folks getting cheated in unregulated securities and losing value.

Think of government regulations as programs executed by people. If you refuse to leverage the right APIs you won't get the response you want. If you start behaving badly enough, you get labeled as a virus/convict and quarantined. just because is is white collar fraud instead of burglary makes it no less of a crime.

In the case of securities regulations they are there because of hundreds of years of clever assholes, you have a lot of learning to do if you want to surpass them.

You are quite right to be disappointed, markm. The future of OT and OT Server in particular doesn't look very rosy in light of what SEC have done to Nefario. The only solution to overcome this tyranny is decentralization as much as possible.

I am not a lawyer. The impression I have been gathering is that there is no law directly forbidding the New York Stock Exchange, for example, from providing and enabling the buying and selling of registered securities using apples, oranges, bitcoins, or possibly even horses of a different colour (absent certain colours being controlled or restricted or protected species, the expectation that the person accepting them as payment might have it in mind to subject them to cruel and unusual treatment and such).

I haven't encountered anything yet that seems to bar stock exchanges from using barter, for example.

So the path forward seems actually quite straightforward really, laid out by the friendly people in the relevant regulator agencies and departments and what appear to be almost monopolistic vested interest groups of incumbents who possibly originally ganged up to attempt to fend off government regulation by asserting implying or claiming they could, collectively, regulate themselves thank very much.

(Similar to how various other "professional" professions have "professional associations".)

The path looks to be something along the lines of:

First, form a "firm" (company, corporation, limited liability get out of liability free card team) owned and operated by someone who has passed all the required examinations and such and staffed with "associated people" who are not required to have as many exams under their belts. (Save maybe the Chief Compliance Officer, who might have to be way up there with the designated Buck Stops Here fall-guy/chief/boss in terms of exams passed education acquired and such.)

That done, you now have a Broker-Dealer(ship), Only a grand or few a year to keep the boss and compliance officer licensed, only a few hundred for each of the smallfry such as sales staff who actually sell stuff.

Now you have a "firm" that could employ technicians to operate application servers such as [webservers that Americans might see pages of the sites on that mention securiities being available] and [trading platforms upon which investors to whom the firm and the salespeople who write the sales copy could possibly offer such securities as their licensing/qualifications and registrations permit them to deal and/or broker]. Oh of course some of that sales copy might need to be draughted as a prospectus, the terms and presentation in such prospectus approved by regulator authorities prior to its being deployed where potential purchasers might see it.

As far as I have read to this point, I have not seen any path that allows people such as application server technicians to form a "firm" with them as boss which employs as employees all those exams under their belts people. Such (exams under belts) people's professional associations seem to be instrumental in arranging the regulations in such a way that is they who necessarily must be in charge, justifying it by asserting that the Buck Stops Here person necessarily needs to be highly qualified to, uh... Stop Bucks, I guess? Meaning to take the fall if anyone employed in the firm "pulls a Nefario" or anything crazy like that...

Oh and this is just to create a broker-dealer(ship), one small step on the road toward creating an actual Stock Exchange, which typically involves lots of broker-dealer(ship)s all having "seats" so called while standing in mobs shouting and waving slips of paper and/or sitting in back rooms sipping brandy while the young pups the keeping down of whom might yet require the inventing of more required examinations or somesuch do the legwork / shouting in mobs / cornering of little old ladies to ethically sell them a secure retirement / etc.

-MarkM-

There is only one principal solution as far as I can see. The US government should ban the use of this international vehicle (aka WWW) for interstate communication when such a communication is unlawful from domestic point of view. Technically speaking, the US government should start filtering the Web for their citizens. Looks like in such cases they prefer to stop the entire vehicle instead even if they violate legitimate rights of non US citizens in different jurisdictions?

Yes, I remember when it happened.  I believe I downloaded WorldWideWeb over gopher to a NeXT Workstation to try it out.

I've also been an expert witness in a federal trial in the U.S. federal court system.

I appreciate that you have strong feelings on the subject, but legally there is all manner of precedence for the world wide web being a vehicle for interstate communication.

Idealism isn't what's needed here.  What's needed is a clear legal foundation for everyone to understand and operate from.  That is a massive undertaking that crosses international boundaries and pushes the limit of the current legal system.

What are you talking about? The Web is not interstate communication channel and certainly is not a property of the US government. It is a global media. Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN Switzerland, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989. He invented the basics like hypertext (html), the web server, web browser, and gave them to the people of the world not to US government. Wake up!
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/about/WebStory-en.html

Becoin, we know the law is outdated.  But it is very clear.

If you advertise or promote shares of a company or investment using interstate communication, you are under the jurisdiction of the SEC in the US.  That includes telegraph, telephone, mail, internet, email, cell phone, facebook, twitter, anything.

Of course. Whatever they are, no arguments matter if the status quo is at stake. No surprise. This is why bitcoin has such a disign!

What you are basically asking me is to get a taxi license for my automobile from the syndicate of horse buggy drivers 2 years after internal combustion engine was invented. Are you insane or just pretending?!

It doesnt matter what bitcoins are or what you think they represent, as long they have value. It doesnt matter if those assets traded for apple juice or bitcoin, they were publicly traded securities that represented debt, profit sharing agreement or a shares in a company, ie they were securities. It doesnt matter if that debt, or the profit was generated as apple juice or bitcoins.

It really doesnt get any more clear cut than this, your attempt to argue against it is as silly as defending yourself in a murder case by stating you didnt really kill the person, you merely shook hands with a pistol, the victim was still alive for several milliseconds after you touched the trigger, its all the fault of the bullet and physics and no one knows what death means anyway, oh, and your Honor, you cant prove the victim isnt still alive in a parallel universe.

Guess what, it wont stick. Prove me wrong by getting a no action letter.

Again, the "face value" of those bonds is not in fiat currency, apples, oranges, bananas and basically anything else, but in bitcoins. And one bitcoin, again, is the standard measure of trust in the bitcoin network. Why should Alice register how much she trusts Bob... in SEC? Is your point that SEC must give permission to Alice how much she can trust Bob, Carol, and David?!

No one is saying bitcoins are securities. This is about bonds and shares on GLBSE. Those ARE unregistered securities and that you trade them for bitcoins instead of dollars is irrelevant. What is relevant is that they traded for value. Capiche?

This was already explained a dozen of times. Bitcoin has value, but only to the person that holds corresponding private key. This is in sharp contrast to the universal value of fiat currencies, apples, bananas, oranges, and basically anything else.

Trading is a sale!? Who knows? It might be a buy as well?

Just like bitcoin is not money, apples, bananas, oranges etcetera, bitcoin bonds are not securities. Trying to put an existing tag on bitcoin and digital assets measured in bitcoins will lead you to nowhere. Every judge or regulatory agency will understand this sooner or later. Obviously, you will be among the last to get it.