Bitcoin Forum

The question is for US citizens) _ do you participate in an ICO even if it's said "CAN'T PARTICIPATE: USA"?

For example, you are requested to confirm that you are not a US citizen by clicking checking box on ICO's investor cabinet and even enter your  House/Apartment, Street, post code (if any)/city and country.

Actually any U.S. citizen if he/she wants to participate can just click [YES] confirm and fill the address fields with fake information and even use VPN to avoid ICO website IP checkout.  Do you (US citizens) make all these fake fillings in order to participate?

I'm sure people do this, but I don't think many will be forthright in admitting it. It's also not so easy as that in the majority of ICOs, most now have KYC and you'll have to provide identification which is registered to a non US address. I'm sure for most US citizens they don't take the risk because it could land them in a lot of hot water with the authorities.

Some of my friends are still joining ICOs which is prohibited by the SEC,thats risky but they have found a way to join these KYC ICOs,they have bought some fake IDs from the dark web,which are from the non-US citizen countries but some of these ICOs would ask for a selfie that is why thats so risky to do.

But what you gonna do once the ICO is done and the team is requiring KYC "know your customer" which in this process you need to send them via email or on their website your national ID (government issue EX: passport). you will be having a big problem and your investment token will remain on their dashboard as you can't get a refund from your cheating.

And how do these friends think it will end? Surely they haven't thought it all the way through because there is no way that that could end up being good. They will either owe some form of back taxes, or shit go to jail for doing illegal things deemed illegal by the SEC.

That’s a good analysis. Most, if not all, ICOs have it in their terms that US citizens can not participate in their ICO. Therefor they need to wait for the coins to hit the exchanges to trade them

Do you think there are ICOs (outside US) which are not prohibited by SEC?  I thought that all ICOs that out of US are prohibited. But I might be wrong and this ban relates only to investment tokens, but not UTILITY tokens. 

Quite not a pleasant situation, of course, with these restrictions, but I think that they on the contrary improve the situation, because such a situation makes it possible to legally deal with crypto-currencies

Why KYC is required by so many ICOs?  Is it because it's needed to flow tokens on reliable crypto exchanges in future?

I've tried doing that but then I fail the KYC when I have to send verification of residency. Some ICO's are allowing US residents because they're compliant with the SEC of the United States. It sucks to miss out on some of the ICOs, but it should get better for US residents in the future.

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Some ICO's are allowing US residents because they're compliant with the SEC of the United States.
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Are those " compliant with the SEC " ICO's were from US on not?

if need USA KYC you can contact me and pm your contact.

Technically if you purchase non-regulated security as a non-US citizen, yes, you are breaking the law. Whatever ICO you invest in must fail the Howey test and otherwise collect kyc for you to be 100% safe. But yeah, there is still a lot of grey area that even the promoting firms can’t figure out yet.

On the other hand this is crypto, and if you are a true believer you participate in projects that reject much of the governmental hogwash or you find your way to a VPN.

Most of the time, they will ask you to submit KYC verification, so even if you can fake that information, but you can't use other people's KYC information to verify, so that's why americans can not participate in the reason.

I can understand the frustration - I have felt it myself, especially when reading a really compelling whitepaper, doing a bunch of analysis and then deciding that the project is cool and legit, then joining the Telegram / Discord channel and then finding out that U.S. Citizens are not permitted to invest.  Yes, you can use VPN and all kinds of clever tactics, but I really doubt it's worth it.

Instead, do the research and you will see that in fact many project release their tokens, they are accepted by an exchange, and then, during the time it takes the team to execute their plan, interest in the token subsides, and the price actually goes down from the ICO.  This happens a lot.  Then it just sort of sits there until some announcement, or event causes it to come to live.  Look at the many of the charts on Coinmarketcap and you will see evidence of this. 

Also, when a coin is starting out and just getting listed on some exchanges, there is very often an arbitrage in price between exchanges.  An example is ATLANT, which about a week ago was training below it's ICO release price, but on two exchanges with very slim volume and very different prices.  On IDEX, it was trading about twice the price against ETH as it was on OKEX against Bitcoin (measured in USD). 

So I wouldn't fret too much about "missing out" on an ICO when a little patience and monitoring might lead to more profit than if you did manage to participate in the ICO.

Unless its a KYC one they don't bother to look at website IP.  Or they haven't so far. 

I found recent Ico theabyss which is using daico raised by vistlik butter in for this ico US regulated do usa citizen can participate . Once the DAICO successfully accepted by community there should be lots of chances for US citizens to participate in ICO.