The altcoin topic everyone wants to sweep under the rug

[TPTB_need_war]

Details of USA Securities Law is covered in the following thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1218399.0

Making AMPS publicly available for sale to non-accredited USA investors makes the unregistered investment securities illegal even if issued by foreigners.

Alt currencies are not investments in the eyes of existing law anyway.

With that strawman statement which does not address the points of the Howey test, you obviously do not comprehend the thread that was provided to you. You probably didn't even read it or read it carefully.

Verbal handwaving is not technical explaining. It is clever marketing to fool n00bs, but I know better.

If you are the guy who doesn't get it, and almost everyone else does

No one understands the details including yourself. For if you did, you would explain it here in sufficient technical detail so as to be unambiguous statements.

You are BS and you know it.

We need sufficient technical detail so that we can verify if the system will do what he is claiming it will do.

It has been in commercial operation for a couple years.

You are referring to components of the system such as Special K or Microsoft's use of process calculi, but the devil is in the details. This usage of some components of his research has no bearing on whether any of this is applicable to Synereo. Without the details, we can't tell you exactly why you are wrong.

And you certainly don't know the technical details either.

Any way, I don't have more time to waste on your nonsense.

So, again, please cease and desist with the negative misinformation and claims.
Ask your father for a refresher on Libel & Slander.

Sue me in the USA (which is the only jurisdiction which you can enforce on me). Hahaha. So we can go in court and talk about selling illegal unregistered investment securities. There is nothing slander nor libel in demanding proper disclosure with all the technical details explained so that laymen investors can evaluate if this AMP token is a worthwhile investment.

Any way, this is all a waste of my time because Synereo will fall and JAMBOX will not. And JAMBOX isn't selling and hyping tokens. Talk to me again in 6 - 9 months. Until then, any thing other than technical details from you is hot air.

Lol, Synereo with a $9 million marketcap and only $0.016 million ($16,000) of probably fake (insiders buying from themselves) daily volume. You snakeoil salesmen having a hard time getting fools to buy this fake market cap now.

[BitFomo]

First the government doesn't really seem that interested or get involved to the level of paranoia people have unless people... And a lot of people are outright raped with things that are illegal regardless of crypto classification.  Paycoin, BFL and mtgox.  Their actions seem to indicate that they are interested in prosecuting people for the most famous outright scams to try to encourage a tiny bit of accountability.

I have been overseas for six months in three very different countries and I have an entirely new respect for how the government protects the dollar and attacks those who threaten it.  Foreign entities with monetary policies and domestic entities trying to remain private.

If the government is as bad as you say then if and when they take aim at crypto - the swipe of a pen by some appointed official can and will make things in crypto they want to be against the law illegal regardless of what is / isn't legal now.  You may have the chance to abide by the new rules (report all your Bitcoin keys, etc), exit crypto and pay taxes or become a target.  I'm not sure abiding by current rules is going to save or help much with a government that already is in violation of its own constitution and numerous other laws on a consistent basis.  If they decide to attack crypto on a whole - today's legal standing will not matter.  Crypto will exist inside of their new rules or be strong enough to stand outside of them.  I do not perceive existing laws to be any type of protection against fighting against the USD if the government decides their is a big conflict of interest.

At this stage I think tracking the blockchain provides them with far more value than threats when it comes to illegal activity (or that is their impression)

[TPTB_need_war]

BitFomo, the argument that the government won't care about the securities law violations in crypto IPOs, instamines, PoS coins, masternode coins, coins paying debasement to the developers (Z.cash), seems reasonable because the elite have bigger fish to fry.

However, the period of 2018 to 2020 is going to be utter scorched earth economic collapse followed by a coordinated monetary reform into a one-world reserve currency system, thus we could see governments become very totalitarian in terms of going after all illegal actions wherein they can confiscate people's money due to some law broken. They will hunt those with significant money, not nickels and dimes.

I would steer clear of violating laws as much as possible, if you have any money. As for thinking you can hide your money from the government in Bitcoin, the centralization (centralized control) of Bitcoin will eventually kill that.

Do you really think TPTB, the mainstream capital flows that are short the dollar+gold+Bitcoin, and the world's socialism is going to allow the "rich" (i.e. the upper middle class) to ride away with gains in gold and Bitcoin as the rest of the people become impoverished by the economic collapse

If you want to ride through this coming apocalypse unscathed, then you need to be extra diligent on not providing simple legal justification for confiscation of your wealth.

[TPTB_need_war]

Alt currencies are not investments in the eyes of existing law anyway.

With that strawman statement which does not address the points of the Howey test, you obviously do not comprehend the thread that was provided to you. You probably didn't even read it or read it carefully.
>>
There is nothing slander nor libel in demanding proper disclosure with all the technical details explained so that laymen investors can evaluate if this AMP token is a worthwhile investment.

Notice how when you start with the fact that AMPs are not an investment, you don't have an argument?

An AMPs investment security that is not "worthwhile" is still an investment security.

I'll be quoting this in the thread for future SEC investigations since you are disingenuously misrepresenting the facts to intentionally promote an unregistered investment security to n00b USA investors on this forum.

The technical details have been made available anyway, and every week, you have a chance at asking Greg whatever question you want.

Provide a link to all the complete written specifications written in terminology and explanation that non-process calculi experts can analyze. This has not been provided.

Handwaving in video Hangouts is irrelevant and is the way you disingenuously mislead the n00bs speculators here.

Face it dude, you aren't going to win a debate about truth with me, because I am on the right side of truth and you are not. And I am smart enough to unweave your manipulative words.

y it's someone else's fault that you haven't learned.

It has been in commercial operation for a couple years.

You are referring to components of the system such as Special K or Microsoft's use of process calculi, but the devil is in the details. This usage of some components of his research has no bearing on whether any of this is applicable to Synereo.

Of course it has bearing, it's a content delivery network - that's what it does.  They are not simply components, they are the foundation, and the tech stack that does the work.

You need to learn at least enough to be able to voice your specific questions, if you have doubts.

Ad hominem attacks are not going to get you there.

I mean of course in the context of my prior comments that SpecialK may have no bearing on whether this Synereo system as a whole will function without game theory failure as a whole. One can't apply what is true about a component as evidence of what is true about an amalgamation of components w.r.t. to game theory. Duh!

There is nothing ad hominem in my statements. I speak only to the facts (and the lack of written non-technobabble, non-handwaving facts providers by Synereo) of the matter.

[sockpuppet1]

https://daohub.org/index.html

This looks to be a much more effective way to crowdfund than to run a typical ICO.

Pitching the word 'revolution' in the first marketing sentence is a more effective way to start another ETH style pump.

Here we go again with the inane fantasies of the Delirium (Bitalik Vuterin) ecosystem.

No it's not, because it's basically the same as any other ICO.

No there is a very significant difference.

> If you had a project which needed to be funded, why would you create a DAO

IMO, this is the backwards way to think about this. The people that are providing funds to companies might (should) start insisting that they work with DAOs that they are part of. This allows investors to retain leverage and power over their money. In ICOs the investors usually have little to no power after their investment and lead to a lot of situations where the investors get taken advantage of.

You seem to not believe and/or understand why direct democracy results in abject failure.

I do not believe in the smart crowd.

This is quite an interesting paradox. There are two very famous sayings that demonstate this.

The wisdom of the crowd is positive: "Two heads are better than one."

The wisdom of the crowd is negative: "Too many cooks spoil the broth."

Direct democracy has never existed and never will, because organization of work is incongruent with such a flat decision hierarchy. It is one of the reasons that Communism ends up as despotism.

Switzerland, despite being applauded as a role model of direct democracy in a modern society, actually applies an indirect democracy instead. However, its political system leaves room for direct election and referendum.

Direct democracy lacks procedures, promotes rigid uniformity. It restrains society, and causes despotism.

Such a democracy demands all citizens to have an unambiguous, either-yes-or-no opinion, which is quite often extreme, on each and every issue.

It ignores the complexity and ambiguity of issues, thus this decision-making often encourages people to resort to their basic emotions instead of their rational judgement.

This way of decision-making leads to a strict uniformity well known to the Chinese population, discounting the fact that citizens often don’t have a clear-cut position on many issues.

Athens was run by the merchant class. There was no direct democracy. There never has been and there never will be, because flat structures do not function. The uniform distribution doesn't exist in nature, it is only a delusion of man.

Can you imagine a ship at sea in a storm with 100 people at the helm fighting over each navigation decision.

What you will end up with is a normal corporate structure with a board and the investors will vote to elect the board which oversees and makes the decisions for the corporation.

This is no different than an ICO that matures into being a real company with shareholders.

The real issue here is that crypto-currency which is not distributed by decentralized proof-of-work is masquerading as an illegal unregistered investment security. Thus the desire to side-skirt securities law by creating a token that can vote on governance. But this functionally must end up the same as a voting share in a corporation, thus it is still an illegal, unregistered investment security.

Please quote my post before it is deleted by the mods.

[sockpuppet1]

http://www.coindesk.com/liberty-reserve-founder-20-years/

He was not careful w.r.t. running arguably afoul of laws preventing the use the word "dollar" in ways that might offend the US Treasury.

This is one of the reasons I created the following linked thread to make sure I understood well the laws that might govern the creation of an altcoin:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1218399.0

[sockpuppet1]

Re: DAU replaces DAO

3) Finally, this fund-raise is now of a size that it's going to attract SEC attention. If it were a $1m raise, it could be a great experiment, grow with network, and not attract undue legal attention this early. But it looks like it may flirt with $100m. Already at over $75m, this is something the SEC will care about. But what can they do, you might ask? Well, they can declare the project to be an illegal securities offering (Slock.it's language in their terms doesn't matter; only the SEC's interpretation matters), and then track the ETH payments that come out of the DAO and freeze them (by making it clear to exchanges that the funds represent illegal flows). Then holders would be forced to go through dubious (and largely trackable) channels in order to access their funds.

Maybe none of the above would happen; maybe the SEC won't care, etc, but with such large value already locked in the DAO, it's become a significant and increasing risk in my opinion.

tldr: this has gotten out of hand, both for the network/ecosystem in organic terms, and in terms of attracting SEC scrutiny.

The rise in price of DAO is inevitable, at the end of the month it will be the highest funded crowdfunding project to date.

R0ach.  The reason is because the way the contract is setup before any proposals are voted on pre-investors can withdraw 100% of their originally invested Ethereum (assuming they purchased in the first 14 days).  After the first 14 days the price goes up by 5% a day until it's at 150% (the additional price bumps can't be withdrawn).

I suspect it's people gambling on supply and demand - "If someone is willing to pay 150% on day 31 then I'll be able to sell it on open market for 150%.  Also it will never be worth less than what I paid for it in Eth because I can just cash it out (until crowdfunding starts using the money to fund stuff).

SEC sent out a warning in January 2016. Hope the pumpers are preparing for their jail time:

There is a reason why the SEC issued a warning about Crypto coins calling them scams..
Read it yourselves.. https://www.sec.gov/investor/alerts/ia_virtualcurrencies.pdf (Issued Jan 4th 2016)

We are concerned that the rising use of virtual currencies
in the global marketplace may entice fraudsters to lure
investors into Ponzi and other schemes in which these
currencies are used to facilitate fraudulent, or simply
fabricated, investments or transactions. the fraud may
also involve an unregistered offering or trading platform.
these schemes often promise high returns for getting in
on the ground floor of a growing Internet phenomenon.
Fraudsters may also be attracted to using virtual
currencies to perpetrate their frauds because transactions
in virtual currencies supposedly have
greater privacy
benefits and less regulatory oversight than transactions in
con
ventional currencies. Any investment in securities in
the United states remains subject to the jurisdiction
of the seC regardless of whether the investment is made
in U.s. dollars or a virtual currency.
In particular,
individuals selling investments are typically subject
to federal or state licensing requirements.

[sockpuppet1]

The Devastation that man wrecks on himself (in short society is a power vacuum that requires a strong tyrant to beat the men into not defecting from the good of society):

Change the record you're boring

This forum has turned into a circus of lies and ponzi scams speculation:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg14853958#msg14853958 (Vcash deleted posts)

Do not expect me to market anything which is "fair" to this audience. They don't want fair.

I am okay with that. Peace. You get yours and I'll get mine. That is the new world order you want.

Collectivism is a power vacuum and the argument is always about who gets to steal for and from whom.

Bernie: "Socialism can be repaired as long as I can be in charge of the stealing to insure it is fair".
Trump: "Stealing can be optimized if I am Dicktator-in-chief"
Clinton: "You'll tolerate my theft (for myself and my cronies) because as a Democrat I'll steal some for you too (and not remind you I funded it all by expanding an egregious future debt on your children's back)"

Stealing (scams, oligarchy, etc) is not the exception, rather it is the norm of human nature. Always will be.

The Lord warned us that this is the nature of man.

Don't forget the Iron Law of Political Economics.

[sockpuppet1]

DAO crap is as crap as ETH !

"Crap I failed to buy that 1000% ROI crap."

We were crazy for ignoring what Bernie SandersMadoff was selling, until the clawbacks[1]...

Oh so you aren't aware they can come take your profits long after you've disposed of the asset. This is a clawback.[1]

[1]	http://www.businessinsider.com/the-truth-behind-how-gerald-celente-got-screwed-by-mf-global-2011-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/two-mf-global-clients-share-their-stories-2011-11

[iamnotback]

• I was incorrect to waste my time badgering other coins about their ethics. I followed smooth's lead on that. I have already explained that the issuers and promoters may or may not have to answer to the legal repurcussions in the future, but that is irrelevant. Also the key breakthrough in my legal understanding is when I recently realized that if the source code is open source , the protocol is decentralized, and the issuers aren't in ongoing control of trading (which was Ripple's mistake that caused them to run afoul of FinCEN KYC/MSB regulations), then it doesn't likely matter under the Howey investment securities test (which is orthogonal to the FinTech regulations such as FinCEN) how the tokens were issued, because the speculators are in control of their future expectation of profits (return on investment) and thus nothing is secured by the issuer. Forks of the source code and copycat coins are evidence of that reality. I opened my eyes and decided to understand the reality of the nature of speculation. The amount of $ flowing into altcoins is miniscule compared to the other scams going on daily since the beginning of mankind, including for example the fraud of the Federal Reserve and fiat money. The Climate Change carbon tax clusterfuck is many $billion greater fraud than anything going on in altcoin ecosystem, and at least the altcoin ecosystem has the chance to spawn an actual breakthough that helps mankind.
• You seem to have originated from a Communist/Socialist philosophy wherein you think it is the role of society to determine what is fair and how to best top-down regulate the flow of capital. This is incredibly myopic because there is nothing the government can't make worse by regulating it.
  
  "Elephant: a mouse built to government specifications." — Lazarus Long
  
  

  The joke is on you not understanding that Armstrong is writing about the medium-term when he is bullish, and in the shorter-term his reversals are guiding us through bounces and dips until we get the V crash slingshot that sets up the medium-term blast off.
  
  Your lack of reading comprehension is the joke. AltcoinUK enjoins you in that handicap.
  

  
  slingshot that feeable puppet mind of yours.... guiding useless scenario after the fact.
  

  
  As MA has explained, there will always be dumb people to be the bagholders in the market. There is nothing anyone could do to change that.
  

by now he is a law enforcement material

What enforcement   Copious tough talking diarrhoea flowing out one end but zero action forthcoming.

Indiegogo doesn't even enforce their own policy against selling prohibited perks that are negotiable instruments.

AnonyMint documented the reasons ICOs can be considered harmful, but it is irrelevant.

Decentralized, open sourced tokens are probably not investment securities regardless of how they were issued, but many of these recent schemes such as the DAO appear to not be actually sufficiently decentralized to avoid being classified as investment securities. But that is the potential legal problem for the issuers and perhaps promoters, but not for the readers here who are just the speculators.

There are too many self-important do-nothing talking heads on this forum. At least the scammers are risking their own future legal problems to provide the market here a semblance of what it craves.

So keep on babbling talking heads. That is a symptom of the disease of the incapable.

So if you really think your goal is to invest to better the true adoption and goals of a decentralized economy, then stop whining and go make it a reality. Stop blaming the scammers for your own inability to invest in and/or launch something that really addresses that goal.

Being less worse, doesn't make it an accomplishment. Two wrongs don't make it right.

Too much useless verbal diarrhoea on BCT.

And then he claims to know what is expert coding   Ah pardon me, but being an active coder yourself would allow you to be a peer. Otherwise you are just a rocking chair, finger up his anal-yst. Yeah I know you scored 16 touchdowns in 1932 for the Brooklyn Browns with half your ear torn off. How many times have you repeated that story? Btw, we wear helmets now and take steriods. And ES6 with modules on Node.js isn't your grandmother's Java threads.

[iamnotback]

...

He will perhaps try to argue that a stealth mine is a free market and thus is not the same deception as an instamine. I will say bullocks, they are all free market activities. You are either a Libertarian or you aren't. Choose.

Legality is a different issue. But except for The DAO (and DAOs) where the legal risk seems to involve all participants, that legal risk appears to apply mostly only to the insiders and maybe the promoters.

smooth is making some money, if he wasn't affiliated with the devs there's no problem, he just got lucky to hear about the launch before the crowd

Dash insiders were just making some money also. That didn't stop smooth from fiercely attacking their reputation.

if the launch was public knowledge, and there was no funny business with changing coin supply, or some people had access to better miners etc, then it's OK IMO

DASH was a conspiracy, this just looks like a stealth mine, so if anyone was lucky enough to get on early good luck to them. It doesn't meet my requirements for a good investment though, but it doesn't look corrupt. A good launch it wasn't, but that's not smooth's fault

I say bullocks on your arbitrary distinction:

I think he has every right to mine and promote what ever he wants to. I would applaud him stating he respects that everyone else should also have that same free will and we don't need any sheriffs in the altcoin discussion. I expect though he is somewhat conflicted. So I am curious to read his response.

He will perhaps try to argue that a stealth mine is a free market and thus is not the same deception as an instamine. I will say bullocks, they are all free market activities. You are either a Libertarian or you aren't. Choose.

Legality is a different issue. But except for The DAO (and DAOs) where the legal risk seems to involve all participants, that legal risk appears to apply mostly only to the insiders and maybe the promoters.

Stealth mining is like hiding the prospectus if you want to compare it to investment norms.

Either you have fair and wide distribution or you don't. But I say ethics has nothing to do with it. Choose which forms of distribution you think make the most sense business wise. Ethics just drags us in the arbitrary mud slinging.

[iamnotback]

Attorneys comment on the likelihood of SEC or other regulation/action against DAOs or crypto-currency in general:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHcLKrkwPLQ#t=7789

[kiklo]

Attorneys comment on the likelihood of SEC or other regulation/action against DAOs or crypto-currency in general:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHcLKrkwPLQ#t=7789

Side note, you see those dark circles under that guys eyes in the video.
Symptoms of Liver Stress or Damage, not good.


 

[dste123]

With the increased publicity altcoins has been getting combined with the hacks, i get the feeling gov't oversight / regulation will be stepped up at some point...no idea how effective they'll be though

[iamnotback]

Steem issued the shares via PoW and mined them themselves as a legal loophole instead of IPO.

What legal loophole

Steem (and its founding whales at the helm) failed to qualify for the criteria needed to not be classified as an investment security according to the Howey test, so that investors' expectations aren't secured for future gains by a controlling party:

• decentralized, leaderless organization
• forks allowed (Steem license prevents this)
• widely held so that investors so no party effectively controls the trading market

Afaics, there is nothing illegal about issuing tokens to yourself in a premine when you launch a decentralized, leaderless, open source project unless by doing so you destroy one of the criteria above.

Edit: I guess you could argue that by mining for their personal shares, then even though the Steemit Inc. corporation is legally culpable to have registered the shares given the failure to qualify for the above criteria, then at least @dan, @dantheman, and @ned, aren't legally complicit.

[iamnotback]

I am the progenitor of a Bitcointalk.org thread which discusses in detail the SEC and FinCEN regulations.

IANAL, yet my non-expert interpretation is @dan (aka @dantheman) misinterpreted the FinCEN guidelines and he may have overestimated the SEC investment securities implications.

1. Do not pre-allocate any currency to yourself or others.
2. Do not sell currency directly to others
3. Aways sell through a regulated exchange.
4. Complete the currency and protocol prior to launch.

Pertaining the first 3 items, let's quote directly from Dan's blog:

By contrast, a person that creates units of convertible virtual currency and sells those units to another person for real currency or its equivalent is engaged in transmission to another location and is a money transmitter. In addition, a person is an exchanger and a money transmitter if the person accepts such de-centralized convertible virtual currency from one person and transmits it to another person as part of the acceptance and transfer of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency.

“In undertaking such a conversion transaction, the user is not acting as an exchanger, notwithstanding the fact that the user is accepting a real currency or another convertible virtual currency and transmitting Bitcoin, so long as the user is undertaking the transaction solely for the user’s own purposes and not as a business service performed for the benefit of another. A user’s conversion of Bitcoin into a real currency or another convertible virtual currency, therefore, does not in and of itself make the user a money transmitter.”

The Guidance also defines an administrator of virtual currency as a person or entity “engaged as a business in issuing (putting into circulation) a virtual currency, and who has the authority to redeem (to withdraw from circulation) such virtual currency.”

Note the phrases which I emphasize in bold, italic in the above FinCEN guidance quotes.

Therefor if I am issuing virtual currency but do not have the authority to redeem it (and note Ripple was doing both thus acting as an exchanger), I do not exchange it for real currency (noting that BTC is a virtual currency and is not yet equivalent to real currrency), and I ame doing these transactions for my personal use, then I've got 3 ways that I've avoided falling under classification as a regulated MSB. If any of those 3 hold up, then my non-expert interpretation is that I am not subject to FinCEN regulation, even though I am a US citizen.

As for the SEC's jurisdiction to regulate investment securities and the applicable case law such as the Supreme Court Howey test, I came to the conclusion near the end of the aforementioned BCT thread, that for as long as the token system's protocol is open source, then the users of the system have the control to fork the system and thus they are not relying solely on any one third party for their future expectations of gain, thus it is not investment security. Security means some party is securing (responsible for the gains from) the investment of another. Thus I do not think the protocol needs to be cast in stone, but rather it just needs to be open source. It also probably helps the argument of users' self-responsibility, if there isn't just one monolithic developer or group in control of the ecosystem.

However, note that the Steem blockchain has a non-forkable license, thus appears to be in vulnerable to classification as an investment security from that standpoint alone. They would probably argue that the DPOS witnesses and voting system decentralizes control and places responsibility in the hands of the users. And that this is more like a DAC than an investment security. I don't know if the court will view it that way. The court has said it would look past any obfuscations to the economic reality. The economic reality of Steem appears to be some insiders in control of the system and the users dependent on them. But this is a gray area and IANAL.

[iamnotback]

Just to correct factual errors.

...

ICO's are bad except when i do it  

Did you forget that on June 08, 2016, TPTB_need_war wrote that he discovered that he probably had the wrong interpretation of the law and ethics, because if the blockchain is open source, then the investors are free to fork it.

Again I will give you the last word, for as long as you don't distort any facts.

[iamnotback]

Repeating the revelation I had upthread:

You anal motherfuckers and those who want to regulate our pink shits ecosystem are really fucking loonie (and that includes you Spoetnik because you said you want regulation, lol).

Come on men, wake up to reality. Our pimple sized market cap gambling casino is just analogous to any other late night infomercial for breast enlargement pills. Okay there is a pooling of funds in our case, but apparently there is no global law against this. And each investor owns his own copy of the software and can fork the blockchain if he wants. We are buying software tokens, not company shares. Nobody owns the blockchain.

[iamnotback]

Just wanted to remind you all again i don't think law / regulation = death of crypto.
There is laws for the New York Stock Exchange right ? Well they still trade "penny stocks"

And they are all scams too. I created miningstocks.com in 2007 and so I know something about this.

They trample innovation because only the scammers have the connections, resources, and time to waste getting listed. And they place onerous restrictions on the way a coin could be structured, distributed, etc.. It would absolutely kill the Steem concept, which I think is going to be critical (with significant tweaks, e.g. no voting) to attaining mass adoption.

I hope you also understand that the required underwriting for IPOs is a scam that enables the investment bankers such as Goldman Sachs to take all the early stage gains of an IPO.

Regulation is scam, because the regulated are in bed with the regulators. The regulations end up being a way to keep all the non-scammers out of the profits.

I grow tired of pointing out the hypocrisy.

Yeah we grow tired of your hypocrisy.

Why don't you just admit human nature instead of lying to yourself?

[jacaf01]

Which crypto-tokens are ILLEGAL, unregistered "investment securities" as defined by USA securities regulation law?

I don't think I need to bother about your question once I'm not a US citizen.

Crypto is a new type of asset that is even given the regulators problem to regulate. If you read some of the terms and conditions of some of these ICO, they classified ICO token as a software of the company or a license to use the application in future