SEC Charges Bitcoin Entrepreneur For Share Offering

<p><pre><code> Voorhees agreed to settle the SEC’s charges by paying full disgorgement of the $15,843.98 in profits plus a $35,000 penalty for a total of more than $50,000. </code></pre> Voorhees later sold S.DICE for 126k BTC ($12.4M at the time). Sounds like a good deal.

It&#x27;s interesting, but not surprising. If you offer to sell securities to the U.S. public, and meet certain other requirements, you need to register with the SEC. It doesn&#x27;t matter if you take payment for the stock in dollars or Bitcoin or cupcakes.

There is a lot of fraud going on in the cryptocoin &quot;IPO&quot; space. It&#x27;s strange that the SEC went after one of the cases that wasn&#x27;t fraud. Maybe it was because they knew who he was. Either way they really need to crack down on these unregistered securities. People are being fleeced left and right.

Wonder what the implications are for the other companies&#x2F;altcoins that go the IPO route. There are a number of well-known companies in the space that IPO without registering with the SEC, most recently MaidSafe [1] from the SAFE network that got a lot of publicity but no questions asked about the IPO (except boasting in their press release that they raised $5 million in the first 5 hours [2]) [1]: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/these-guys-are-creating-a-new-internet-2014-5" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;these-guys-are-creating-a-new...</a> [2]: <a href="http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/cryptocurrency-news-round-dogecoin-party-maidsafe-raises-over-5m-xapo-credit-card-1446019" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ibtimes.co.uk&#x2F;cryptocurrency-news-round-dogecoin-...</a>

This was bound to happen eventually, especially given the indication of insider trading the day before SD was bought out.[0]<p>[0]<a href="http://sinistercyb.org/wp/2013/07/satoshi-dice-sale/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sinistercyb.org&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2013&#x2F;07&#x2F;satoshi-dice-sale&#x2F;</a>

Very interesting that the shares he issued were purchased in bitcoin, and still the SEC decided to step in. How is this different than if you issue shares and sell them for an in game currency?