Floyd Mayweather, DJ Khaled Charged For Illegally Touting Crypto Offerings (theverge.com)

The Securities and Exchange Commission is charging DJ Khaled and professional boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr for failing to disclose that they were paid promotional fees to tout fraudulent initial coin offerings. The Verge reports: According to the SEC, this is the first time that individuals have faced charges involving ICOs. The Commission is accusing Mayweather of failing to disclose a $100,000 promotional payment and DJ Khaled with a $50,000 one. Both celebrities received these promotional fees from Centra Tech, Inc. earlier this year. Neither Mayweather nor Khaled have admitted to or denied the Commission's findings, but both have agreed to pay back what they had received to promote the ICO and are facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional penalties each. "These cases highlight the importance of full disclosure to investors," said SEC Enforcement Division co-director Stephanie Avakian. "With no disclosure about the payments, Mayweather and Khaled's ICO promotions may have appeared to be unbiased, rather than paid endorsements."

Comments

Well. There are non-fraud ICOs.

[gweihir]

But they are few and far in between and even those are decidedly high-risk. The basic problem is that in a business-context, the blockchain does not solve a new problem, but a solved one. It does it with a bit different characteristics, but so far it seems not really that much better. Take, for example, a bank-to-bank money transfer. This is today either done via an intermediate exchange or based on a direct agreement between the two banks. The exchange charges something (not a lot, a transfer of unlimited amount is something like less than 0.01 cent in Europe if you have volume), and some banks want to get rid of the exchange, but really the most of the work the exchange does is to offer a technical interface to the clients so they do not have to arrange for one with each other bank they do business with. That is not enough to justify going to a blockchain solution. But what about being able to prove the transfer later? Banks already need to have revision-proof storage for that. Hence both source and target bank can already prove the transfer happened and cannot claim it did not. The blockchain adds absolutely nothing here.

As it turns out, that pretty much eliminates the "currency" use, except for the case were you want anonymity. But most blockchain-tech does not actually give you that in actual reality. Monero, as a specialty niche solution, does and that is why it may have an actual valid use-case, but only if it eventually gets its volatility under control. As the cryptocurrency-craze very much banks on people that try to get rich, that means speculation and volatility, again making that "currency" actually useless as a currency. What is left? Supply-chain management? Revision-proof storage still has an edge there. Anything else? Not really.

So this is it basically, except for a few special scenarios, but only ones were volatility and speculation is a severe problem. Hence in general, there is nothing but speculation in here and that invites fraud. The typical ICO is basically a pyramid-scheme and these are illegal for a reason. The disclosure requirements are there for the same reason. And violating them is at the very least preparation for fraud.

Re:Not so bad considering!

[gweihir]

You seem to have slept though the classes where they explained "separation of powers". Trump cannot send anybody to prison and for good reasons. Or are you advocating for making the US a fascist nation were separation of powers gets abolished?