“Just because you call it a playtpus, that doesn’t mean it still ain’t a duck,” said Samson Williams, adjunct professor at UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law.
I approached Williams and George Pullen, another adjunct professor at the school, because they’re part of the law school’s interest in the digital world’s effect on the law, as reflected in the Twitter hashtag #UNHLawBlockchain.
The simpler of the two New Hampshire cases involves a half-dozen people, many associated with the extreme-libertarian Free Keene cluster, who were charged by the FBI last month with operating an “illegal cryptocurrency exchange.” The FBI claims they sold bitcoin for what cryptocurrency fans love to call “fiat currency” – you and I call it money – which is a perfectly legal activity.
Law enforcement has been leery of bitcoin being used in money laundering or other nefarious activities because the technology makes it easier to avoid notice.
The other case is harder to get your head around.
They were used to register files on the LBRY network, which is scattered among users’ computers instead of only residing on a central server, or to boost their presence.
You can keep the token and impress your friends with it, assuming your friends are easily impressed, but there’s no hope that it will one day be worth 26 cents.
By contrast, LBRY credits did have a secondary market, as they could be sold separately and bought by people who had the expectation that their value would go up like any other cryptocurrency.
The SEC argues that such trading makes LBRY credits the functional equivalent of stocks and other securities and as a result LBRY should have registered itself with the SEC and followed laws and regulations built up around securities trading over the past eight decades.
It says its credits are just a commodity that “facilitates the LBRY protocol” and lets people function within its video service, called Odysee.
Williams and Pullen don’t find that claim convincing.