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Comment by anton_tarasenko | Hacker News Reader

The SEC uses quite a mild language here. Issuers often avoid mentioning even what they sell: revenue flow, profit, or just hashes. White papers has no traces of legal entities involved, dispute resolution jurisdiction, financial statements.

A proper prospectus:

- https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1447599/000119312515...

And how ICO white papers look like:

- https://detectortoken.com/docs/DetectorToken_White_Paper.pdf

- https://magos.io/bluepaper.pdf

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The cryptocurrency community is hilariously bad (well, it would be funny if people weren't getting fleeced) about putting blog posts through Latex and acting like they've written a "paper".

The people who have written dozens of real papers that end up in a dustbin somewhere are jealous. The funny thing is most of these docs would be more accessible as blog posts, but those don't provide the same faux-academic thing con men need.

Not sure if they're actually that amateur or it's more cynical and they know it's the way you do business - probably both.

Could be a new idoimatic phrase:

"And if you believe that then have I got a paper for you..."

The reason some ICOs release a white paper in LaTeX is that there is often a lot of math to be written out. Take for example IOTA's white paper: https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf

Often, it's easy to spot the ones that are doing the faux-academic thing.

IOTA's paper was what I was thinking about while reading OPs remark about blogpost to LaTeX conversion.

I'm not sure if I'm dumb, or its dumb (trinary, whaa?) but I had a really hard time getting through it without rolling my eyes a whole bunch. I still have 77 MegaIOTA, just in case someone ever figures out a use for it.

For the time being its going to be more of a "I'll know it when I see it and so will you" type of situation. Preventing scams and things advertised as investment opportunities appear to be the focus without trying to pin down an exact framework for detecting it, but I wouldn't say they are being vague about what it is they're are going to limit. If they tried creating an exact framework with the information available today it would likely miss the mark in terms of a balance between restrictiveness and protection to investors/purchasers.

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