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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> Can you get in trouble for promoting fake money from Monopoly and trying to convince people that the collectible value of the Monopoly money will increase?

Monopoly money isn’t a security. ICO tokens are. Securities laws, including those requiring disclosure of sales incentives, apply to securities.

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> It's an entity with a value specified by the eminent. If it's a fashion startup, one token can be equal to one dress or a yearly license of a software in case of a hi-tech startup. You even can issue tokens of yourself and a token holder will be able to buy an hour of your work with the token. You can “tokenize” everything.

From https://www.google.com.hk/amp/s/cointelegraph.com/ico-101/wh...

So basically if you top up your namecheap account it will count as a token? Looks like yes, from this definition. Please explain to me why I'm wrong.

Like any other thing the SEC would consider a security, it’s complicated and technical. The article refers to https://www.sec.gov/litigation/investreport/34-81207.pdf as the SEC’s basis for considering how “coins” relate to securities.

You may be right that your Namecheap account balance is a kind of token. But not all tokens are securities. The SEC is only interested in ones that are.

With something like trying to pump Monopoly money I imagine you'd just get hit will some flavor of fraud charge if someone bought, and maybe a conspiracy charge depend on whether or not you were paid to do it.

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