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Comment by ericpauley | Hacker News Reader

Yes and no. Gold isn’t a security, for instance. Unfortunately (for coinbase) ICOs and related grifts pretty clearly meet both the spirit and the letter of the SEC’s definition.

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The other part of the definition is that it can be easily bought and sold on an exchange. I think if there were an exchange for physical gold then it would be considered a security.

Exchange-traded commodity futures (including those for physical delivery of 100 troy ounces of gold) have existed for a long time and are regulated by the CFTC.

Right, and those are securities, but gold itself is not a security because it's relatively difficult to trade.

> I think if there were an exchange for physical gold then it would be considered a security.

I don't think that if you were to make an exchange that made it easy to trade physical gold (rather than deriviatives) the SEC would suddenly determine that gold was a security.

There's loads of trading platforms that allow you to buy and sell gold.

https://tradingplatforms.com/commodity/gold-trading/

But these are all about trading gold-related stocks and ETFs, which are securities, right? It's just the actual metal that isn't.

Is the relationship pretty much ICOs or tokens are a security and older options are like gold?

ie: BTC, LTC, Monero are gold but an ERC20 token is a security and Cardano is a security because it was an ICO? I don't know off hand if Ethereum was an ICO.

I keep thinking this but I can't remember seeing anyone suggest that each coin could be categorized differently. Is it possible we ended up splitting the crypto currency market into multiple groups?

It comes down to the Howie test. Matt Levine has written a fair bit on this: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-02-13/the-se...

> but an ERC20 token is a security

What is WETH then?

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