[pjbyrne]

All of the pre-sale participants were BTC holders because that is the only currency the Foundation accepted for presale Eth.

The question is how many of those BTC holders there are and whether presales/ICOs usually follow that pattern. Most don't, they use all their powder in the beginning (there's no Indian summer surge of donations towards the end of the sale). Even when they do it is not as pronounced as here. That's what makes the curve weird.

[drcode]

This is totally wrong: Since there was no "upper limit" on total cap of ether in the presale there was a significant incentive in waiting until the last minute to benefit from additional information (i.e. to know what percentage of ETH supply you were bidding on) and similarly to withhold bid info from competitors- This was partially offset by a gradual decline in ETH/USD exchange rate set by the presale terms.

It seems pretty clear that you haven't studied the mechanisms of these sorts of crypto auctions, since you are ignoring a lot of the underlying complexity and the many differences between different auctions in practice, or you have forgotten a lot of the intricacies of this particular auction. (which may have been a good or bad design in this case, both cases can be made.)

If you think it's common for actors in an auction system to "use all their powder in the beginning" unless there's a explicit reward for bidding late then you've clearly never been a victim of ebay bid sniping LOL

[pjbyrne]

I've updated the post to include a chart of the Tezos raise, which was both much larger than the Eth raise and I think illustrates my point rather well.

[drcode]

So I'll grant you that the differences in the smoothness in the ethereum vs tezos charts is interesting, but your argument is still unconvincing to me for two reasons: First of all, you're basically saying "The ethereum graph is so perfectly what you'd expect from an ideal auction that it can't possibly be ideal" which is the sort of argument that requires more convincing evidence. Secondly, the Tezos auction had many differences in the auction design from the ethereum auction, which could be a more mundane reason for differences in these curves.

...also, I feel like you still need to explain more explicitly why bidders making purchases in multiple lots is a nefarious thing- Does the argument just boil down to saying there were too many big fish, which means that ethereum may not be "decentralized" and therefore a security? If allowing arbitrary people to make their own purchasing decisions on an asset is not adequately decentralized, then it seems you've defined "decentralized" to the point where no asset could ever reach your threshold to fall under that definition.

[pjbyrne]

Well, it's either the ideal auction or it isn't. The question is how likely is it that a coin auction running for two weeks would produce a curve like that. I can't find any others in crypto so far, though I am open to being proven wrong if someone can show these are common and rule out promoter action as being the cause.

Making purchasers in multiple lots isn't nefarious at all, it just disguises how many purchasers there are, which is a relevant consideration for the _Howey_ analysis. If (arguendo) 85% of the tokens are in the hands of 1 person, that would militate against a finding that Ethereum is like Bitcoin and lacks the necessary degree of organization to constitute a scheme in which any one person shoulders personal civil or criminal liability.

If, again for sake of argument, they find that the largest hodler only holds 1% of the tokens, then that tends to make it more difficult to identify a central promoter and parallel investors (think: LPs without a partnership deed) which is usually required to bring enforcement.

I'm not making normative claims here, just saying that those three factors (common fund, repo, likely centralization of Ether holdings in few hands) tends to suggest the scheme is in the "regulated" bucket rather than the "unregulated" bucket.

[pazimzadeh]

The sale lasted for 42 days.

> The price of ether is initially set to a discounted price of 2000 ETH per BTC, and will stay this way for 14 days before linearly declining to a final rate of 1337 ETH per BTC. The sale will last 42 days, concluding at 23:59 Zug time September 2

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sal...

How much of it did you graph?