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by pjbyrne 2979 days ago
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.

1 comments

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?