With baseball cards, You have an expectation that the MLB will continue to promote and develop Baseball as a top sport. You purchased an illegal security.
With baseball cards, You have an expectation that the MLB will continue to promote and develop Baseball as a top sport. You purchased an illegal security.
No, you don't. For starters, baseball cards are not sold or marketed by the MLB, the teams, or the players, and buying a card does not entail any ownership in either the MLB, the companies making the card, the store where you bought the card, the players, or the teams. They're not sold by the companies that make them as business opportunities, and in fact most cards aren't worth anything.
But every NFT tells you that you should buy their NFT because their efforts to promote the NFT as a business will lead to it increasing in value. And legally, that makes all the difference.
Rare things are not automatically valuable. I still have "dragon dice" and an original deck of cards from an old lord of the rings game. Basically worthless.
This only would be the case if people continued to care about baseball. In reality, fewer people would care less and less over time. For example, there is not great value in jousting paraphenelia.
Its also worth nothing that the SEC is losing in court, losing the support of Congress and losing the support of the White House
specifically as more people, including judges, notice this lack of distinction and the SEC’s unwillingness (and inability) to describe why there is a distinction
there is either a way to issue crypto collections and collect money for them without being a security, or all other collections sold are securities with unregistered broker dealers operating illegally and fraudulently for the past 100 years
That's not true, just wishful thinking on your part.
Not all collectibles are unregistered offerings, obviously. Being a collectible also doesn't mean it can't be an unregistered offering also. This one clearly was.
You seem to be very keen on making this rather dubious point all over this thread. Certainly more motivated than I would consider “normal” for someone just wishing to weigh in on a topic they care about. Are you connected with this, or just having a particularly manic day?
One key difference between MTG cards (or baseball cards, or most any traditional collectible item) and NFTs: If the SEC shut down Wizards of the Coast and/or caused them to radically alter their businesses, old Magic cards would likely rise in value as a result, rather than cease having any material value whatsoever, as is the case with most digital assets.
Baseball cards aren’t owned by the MLB. That would be a weird expectation like buying Oakland raiders hat and expecting the hat manufacture to stop the raiders from moving to Las Vegas because it would devalue the apparel.
People buy baseball cards to collect them. I have a bunch from my childhood. They weren’t investments.
That seems materially different from an expectation that you will make money on the card, or that the value of your card is determined by MLB's profitability and future earnings.
That's still not a security, because if someone buys all the baseball cards, they don't control anything about MLB or have a right to its profits, for example.
There are companies that use the cards of specific players as a way of investing in that player - they better the player does, the more their cards are worth.
Because in this case the company did exactly that.
While they didn't call them securities they marketed them as securities.