[AnthonyMouse]

Which seems like kind of an arbitrary distinction anyway.

Suppose you create a new coin under similar circumstances as Bitcoin. No pre-mine. But it's a new coin and nobody cares about it, so nobody is mining it, so you can go mine it yourself and get all the block rewards for a while. Then once you have a lot of it you go about promoting the coin and developing the technology which causes it to be worth something.

In theory the difference is that anybody else could have mined the coin from the first day too, but at that point nobody else had any reason to think it would ever be worth anything.

[adastra22]

If you're looking for consistency and logic in regulator rulings, I'm afraid you're going to be left wanting.