Steem was mined and then was bought and sold (not just by Steemit) on the market. Not ICO.

As @smooth also agreed (archived here), you’re using irrelevant words to attempt to obfuscate the economic reality.

The Supreme Court’s Howey decision stated that the SEC must always look at the economic reality and disregard any descriptive words (obfuscating schemes or other attempts to deceive or obfuscate the economic reality) that are irrelevant to that economic reality.

You state that Steem was mined, but it was not competitively mined. The insiders mined (about ~80+%) of the money supply because the mining was intentionally done in a sneaky and stealth manner so that the insiders would not have much competition during the mining. And the mining was not over a long period of time, but very rapid so that the insiders could mine the money supply at a very low-cost.

Thus economically all the mining phase did was to issue tokens to insiders at nearly no cost. Thus economically it is equivalent to pre-mining (~80+% of) the tokens.

Then the insiders sell these tokens to investors to raise funds. Selling tokens that were creating at no cost by the issuers, is effectively an ICO, but just intentionally obfuscated.

In terms of the Howey Test that determines whether STEEM tokens are illegal investment securities, there was a transfer of value from investors to the insiders who the investors depend on for ongoing managerial and development efforts. Thus STEEM is an illegal investment security.

You’re a fucking idiot.

At least learn the subject matter before you go downvoting my blog and removing $100 of earnings!

Poloniex will hopefully get their node/wallet running again.

If Polo doesn’t implode before that.

Another Mt. Gox is coming and Polo has been exhibiting signs of it.

Bittrex and

Correction noted. I wasn’t aware that Bittrex is still offering trading of STEEM.