News: suit against Ripple, Ronn Torossian, fake KodakCoins, sports blockchain

  • A securities fraud suit has just been filed against Ripple Labs. It’s a class action suit, filed by Ryan Coffey (PDF). The grounds is: XRP is a security, he lost money and it’s their fault. His loss is around $600 — and that in Tethers. Stephen Palley thinks the class representative may be problematic. “Not saying it’s contrived but defense counsel certainly might.” Nicholas Weaver suspects “an attempt to manufacture a class action securities lawsuit by recruiting a plaintiff” and that this was a rush to file: “Assuming the SEC says ‘XRP is a security’ on Monday (IMO, highly likely, this court filing explains why), there is pretty good odds the price will tank and you will get real plaintiffs. But first filing lawyers win.” The question now is if it survives the inevitable motion to dismiss. Bloomberg reports.

 

 

 

 

  • BBC News: Is football ready to embrace the Bitcoin world? With a slightly-mangled quote from me. (Entirely my fault — the journalist emailed me to check wording and I didn’t get back to him in time.) The story here is that the money people in sports missed out big on the Internet, so they’re desperate not to miss out on whatever might be the next big thing. So there’s blockchain promoters pushing the usual selection of utterly inane ideas. I spoke to the journalist for about an hour, we had fun going through some really bad ICOs. But all the stuff talked about here — media rights distribution (in the manner of musical blockchain proposals), gambling, ticketing, drug testing — is stuff that’s seriously being proposed, even if it’s ridiculous. Oh, and apparently putting personally identifying information on an immutable blockchain will actually be good for GDPR compliance, somehow.

 

 

  • TechCrunch: Reports of institutional crypto desks have been greatly exaggerated, with quotes from me making up about half the story. Goldman Sachs are about as committed to this as if they had customers asking to deal in Beanie Babies, and their Bitcoin guy is currently exploring the regulatory issues. Jameson Lopp concurred: this is almost certainly not Good News and Serious Money for Bitcoin. But I do like the photo they used.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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