The United States Securities and Exchange Commission1 has extracted a Settlement from Erik Voorhees that consists of $15,843.98 in profits and a penalty of $35,000 for the high crime of having been involved in financing two offerings with Bitcoin.
The two offerings were the forgettable FeedZeBirds2 an asset listed on the now long defunct GLBSE and SatoshiDice, listed as S.DICE on the still virile MPEx. If you read the Security and Exchange Commission's actual filing you can see that all of the fines and settlements relate to FeedZeBirds with any actions relating to S.DICE on MPEx consisting of a strong finger wag and stern look.
If you've been following this story a while you may remember the Security and Exchange Commission's Daphne Waxman reached out to Mircea Popescu of MPEx to inquire about the matter and in an exchanged published for posterity was instructed in exactly how the agency could cooperate with MPEx in an inquiry. It remains to be seen if the Securities and Exchange Commission has taken any further steps towards building, or considering the building of a relationship with MPEx.
With the light assessment in this case, it seems that the SEC's ability to act in mature Bitcoin markets3 may be limited unless they work to build cooperative relationships with those markets.
- You know, not the SEC that plays foozball goods. [↩]
- An attempt to monetize tweets using bitcoin. [↩]
- As opposed to GLBSE and cheaper knockoffs thereof. [↩]
[...] space this has resulted in incredibly lulzy situations like the Securities and Exchange Commision scratching out a settlement for one thing, parading it as something else, and letting Erik Voorhees ... from any future actions by them for [...]