Re: Potential list of securities in the US [was: Unlawful Unregistered Securities, DID and VC]

I agree with several waypoints in your chain of logic, Melvin.
Specifically, I agree that allegations have been made and are being
adjudicated, that your list of allegation targets seems accurate, and that
W3C should be careful not to be tied to illegal activity.

However, "tied to" is a pretty subjective phrase. It strains credulity in
my mind to imagine that W3C could be accused of endorsing or promoting a
token when it simply records the existence of published work by other
entities -- entities who happen to be using a particular blockchain for an
activity that either involves no tokens at all, or that merely consumes
them. This is especially true when blockchains have been a major phenomenon
in tech for the past decade plus, neither W3C publications nor the
publications W3C cites mention tokens, and before allegations have been
adjudicated. Plus, I think Kyle's logic about jurisdictions deserving equal
(non-)reaction from the W3C is pretty strong. If different jurisdictions
are coming to different conclusions, what is the argument for the W3C
privileging some (likely) conclusions over others?

Where I think you could make a stronger argument is if you grounded it not
in legality but in ethics. I think perception of tokens by many is that
they are unsavory, regardless of whether they are legal. And that's true
across jurisdictions. But this point is also controversial, and I think not
all tokens have the same ethical profile, so it's only an iffy argument for
me.

But suppose I were to grant the soundness of the preceding logic in some
form. I still find the conclusion unwarranted, because it seems to depend
on the idea that parties using a DID in a token-associated ecosystem are
doing something that is either illegal or unethical. Under any form of the
analysis above, I don't think either would be true. Aren't the legal
allegations and the ethical concerns about the *selling* of tokens rather
than *buying with* tokens? As I understand it, the people that prosecutors
are looking to shut down (or ethicists are criticizing) are those
building/promoting/selling the token, and not their putative victims (which
is the status that DID owners on such networks would have). N'est ce pas?

A DID method spec that describes how to create DIDs within token-associated
ecosystem X should not be equated with an attempt to sell X's tokens. If
anything, it is the opposite: *an attempt to deliver genuine value to
someone who chose to enter ecosystem X for other reasons*. Should that,
too, be illegal/unethical? (Or are you arguing that people will enter X
purely to get a DID? Given our registry with 160+ alternatives, many of
them free, that seems highly unbelievable...) Further, it could be argued
that a DID method for X actually provides a migration path for X's putative
victims to leave that ecosystem. All they have to do is prove their control
of did:X, then prove their control of non-token-oriented did:Y, then start
using did:Y. The interoperability of DID methods thus lessens the harm to
victims. If we remove did:X from our registry, this benefit disappears.

Surely delivering value and lessening harm are not what W3C must distance
itself from...