Overnight Trillionaire

At the beginning of yesterday, I was just a regular college student. By the evening I had a net worth north of $5,000,000.

Following the methods outlined in this post by steemits own Scatmandingo, it is currently possible to create assets with staggering value contributing towards your net worth overnight.

How? Thanks to cheeky cryptocurrencies flying in the face SEC definition of securities. Scatmandingo summarized it best:

"Any publicly traded token that carries with it an expectation of profit from someone else’s effort is pretty much considered a security like a stock or bond"

It is shockingly easy to create your crypto coin, promise to pay a dividend to the holders of said coin, then sell to a willing buyer and effectively control the "market" value of the coin.

Implications? With a little cooperation from a lawyer or accountant that knows nothing about crypto it is possible to claim ones own net worth is incredulously high. This would enable one to become a SEC defined bonafide "Accredited Investor" (income of $200k or more or net worth over $1m), allowing them to open themselves up to high-risk/reward investment opportunities such as ICOs.

More concerningly, it also could lead to the scamming of inexperienced investors through clever persuasion. Although the "Accredited Investor" designation may not carry with it much besides access to more elite investments, it may be enough to persuade a young speculator to throw their piggy bank a fraudulent crypto currency that apparently skyrocketed in value overnight.

The SEC doesn't know how to regulate cryptocurrency. In this statement they basically admit this and simply suggest vigilance, or better yet just stay away from the whole thing.

The crawling pace and tedious detail of bureaucratic processes need to adapt. The average time it takes for legislation to make it through congress is about 250 days. In crypto time that is a millennium. Solutions to such modern problems are out of my scope, the best idea I can imagine is a decentralized professional credibility platform paired with a sort of digital circuit court, but that's just the imagination of a student on espresso.

These are issues that need to be addressed before they are exploited by bad actors, from scammers to terrorists. Techies that just want "the man" to keep his nose out of their stash of Garlicoin so they can bring down the Federal Reserve need to snap out of their day dream and start talking about real solutions.