News: BitTorrent (BTT) ICO Aftermath / Justice for Bitgrail Victims / Kik fights SEC

What's up everyone, welcome back to Box Mining and let's start off with some cryptocurrency news. And there's some actually good news coming out today. There's some finally some justice for victims of the Big Grail hack last year. So last year Big Grail was hacked. They were reported to have a loss of nearly $170 million worth of nano. So what the court found was that the court found the CEO, Mr. Ferrano, to be personally liable for the losses incurred. And this is actually quite a good for this whole space because now the exchange owners, they can't hide behind companies can just go bankrupt and not go to jail or have their personal assets seized. Here they actually seized a small amount, $1 million of personal assets, including its cars and some of its crypto. So the reason why the court did this was because he was just so negligent. If you look at the court findings, $2.5 million was lost in July. Another $7.5 million was lost in October 2017. And then he filed for this transfer of companies. So he wanted to protect himself once he starts making the run for it. Pretty, pretty bad. And this just goes to show that the courts do care, but when they care, it's a little bit too late. And I've got experience with this myself with MT Gox, you know, by the time that I made all these filings, that money is long gone. I'm still waiting on, you know, this two, three year trial. Now, I'll do other exchange news as well. This is actually quite important. Liquid.io has just closed down. They made an announcement saying, you know what, we're closing down. You got 30 days to withdraw your funds. Don't guys do not wait for that 30 days. If you have funds in Liquid.io, withdraw them right now. Just, you know, even just close this video, even just go there, withdraw all your funds, because it's very likely that they are not solvent. They don't have enough funds to refund everyone. Next up, let's follow up on what's happened with Bitcoin. So this is an ICO that sold out yesterday. And you guys know my opinion on that. I've made a live stream about why I think this is a very well engineered project to say the least. The reason why it's well engineered, it's listed on Binance Labs. So it kind of implies that Binance may potentially list it after all, it's on their own freaking launchpad. Then we have Tron. Tron has a history of market making. And we also have this Bitcoin, which, you know, I guess it has a bigger name out there, name recognition. And that's why I felt like a lot of people will go into this for the wrong reasons. The reason being that they can make a quick flip. And what was the reality? Well, the reality was very similar. If you actually look at the number of people who actually successfully got in, it wasn't that huge. It was 622 for the Tron sale, 340 for the BNB sale, which is less than a thousand total people got in. And the reason for this was because the website was actually, the Binance launchpad actually stumbled either by the number of sheer number of people trying to access it, or by an intentional attack by some whales or some group, maybe even insiders who tried to attack it. So they are the only ones who get in on this deal, and then they can potentially flip it on to the general public. So that's my opinion on it. I think like it's engineered very well in terms of the actual use case, it's actually going to be problematic because Bitcoin is a protocol. So there's a lot of people who definitely use it. And we're actually talking about how there were companies that actually use it. For example, we even have League of Legends, Riot actually used one of their BitPort protocols, but they can implement their own version of it. So whether or not the whole community can use BTT and will use a BTT token, that's very, very speculative at this current point. Lastly, this bit of news would have probably made me excited back in 2018. The headlines is pretty huge. It's our ICO token security startup wants a judge to decide. And on social media, even there's this talk about, you know, the guys from PIC ICO trying to go to war with the SEC. So I thought, you know, if back in the day, I thought, wow, man, God, these, you know, cryptos fighting back. But at the same time, there's some serious issues with this as well. And the issue here is that the SEC isn't accusing PIC of fraud, but rather, it's the fact that PIC did not register the sale with the SEC. Now, the interesting part about this is that PIC is retaliating with a 39-page rebuttal saying, actually, because the terms didn't constitute an investment contract, and investors weren't led to expect a profit from the purchase of PIN, they're not a security. Honestly, it's kind of like a wink wink, because, you know, a lot of these ICOs, a lot of people buy them to flip them for a profit. So you can't really, you know, you might not have language there, but we all kind of know what's happening. I actually think that a lot of securities, in terms of what they're doing, and this is something I want to talk about later, is that they give us impression that's related to the company. And because they can change the terms of whatever time they want, there needs to be some sort of legislation on centralized projects. Decentralized projects are a whole new deal. So this is why I think we need, in this space, to make this distinction between what is a decentralized project and what is a centralized one. For me personally, I think for utility tokens and for tokens on centralized platforms, they seriously need to be regulated. We saw some serious bullshit coming this month, especially in relation to what happened with 10x and their pay token, and with the B token as well. So with that in mind, I think we need to make that distinction between what is a utility token and what is a decentralized currency. Decentralized currencies, their power stems from the fact that they are beyond this regulation. But centralized projects definitely need some protection for token holders. And anyways, that's it for me today, guys. Thank you guys so much for watching this episode. If you guys like news updates, tell me what you guys think about this whole Tron ICO from yesterday. Do you feel like you guys tried to participate and not get in? Do you think it's a big scam? Do you think that there is actually use cases for BTT token? Tell me in the comment section below. Thank you guys so much for watching. See you next time.