RE: Ripple Lawsuit Update: The Judge is FUCKING PISSED!

The SEC’s untethered position would convert the sale of all types of ordinary assets — diamonds, gold, soybeans, cars, and even works of art — into sales of securities,” says its filing for a summary judgment.

Ultimately it all boils down to the above statement. When someone buys something, either the thing they are buying itself has value (commodity) or the thing they are buying merely represents ownership in a separate enterprise (security). Most every crypto I am aware of is clearly the former - i.e. they have no investment contract or ownership of anything, and the token itself is valuable for how it can be used. Sure many tokens trade for a lot higher price than their actual utility would suggest, but the same can be said for many commodities as well like gold and diamonds.

If the courts find that XRP is a security, then that would mean pretty much every commodity is all of a sudden a security. I saw a great analogy on Twitter a while back that the forever stamps sold by the US post office are the first "utility token" and work nearly identically to many of the cryptos that the SEC says are securities.

The post office sold the forever stamps to fund its operations, and they were guaranteed to be able to be used for a specific utility (mail a letter) for which the price would increase over time. So people could "invest" in the stamps now and be guaranteed a profit over time as the cost of mailing a letter increased. In fact, many people did purchase large quantities of forever stamps with the purpose of reselling them at higher prices later.