I am not saying they are the same. But it is really semantics. And the reality is most of my Ethereum I acquired via mining. Lots of sweat equity went into it. We suffered through hot days, two outlets melted over the years, I had to build all the rigs which is a lot more work than buying a Bitcoin ASIC miner and using it out of the box. Motherboards, hard drives, power supplies, graphics cards, memory, cases, cables, tables. All that shit had to be bought, assembled, etc. One of my typical rigs had 4 power supplies. I used a mother board that could accept multiple power supplies but even then I had to split the power supply cables to get to 4 units. It is a lot more technical than setting up an ASIC miner.
So how is the SEC going to declare ETH a security now after all that time and many people who mined it. It didn't help that Gensler himself stated Ethereum was a commodity, along with Hinman. The time has gone to try and declare ETH a security. They also approved ETH Futures to trade on commodity exchanges like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. They and the "Media" are playing games at this point. Probably to allow entities to accumulate ETH at lower entry points.
No doubt you put in a lot of hard work. Just like people put a lot of hard work into acquiring investment in Bernie Madoff's fund, or acquiring XRP tokens, by trading their hard earned cash. You actually put in proof of work, and not only did they pre-mine you, but then they changed the protocol on you, and indeed also the monetary policy.
The issue here, is whether seemingly illegally issued tokens, can nevertheless become shares which can be legitimately traded on exchanges. Your best hope, I think, is that the SEC punishes the issuers, settles with them, but allows the tokens to trade. It is possible this would happen (eg Vitalik gets a Billion dollar fine and hands over x amount to Eth to the US Government), maybe serves some token time in prison for fraud and securities violations (no pun intended) and then all goes ahead with Eth being converted into a listed company after extensive re-organization. There are some easily examples of such agreements with illegal issuers, EOS I think being one. So there is hope. Same with Ripple - I think the SEC wants around 5B to settle and then also some jail time to be served? But to go so far as to allow something with these origins to be traded as a security in an ETF is going a step too far I think. (Again, nothing personal view, but just applying the law as I see it - its just too much a perversion of the law, and an absolute moral hazard.
Lets see. I have a little ETH, but would likely still be more harmed by dilution of BTC by ETH, than I would be benefitting from ETH being allowed into a US ETF. So, for me personally, I would prefer to see BTC as the only ETF for a long time ahead. The other big problem is where to draw the line. If ETH is legitimized, then arguably the floodgates are opened to any issuer of securities to circumvent the SEC.
