Coinbase is a lot more accessible to the SEC than a shitcoin out of China or Bulgaria or whatnot. It's hardly an unreasonable choice, and I'm not aware of any legal theory that says the SEC can't (or even shouldn't) take that approach.

Coinbase needs far better defenses than they are using, definitely screams incompetence on their end too

There are defenses to the SEC’s approach as it has nothing to do with the remoteness of some issuers, it has to do with the shaky legal ground and symbiosis that the SEC has relied upon. The SEC’s standard can be equally applied to anyone that purchased a baseball card hoping to flip it, where that unilaterally makes all shops and ebay to be unregistered securities exchanges in violation of Federal Securities laws no matter what the baseball card company did to ensure otherwise. Either all consumer product industries and intermediaries are affected, or most crypto tokens aren't at all. Or there is a clear way to make a crypto token that fits into the consumer product framework exclusively, but the SEC wont say and says “its always been clear”. Thats pretty much where we are, based on the SEC’s own logic used in this very case.

> The SEC’s standard can be equally applied to anyone that purchased a baseball card hoping to flip it, where that unilaterally makes all shops and ebay to be unregistered securities exchanges in violation of Federal Securities laws no matter what the baseball card company did to ensure otherwise.

No; the baseball card market fails various bits of the Howey test. If you sold shares in a baseball card collection, that might be a security.

https://www.sec.gov/corpfin/framework-investment-contract-an...

> When a promoter, sponsor, or other third party (or affiliated group of third parties) (each, an "Active Participant" or "AP") provides essential managerial efforts that affect the success of the enterprise, and investors reasonably expect to derive profit from those efforts, then this prong of the test is met.

In the baseball card market, the card manufacturer could cease to exist without the success of the enterprise being impacted. (This is why BTC and ETH are currently being treated by the SEC as non-securities; the original creators of both could vanish without impacting the market for the coins, which is much less true for most coins.)

> the card manufacturer could cease to exist without the success of the enterprise being impacted.

while a promoter, sponsor, or other third party could pop up at any time.

it says nothing about manufacturer or issuer for that prong of the howey test.

and the same is true for all of the tokens listed in the case against Coinbase.

I guess your argument is based on looking for differences to support your worldview instead of looking for similarities, and its not clear if you're aware of the similarities.

The "manufacturer" disappearing from tokens makes them more scarce in many cases. Their functionality remains the same.

another thing you might not be aware of is that the SEC is aware of this. Other commissioners - specifically Hester Pierce - and enforcement division personnel has made this observation, the people calling the shots in the enforcement division and the head commission are avoiding this because it breaks their whole framework if the courts really feel compelled to break this down more holistically. Thats why their approach to unilaterally calling things "evidence" when they haven't even proved they are evidence is a weak evolution of their practice. Prolonging an inevitable challenge to their authority and aspects of their existence.