John Deaton, the founder of CryptoLaw US and a pro-Ripple attorney who has been closely following the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple Labs, tweeted that two words in Dr. Hinman’s recently made-public deposition have essentially been deleted along with more other text.
Deaton did not identify or confirm who or what they were, but he shared some of the papers in the public domain, where the redacted language may be seen. He challenged the public to speculate on what those two words may be.
On the person described by Hinman, the commenters appear to have a solid consensus.
Here’s what community’s guesses are — Ethereum
Deaton made a suggestion that the two terms above allude to a person and a business. Virtually everyone in the cryptosphere responded in the comments thread with “Vitalik Buterin” and “Ethereum.” Some have also mentioned Joe Lubin, another co-founder of Ethereum, and his software company ConsenSys.
A few people said they believed the subject to be Jed McCaleb, the initial Ripple CTO and co-creator of both Ripple and the XRP Ledger. In contrast to Chris Larsen, another co-founder of Ripple, he was not sued by the SEC.
The creator of CryptoLaw brought up one of the Hinman emails that had been made public earlier this week in another tweet. Hinman calls his lecture the “Ether Speech” in this email and informs the recipients that “he’s meeting with Vitalik Buterin the following week to confirm his understanding of the Ethereum network and The Ethereum Foundation.” This might be interpreted as a signal as to who and what business are mentioned in the aforementioned tweet from Deaton.
These assumptions are quite likely given that Ethereum and Bitcoin are the only cryptocurrencies that the SEC has classed as commodities rather than securities.
