[jdavila90]

"All these things were put in place because your average person doesn't know what they're doing, and they think stock ownership is just gambling"

In order to not be an "average person," you must make 200K+ in salary or have 1 million dollars in cash?

I'm not saying that ICOs are currently perfect by any means. There will be a NEED for some type of regulation and time for the market to figure itself out. Unless youre in the elite group of VCs or a very wealthy person, then you should be excited about the ability to be able to directly invest in a company. As far as voting rights, that can be implemented in the tokens.

This is still very new and one should assume that the current state of ICOs will change as people start figuring it out

[ccrush]

Those opportunities are there for people who want to invest. The rules are in place to stop solicitations for investment, not investors. Anyone can go looking for these opportunities and participation is not hinged on being an accredited investor. The rules are to stop these startups from making promises they can't deliver to people who can't protect themselves when they don't.

[kolinko]

Having participated in the very first ICO (Satoshi Dice), and seeing the field develop - it seems they are getting more and more professional every single year.

In 2017 we will probably see the first rating agencies for ICOs, plus distributed ways of doing due dilligence. It is quite possible that in a few years the investors will be protected as much, if not more, as in traditional investment opportunities.

It will be a dofferent model though - you will have scamcoins for speculators, but also many ways of gathering information about the startups, much more accessible and sensible than the current system. This may lead to naive investors being protected/educated well enough.

Look at the internet right now. Imagine that in 1996 the government required a ton of red tape to launch websites, and would pose limits on who can access it (so your grandma woukdn't put her cc numbers on a scam site)... That's how the investment environment looks right now.

Instead what we did was to allow anyone access and publish, and fight scamming by prosecution, education and built-in browser security. People are still getting scammed on the internet daily, but it's kind of under control, and the benefits far outweighted the losses.

[manigandham]

> In order to not be an "average person," you must make 200K+ in salary or have 1 million dollars in cash?

Yes, those limits are inherently non-average so by definition it works.

Using monetary wealth isn't a perfect proxy for sophistication or intelligence but it does correlate and allows for risk tolerance by the fact that there's enough income to fall back on.