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Investors in ICOs could see jail time, not just lose capital

9 points by StanislawMel ↗ HN
I haven't really been able to wrap my head around why large investors with significant profiles are leaping so carelessly into ICOs. The same kinds of VC information games we're all used to take on completely different dimensions of risk with retail investor money on the table.

I hear about large funds out there helping coordinate ICO raises, setting terms and stages for the raise, and obtaining information from the company that they know retail investors don't have. It's basically begging for the SEC to come down like the hand of God once they decide your token is a security. Which it is.

So I wrote a post about it, and would love to hear some ideas on why I might be wrong.

https://hackernoon.com/investor-liability-for-icos-could-be-downturn-catalyst-e902ffdb9eeb

5 comments

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modeless
Interesting article. Posting advice: on HN, unlike reddit, you shouldn't make a text post linking to an article. Just link to the article. Also, don't use a different title in the HN post and the article, they will just change it back to the article title later.
StanislawMel
Ah whoops - that's right. This isn't Reddit. Thanks for your patience.
blakdawg
I think the title is a little aggressive - it presupposes that an ICO buyer received a "tip" with inside information. While that's not an unreasonable thing to consider with respect to an angel (or larger) investor who has substantial contact with the company/people behind the ICO, arbitrary retail-level speculators who are just throwing money at anything using the word "blockchain" or "ICO" aren't likely to be punished by the SEC for having too much information.

Instead, they'll be punished by the market for being idiots. But that's a different sort of thing.

StanislawMel
This is a very fair point - however I think the bigger issue is that there are so many larger entities usually subject to Regulation D that are piling into ICOs as though they have no unusual degree of exposure.

Those are the investors I meant to invoke rather than retail, and they're the ones that usually underpin ICOs to the public at large with big commitments.

I think the SEC is going to view it as a legitimate policy goal to stomp on some of these accredited investors as bad actors, and by doing so scare accredited capital from receiving privileged access while playing alongside Main Street investors.

If that's correct, this would have systemic impacts on the ICO market. So retail investors would be punished by the market, true, but largely because of SEC intervention.