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Comment by anilshanbhag | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that companies doing ICOs aren't Uber.

Peek your head into /r/ethtrader. You will find people putting their retirement savings, mortgaging houses, etc and these people aren't technically savvy and can be easily taken for a ride. While you might have good apples, there are going to be tons of bad apples, people just coming with a white paper and asking for millions of dollars. Coming back to your question, the rich don't need protection as its ok to lose money when you are rich. The 'not rich' need protection as if they lose all their savings, it will seriously harm their lives.

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That's your presumption. You think they aren't technically savvy. Hell, I think some of them aren't myself, but it's not my right, and it's not your right, to say what they can or cannot do with their property.

And a lot of those non-"savvy" people have outperformed me, for instance by buying ETH at the ICO.

You guys keep presuming that the only choice is "people losing all their money" and that these regulations stop that.

The reality is, these regulations keep the poor people poor, not keep them from losing all their money.

As I have pointed out, you can go to Las Vegas and lose all your savings in a weekend.

That dog don't hunt.

It boils down if you are willing to accept that stupid people are going to pay for their stupidity (on very real and life-altering consequences) or if they should be shielded from it.

Personally I belong to the side where I'm willing to give up some personal freedoms for a better collective life, that includes saving very stupid people from very stupid decisions that might affect the rest of their lives (and their families').

His point is that the government not only doesn't ban many forms of stupid decisions, but actively encourages ones that provide significant revenue, particularly in the gambling and consumer spending spheres.

"Tu quoque" is actually a pretty useful heuristic for analyzing whether a party's stated goals for a policy align with its actual ones.

This is an excellent argument that the crime of fraud does not exist.

Regulation is only on the surface about investor protection. The main driver is usually taxation (only what's regulated can be taxed). If these investment schemes become too liquid allowing anyone to invest in anything in large sums, tax evasion and tax fraud become even harder for authorities to track (especially since there's no legal framework for ICOs - and creating those takes time). As many others have pointed out, there's no legislation that will hold you back investing in the companies behind these ICOs in one way or another. Just talk to the founders, ask them to sell you some shares and you're good to go. But then there's a well established track record when you buy and transfer shares (for example in the books of the company that sold you the shares). The same is not (yet) true for ICOs.

you assume that 1) most people are rational and 2) irrational behaviors of others costs you and everyone else nothing (in dollars or utility).

Maybe I'm cold-hearted but I believe in something called "personal responsibility." They chose to throw their money into something they don't understand, now they get the consequences of that decision. You can be sure they'd be all about accepting the consequences of their decision if it panned out the other way and they made a fortune. I feel zero sympathy.

you too can be in one of those situations. Humans aren't at their rational best all the times.

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