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Comment by AlexCoventry | Hacker News Reader

The majority of ICOs are not restricted to accredited investors.

There will be penalties for failure to register securities, for failure to meet reporting and other registered securities requirements, and shareholder clawback lawsuits.

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and how exactly are they going to enforce these rules? Do you think the SEC is going to zimbabwe, congo or some other backwater country to tell these people to stop issuing ICO lol? The US federal government is not the policeman of the world my friend.

People who are doing ICOs will just move to where they can have their business be successful. If USA/Europe or Asia ban ICOs then all the devs will just move to another country where it is legal, maybe russia?

The majority of those ICOs are not available to us citizens though. Can you name a recent ICO that allowed non-accredited us investors to participate?

> Switzerland-based Tezos said it did not specifically exclude investors from any country from participating.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/18/hot-digital-currency-trend-m...

This ico happened before the sec bulletin was issued:

https://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts-and-bulletins/ib_co...

Do you have any more recent examples?

I haven't been following closely, recently, but literally the first one I checked has no check on residency [0], which is enough to bring it under SEC jurisdiction if the sale goes over other thresholds.[1]

Sales before and after the bulletin are subject to the same laws.

[0] https://etherparty.io/ico/contribute

[1] https://www.sec.gov/divisions/corpfin/internatl/foreign-priv...

There were lots of disclaimers saying:

>"Every potential participant in the fundraiser is responsible for determining the legality of participation within their jurisdiction."

It was totally legal for US residents to participate, as far as I know. I believe almost all the securities-law obligations resulting from the sale are on Tezos. (Not a lawyer.) The only obligation on buyers might be that they can't resell it without being guilty of selling an unregistered security themselves.

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