People in the HNews community have been pushing for the ability for unaccredited investors to be able to put money into early-stage startups for years. I think the situation with crypto-currency* is a preview of the upsides and downsides of what that would look like. Now - crypto is worse because of the constant theft - but even without the crime you can clearly see the upsides and the downsides.

The upside is that anyone can get in on the "ground floor" of these projects and crypto currency - for all its flaws - does do a good job of securely transferring 'ownership.' Fake crypto is not, as far as I know, a problem.

The downside is obvious for all to see: it's difficult to figure out if a technically complicated product is worth investing in. It's doubly difficult when the people working on those projects will get an immediate monetary reward for attracting investment.

I do think it's unfair that only the rich can bet on early-stage startups, but it's impossible for me to ignore the anecdotes of naive investors losing their savings on poor crypto investments. I'm not sure what a better system would look like - perhaps one where investments are taxed to create an insurance fund. Though the downsides to that are obvious as well.