Hacker News Reader

That blows my mind. I'm allowed to spend $10 in a bottle of alcohol or a packet or cigarettes, no questions asked, but I'm not allowed to spend those $10 in stocks of a tiny company unless I'm able to demonstrate that I sleep with the founders or make their lunch or run their accounting, or that I have so many millions on my name that investing $10 without doing any of the above really could not harm me.

View on HN

It's not like accreditation exists to ensure poor people stay poor, framing it like that is disingenuous. Small-time investors are unlikely to be able to even semi-accurately estimate the value of a company, so they're much much more likely to be tricked into overpaying.

It isn't that it exists for that reason, it merely has that effect as a callous side effect of not really caring about the power imbalance it causes on said poorer people. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" 100% applies to people trying to protect other people from none other than themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com