I don't know of any kickstarter that has offered equity.
I think the reason you do not need to be an accredited investor is that: they are not investments.
I think the reason you do not need to be an accredited investor is that: they are not investments.
Right now kick starter and many other sites are handling scammers because, there aren't that many.
What happens when they do try to abuse the sites though?
If you were creating a startup, and it would have cost you 1 million dollars of software development cost, 1 million dollars of hosting costs for 10 years, and you expected to earn 1 million dollars profit over 10 years, why not do this instead - ask for 1.5 million dollars on kickstarter - 1 million cost and 500,000 dollar profit. Say that you will be releasing as open source - this is the value you provide to funders. Then sysadmins come in and compete on hosting the software and divide up the other 500,000 dollar profit among themselves. You can move on to other software development projects instead of supporting your startup for 10 years.
http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/08/faq-what-the-new-u-s-crowd...
Kickstarter et al. have been project-focused and artist-centric primarily in order to get around the "motivations to invest" problem, so passing this could open the gates to a new wave of startups.