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Comment by ybrah | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who buys into ICOs tend to not do much research

Most ICOs look like fairly blatant fraud. We have laws to protect people from even subtler forms of fraud. The fact that they allow this stuff to continue is as amazing to me as some of the scams going on.

Before they can stop it, they need to learn enough to learn how to correctly characterize it, without hitting non-fraud in the process. That's easy to do in an HN comment box, with nothing at stake if you get something wrong, and all the ambiguity of English working for you. It's somewhat harder to do when you require legal precision and are interacting with trillions of dollars worth of existing market.

I agree with you, however, why not stop it all immediately and then work through it case by case, creating a definition along the way? By allowing it to go on, the problem simply becomes worse and worse, and more money gets tied up.

I ask this genuinely because I am not familiar with the philosophical aspects of law. I understand that regulators would rather not take an action to harm someone innocent, but it seems to me that they strongly prefer that over taking an action that prevents harm to many people.

I can buy that 100 percent. They need to be precise but hopefully thorough so there's no quick work around after, and this is new territory. OTOH it's running rampant, so even a minor slam-dunk charge against one might slow things down a bit.

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