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Comment by laluser | Hacker News Reader

To me, it's more about the idea than the actual action on display here. Decentralizing a process than is normally very opaque and centralized is what's being attempted and it's a cool idea. Whether this is executed well or not, that's a different story.

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I wonder if one of the main reasons it hasn't been decentralized is because it has been illegal to do so—selling shares/securities to the general public without disclosure of risks and other rules set forth by the SEC.

I remember being in the Bay Area back in 2014-16 and people talking about wanting to use Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms for not just buying products but owning the company, but kept getting stuck at the accredited investor requirements for private companies.

So, I guess I'm curious about this as a referendum on why we have securities laws and accredited investor laws and whether those should change or stay, I just don't think it's necessarily as brand new of an idea as it seems.

EDIT: The concept I was talking about is called equity crowdfunding [0] and the SEC opened it up to more people in 2012 [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_crowdfunding [1]: https://www.sec.gov/divisions/marketreg/tmjobsact-crowdfundi...

I think these types of decentralized entities will collide with a long list of legal issues in the future. The technology is just moving too quickly for any elected official to understand. Just imagine that instead of buying this copy of the constitution, the resources were anonymously being used in some malicious way and there is no accountability along the way.

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