August 22, 2014
A few suggestions:
1) Allow anyone to invest in startups seeking crowdfunding. Accredited investors, Hedge Funds and large Venture Capital funds are the only ones benefiting from new companies. By the time they go public most of the value has already been attained. The average person is becoming more and more knowledgeable when it comes to investing and money management. Just because we don't make 200K+ in a year does not mean we shouldn't be allowed to invest in great companies.
2) Why not allow businesses to crowdfund using cryptocurrencies? Bitcoin 2.0 technologies such as Colored Coins, Mastercoin and other platforms allow ANYONE to issue shares, tokens, vouchers or whatever they want to be called in exchange for Bitcoins or other virtual currencies which can then be easily converted to cash. The cost of doing such a fund raiser is virtually nothing with no middleman that siphons off value from the start up seeking the maximum amount of funds possible. Using these technologies even one person shops, or even kids starting a lemonade stand, could crowdfund working capital from investors all over the world in exchange for newly created "shares" of their company.
There is nothing that the government can do to stop the rate of progress that is being made in decentralized cryptocurrency technologies. Why slow down the process even more with regulations that benefit only large investors and established exchanges? The goal should be to jumpstart business creation and allow the maximum amount of investors (no matter their net worth and income) to participate in the creation of wealth.