So basically, if you want to raise money by selling gift cards for a product that doesn’t exist to speculators who will trade them, make sure you describe it in terms of some inscrutable crypto protocol network thing that doesn’t map neatly to stock or gift cards.
I don’t disagree with your characterization of many ICOs.
But... is there anything wrong with that? It’s a junk investment, but aren’t junk investments just as valid as strong investments? If my gift card for an unreleased product trades for pennies on the dollar... isn’t that still a valid investment?
Anything can be an investment. There are laws about gift cards and equity. Cryptocurrency systems are so technically complex and overloaded with ideals, uses, and philosophies that they can be simultaneously nothing like and everything like these things, IMO. It’s not about what’s right and wrong, it’s just amusing to me that if you want to exploit this particular opinion, as a loophole, the way you’d do it is to make your cryptocurrency sufficiently abstruse.
Edit: To be really clear, I’m talking about the opinion that basically says, if your coin functions as equity then it’s equity; if it functions as a gift card, it’s a gift card; but if it functions as a protocol, it’s a protocol, even if it has speculators bidding it up and benefits going to coin-holders — basically a lot of the properties of equities and gift cards that cause them to be regulated.
