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There is a significant difference. Gambling is up front about the odds and the fact that they are stacked against you. ICOs and scam investments are not. The

by stale2002 9y ago

There is a significant difference. Gambling is up front about the odds and the fact that they are stacked against you. ICOs and scam investments are not. The issue is not about allowing people to lose their money. The issue is about Fraud, and people lying about what they are selling, as well as promising false returns. Casinos don't promise you anything false, and transparently offer you provable odds.

icebraining 9y ago
Would casinos be that honest if they didn't fear being prosecuted? Why can't ICOs be similarly managed? After all, if someone is willing to violate the law, chances are they won't respect limitations regarding the eligibility of investors - which is, in fact, what we're seeing with ICOs. Seems like just another example of the known results of Prohibition - prevent legal markets and you'll just have dark markets in which people get poisoned.
- notahacker 9y ago
  Regulating a casino is relatively straightforward. You demand their games actually pay out on the odds they're required to publish and periodically check they actually do so, and prohibit them from claiming that they are an investment at all. Regulating a company that may or may not believe their pitch about making their investors rich and whose probable failure may or may not be the result of them failing to even attempt to execute on it and/or their pitch deck being a pack of lies is incredibly complicated. So it's left to investors that have the resources to do what would otherwise be the extremely laborious regulator's job of doing due diligence, sitting on boards to see what's going on and litigating malfeasance. Who also happen to have sufficient funds not to suffer if they don't. Prohibition isn't really an appropriate comparison since there's an abundance of alternative places for the general public to speculate, and no reason to assume that the investment opportunities investment professionals won't touch would start offering consumers better returns than a casino if everyone could advertise an SEC stamp on their ICO after filling in a few forms.

icebraining 9y ago

Would casinos be that honest if they didn't fear being prosecuted? Why can't ICOs be similarly managed? After all, if someone is willing to violate the law, chances are they won't respect limitations regarding the eligibility of investors - which is, in fact, what we're seeing with ICOs. Seems like just another example of the known results of Prohibition - prevent legal markets and you'll just have dark markets in which people get poisoned.

notahacker 9y ago
Regulating a casino is relatively straightforward. You demand their games actually pay out on the odds they're required to publish and periodically check they actually do so, and prohibit them from claiming that they are an investment at all. Regulating a company that may or may not believe their pitch about making their investors rich and whose probable failure may or may not be the result of them failing to even attempt to execute on it and/or their pitch deck being a pack of lies is incredibly complicated. So it's left to investors that have the resources to do what would otherwise be the extremely laborious regulator's job of doing due diligence, sitting on boards to see what's going on and litigating malfeasance. Who also happen to have sufficient funds not to suffer if they don't. Prohibition isn't really an appropriate comparison since there's an abundance of alternative places for the general public to speculate, and no reason to assume that the investment opportunities investment professionals won't touch would start offering consumers better returns than a casino if everyone could advertise an SEC stamp on their ICO after filling in a few forms.