The requirements to be an accredited investor changed recently. It’s possible to be an accredited investor because of passing certain tests that are basically r

The requirements to be an accredited investor changed recently. It’s possible to be an accredited investor because of passing certain tests that are basically required for lots of people who work in finance anyway. The wealth requirements are, roughly, $200k personal income, $300k joint, or $1m net worth. The numbers look big but I think they aren’t really that high. The numbers are nominal and haven’t changed in a long time so the bar has been lowering over time. $200k income used to be a much higher bar (both in general due to inflation and on this site as income for programmers has gone up a lot in the last 20 years). If the $1m includes real estate wealth then the requirement is basically to be old and to have had a high-but-not-crazy income and bought a house somewhere where prices have gone up a lot. Every now and then there will be some news story about some unfortunate dentist who got tricked into investing into some terrible scheme or who made some other poor decisions (e.g. ‘I wanted maximum safety so I figured I’d buy bonds and I put all my money into buying bonds in this Turkish real estate developer that paid 15% that I found from a Facebook ad and now they’ve gone bust and I’ve lost all my money’) which they were only able to do due to their upper-middle-class income/wealth qualifying them as an accredited investor. So I think the rules aren’t particularly fit for purpose. Having a test is maybe better. Having an annoying process where a bunch of government officials tell you that you’ll lose all your money is a funny idea but presumably scammers are much better at learning how to walk people through that sort of thing than the government is at making it do what is intended. Having some process which takes a while might help a bit but maybe is too annoying. I think it’s also extremely false that getting rid of accredited investors gets rid of the class system that currently exists. There will still be ISDAs and relationships and so on. Even if you’re an accredited investor, you’re not going to get the opportunity to participate as an angel investor in all the best companies and you can’t phone up Goldman and get them to construct some new derivative for you to buy, so I think there’s a lot of adverse selection for someone who becomes an accredited investor but doesn’t have much to invest or many good connections. My (poor) understanding is that this is also true in crypto in that the better deals will generally be available to early investors (ie some big fund, not you) who can then dump their positions on everyone else (ie you) after some relatively short lockout. Finally, I don’t think being a ‘comp sci PhD who really studied crypto in-depth’ is actually a good example of a way to tell if someone is fit to invest in something. The qualifications are generally about understanding the financial product rather than understanding the underlying ‘business’.