"Now consider a company selling itself. With no rules, they are able to say anything they want about themselves. The stock market is seen by many (most?) as an

"Now consider a company selling itself. With no rules, they are able to say anything they want about themselves. The stock market is seen by many (most?) as an investment, and therefore fairly safe (possibly even safe). How well dispersed is the knowledge that, while investing most of your money in the market is relatively safe, investing it in one dstock is horribly risky? How easy is it for a semi-reputable (much less disreputable) company to paint an overly rosey picture, appealing to somebody's hopes and dreams?" I don't know where you extract that there are "no rules" in crownfunding stock. The stock market is crownfunding by nature. At first NY Stock market was a tree under which interested people traded part of their companies. With more than one hundred kickstarter projects backed on my belt, I have been duped in... ZERO. They are free to say whatever they want but it is very easy to catch a liar. Part of my family comes from socialist East Europe economies. In those places even very smart people like nuclear scientists or very bright philosophers were protected "for their own good" against taking risks(or doing anything on their own by the way, good competent people were dangerous if they did good things because it made the very incompetent look bad). The only problem is that "protectors" were very Mediocre people, people that spent their time banging pretty girls and drinking Vodka. Bureaucrats whose only merit were kissing asses of someone higher in the monopolistic hierarchy of power. Let me be a grown up, an adult who takes his own decisions.