Hey, we could sell equity in our company for money....or we could give out gift certificates (tokens) and keep all the equity. Sure, as soon as we've got all the dummies money, the incentives will massively shift for us so that we're better off doing a new ICO than building anything, but they won't notice. Who cares if distributed systems are an overhead and not an efficiency, we can all get rich!
If you sell the equity for money only certified investors are allowed to invest. You now also have a investor whose word carries some weight on your company. The latter might be good or bad depending on the investor and your personal view/attitude and situation.
> If you sell the equity for money only certified investors are allowed to invest. You now also have a investor whose word carries some weight on your company.
Finance types are a creative bunch. The industry has spent a good amount of time trying to poke holes in securities regulation since the 1930s. Regulators and prosecutors have expended a similar deal of effort suturing the loopholes.
The thread interfering with your idea is the symmetry between securities purchased for cash and securities purchased with "services rendered". Securities regulators and the IRS take a broad view of the latter. The former would likely be more vigilant if unaccredited investors [1] were "buying" these tokens, and even more so if such transactions were taking place next to accredited investors getting bona fide stock.
