Richard Kastelein
Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read

The fact that there is a separate class for wealthy ‘accredited’ investors is… well, frankly — disgusting.

And is yet another reason why ICOs need to not only disrupt, but actually terminate how innovation has been funded in the past.

The Securities and Exchange Act was signed June 6th, 1933, and created the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as the Depression was kicking in. It was designed to contain Wall St. and protect the public from the scammers who were fleecing the poor.

100 years ago people were lucky to read the equivalent of 50 books in a lifetime — they had very little access to information. They were ripe for the picking.

Today we are bombarded with the equivalent of 174 newspapers a day and we have the world’s library at our fingertips — we can research whatever we want. Google it. We can make informed decisions thank you.

People who are worth less than a million dollars a year (the benchmark for being accredited) deserve to have the opportunity to create new wealth and participate in the innovation sector which has been fattening venture capitalist’s pockets since the 1990s.

The fact that a bloke in America can walk into a Vegas casino and blow his kid’s college fund in a night without a problem but can’t make an investment in a startup is ludicrous.

ICOs are global. ICOs are largely built on open source software and open ethos. ICOs are largely founded as foundations. ICOs allow for anyone to invest. Anywhere. ICOs are not about whoring intellectual property or delving over a huge part of the pie to those who provide mere capital, they are about empowering creative innovators and building new value networks based on commonalities.

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    Richard Kastelein

    Written by

    Father. Husband, Tokenomist, Publisher, Writer, Entrepreneur, Fellow Royal Society Of Arts, Dutch-Canadian based in Groningen, Netherlands