I guess there's one other option - create an honest investment for us to engage in...
That's the route I went, but you're a tough bunch.
The money available via the bitcoin route for 'legitimate' products is amazingly low and really doesn't make sense for a company to do it.
With a quality startup going the havelock/ect route, you'd be lucky to fund over $50k, and that simply isn't enough to do much with. Meanwhile in countries like the UK you could go with a legitimate crowdfund route and have a pretty easy time getting $500k-$1mm without too many troubles and relatively low investment. Once second market type exchanges come available with JOBS 2012 compliance (And there's 3-4 working on it) bitcoin investment in the US will make even less sense. I'd ask you then, do you REALLY want to be in a country with even less legal oversight and investor recourse than the US or Europe?
I've met many awesome investors so far in the bitcoin world, and maybe it's just me but all of them seem burnt out. You've got bankruptcy after bankruptcy, failure after failure and so on of companies that took or lost SIGNIFICANT sums of money.
Freidcat?
AMC?
Bitfunder?
MtGox?
Neo & Bee?
Just between a few guys I know there were MILLIONS lost by way of these companies.
This happens because people keep blindly throwing their money at every business, regardless of what it is, in the hopes of becoming a millionaire. If people continue being stupid, we'll continue seeing businesses go bankrupt one after another (in the real world, these would never get off the ground because accredited investors aren't morons. In the crypto world, they take off and crash because the people that invest have no idea what they're doing).
In the past 2+ years following businesses in the crypto world, I've seen a total of one business that was a legitimate opportunity. The rest have been obviously run by people that don't know what's going on and hope that just by making a crypto business they're going to make millions.