One thing that has not been mentioned is that regulators like the sec can grandfather existing instruments when a new regulation comes out.
This situation reminds me a lot of crowdfunding. People did crowdfunding even though it was not permitted by securities law. In the us, the sec got involved and issued regulation. The existing crowdfunding arrangements were grandfathered, afaik. Even thoug they were securities.
I do not admonish you with an intent to be disrespectful or unappreciative. I guess I am glad you raised this point although it has been raised numerous times all over the forums and refuting and correcting it every time will become tiring and impossible for an expert. Thus the community will become highly misinformed and idiotic as a result. It behooves all of you to be more astute and stop spreading incorrect information. And to try to help spread correct information.
Unfortunately readers here such as yourself make comments while being inadequately informed about the details, thus your statements are most often highly incorrect because "the devil is always in the details". This is why statements by people who have not studied an issue carefully, are worse than worthless. Statements from uninformed people, can be misleading and contain the opposite of the truth.
In this case, you are not emphasizing a very important detail which can mislead readers of your comment, which is that
equity crowdfunding (as opposed to preselling production or other forms of
non-securities crowdfunding a la Kickstarter) afaik has not been grandfathered in any way that allows them to be not classified as securities.
Thus all equity crowdfunding has remained subject to securities regulations, and thus all the pitfalls I detailed about not being able to trade the securities (i.e. shares or tokens) applies to all equity crowdfunding that occurred prior to the Regulation CF and Regulation A+ legislation. Essentially the main change in those new equity crowdfunding rules is that it is easier to sell equity to up to 1000 non-accredited investors subject to certain stipulations and regulatory compliance requirements (but only for a USA corporation!).
But they are all still securities. And as I explained already, a token being a security is a kiss of death, because it can not be legally traded P2P nor on unregulated exchanges (and afaik no crypto exchanges are registered with the SEC yet and no tokens are registered with the SEC).
Even if ICO issued tokens are properly registered and compliant in the future (in every fucking jurisdiction! which is an implausible clusterfucked mess of unresolved legal crap!), still they will be delisted from unregistered exchanges and illegal for use as a currency or utility token, because P2P trading of even registered securities is illegal.
Bottom line is that raising equity is entirely incompatible with creating an unencumbered token.
And there is no way currently to legally raise equity with a global sale to non-accredited investors all over the globe. For legal reaons, equity must be raised separately in each jurisdiction, e.g. USA, Canada, UK, Singapore, etc..
Also I do not think any equity crowdfunding was grandfathered. Rather the equity crowdfunding sites were working with the SEC on the new Regulation A+ and CF rules. And any equity crowdfunding that was sneakily done on non-equity crowdfunding sites (such as Rimbit's scam on Indiegogo which was linked in the linked blog of the OP of this thread) is still culpable (and will eventually haunt the participants unless it is just too small for the regulators to bother going after).
Readers are apparently very slow minded and/or just uninformed (and not well read) and thus having much difficulty in grasping these facts.
Ponder the many days and dozens of hours or more I have expended to become somewhat knowledgeable on this issue. And every issue I am involved in, ranging from deeply technological issues to these organizational and political economic issues requires deep study. That is why I am often on the computer 16 hours a day, which is a very unhealthy level of exposure to blue light and lack of exposure to the sunshine and exercise.
The soundbite Twitter tl;dr generation expects everything to be easy. But then they do not give appreciation and respect to those who do the hard work to explain for them. How do they expect that to end up then?
I wish someone even more expert than myself on this issue would enter this thread and help analyze. Unfortunately that does not seem to happen on BCT.