You can create whatever crazy investment you want as long as you limit it to qualified investors. But those people mostly won't fall for pump-and-dump ICOs.
During the dotcom bubble, there was a guy that moved from the East Coast, New Jersey or similar, to Orange County CA. He had next to no technical ability or background. When he moved, it was on the last thread of his pants, he was broke. The story (in The Industry Standard or Wired or similar at the time) included an example of that poverty: him pulling his own cracked tooth out with some help from a bottle of jack, on his way out to California.
He gets to Orange County, settles in, and has a bright idea. To defraud people by starting a new tech company that is going to be in the media player / streaming space. He proclaims that his company has invented an advanced new codec, among other things. He proceeds to raise something like $16 million from wealthy people in Orange County, using each investor as a referral to the next (dentists, doctors, wealthy older people, and so on). His product, used in demonstrations to said wealthy people, consisted of a skin over top of Microsoft's media player. People started to very gradually get suspicious, so he hired armed guards to stand outside his office, supposedly to protect him from death threats that had been made (actually to prevent people, employees and investors, from getting easy access to him). The rest of his story melts down from there, with him essentially wiping out the ~$16 million he defrauded investors out of. His side of the story of course, was that they were going to build an amazing new media player, and that investors conspired to make him look bad and blah blah.
Those qualified investors fall for all sorts of dumb schemes.
16 million is like nothing. Bancor claims to have raisen 250 million (by public records, though you don't know how much they recycled their own money through that ico)
Based on that response I have to assume you weren't in the tech industry in the 1990s. $16 million was considered a large sum of venture capital during the mid 1990s, just a few years prior to the story taking place. By 1998/1999 it was still considered a large amount of venture capital, despite the wave of capital that would make companies like Webvan infamous.
The price floor worked as intended. It meant that those who wanted to get their money out had ample time to do so, and the result was Bancor effectively returning a large chunk of the ETH sent to it.
Qualified doesn't mean clever, it just means "losing isn't a big deal."
The only people to whom losing a 50-100k investment won't be life-changingly bad are either high net worth or high income.
There is a lot of frustration from this crowd about not being able to invest a sensibly small amount of money in an ICO / early stage startup / other risky thing. As a curious technologist who can handle a bit of risk, I can empathize! But we're not who the SEC is designed to protect. They're there to stop situations where people get half their life savings ripped off, and that is completely sensible.
There's long been talk of having web-portable, cryptographically secure endorsements for things you want to prove about your identity: that you've over 18, that you hold a valid driver's license, etc, but they've never gotten off the ground. Basically, same as CAs, except for validating that "this identity has that attribute".
This would be another use case.
Edit: if you meant proving you own enough ETH tokens, rather than USD, that's a lot easier and (I assume) possible now.
