Or any of the weird coin offerings. Which - if you believe in the thing not being a scam - is essentially a way of financing a company. Just like buying an investment in a small business.
Woah watch out there. I have never seen a 'coin offering' that was remotely like buying an investment in a business, certainly not "just like".
Instead, they have mountains of fine print that with extraordinary care make sure the recipient has absolutely no property right in the business, no claim to any title, no voting rights, usually no rights to share in profits, etc.
If you wanted to liken them to something offline, they're structured more like making a donation and getting a limited edition t-shirt in return. Maybe with some vague suggestion, but no guarantee, that the t-shirt may entitle you to discounted services in the future should the business actually begin operations.
And this is before getting into the fact that a great many of them are essentially outright scams.
The fact that many people are thinking that ICOs are "just like buying an investment in a small business"-- is a great example of how the SEC is pretty much flat out failing at this part of their job.
It has shut down some but it mostly seems to issue nominal penalties.
For example, the EOS ICO unlawfully raised over $4 billion dollars. The SEC settled with them where they paid the SEC $24 million and the SEC agreed to take no further action.
The only lesson here is that if you're going to ignore the law and sell sketchy assets with over-hyped claims to unsophisticated investors in the US... make sure you raise enough that the cost for good attorneys few million to the SEC is just a rounding error.
Or the value is being transferred out of the US and toward other countries, because you can't even start an ICO in the US unless you have the right connections.
