Honestly, I think it's a good thing. You know kickstarter? Great idea. Often, however, the projects are terrible and they hock a dumb-ass, never-going-to-work idea and manage to get funded, piss away the funding, and close.
The good news is that they don't promise you anything for your "donation". Sure, sometimes you get a t-shirt shipped to you, and sometimes it's a pre-order-if-it-happens type of deal, but it's very rarely either a big sum or a big promise. People are happy to throw $20 at something on the chance that it works and they get to pre-order it, and if not, no big deal.
Now imagine kickstarter, except instead of offering t-shirts and hypothetical-pre-orders, they're offering you percentages of the company and making wild promises of returns. Perfect storm: investments small enough that people can make them, often big enough that people will really miss the money, and targeted at the financially illiterate.
No thank you. Block that venue before it ever gets used, and keep it blocked. Normal people should not be investing in private companies. Hell, they should barely be investing in single stocks, let alone private companies.
Accredited investors may not be financially savvy, but they should have enough savings / income that a loss won't be devastating. Sure, it may be devastating to them, but it'll still leave them able to eat, work, and live indoors. You let your average idiot - or, especially, your average senior - put their life savings into Free Energy or whatever, and you have people ending up on the streets.
"But there are ways around it." If you know the ways around it, and use them, then you're knowledgeable enough to understand the risks - and if things go south, there's not much pity coming your way, since you drove right past the ten warning signs and off the cliff.
