The issue I have with this is that those regulations still exist.
For a recording artist to raise funds in this way still requires that they deal with all the administrative complications - laws just tend to not be enforced very frequently in this new space.
If Jay-Z launched Jay-Zcoin and raised $100M, the SEC and IRS are going to be poking around his finances and looking for any place he violated the law and imposing fines.
I think a lot of the "potential business models" for ethereum that people discuss may be (sometimes) technically robust, but the are also usually extremely fragile politically.
But Jay-Z raising $100M is the wrong use-case example; he’s already a superstar and already wildly rich so doesn’t need investors, or can easily get them the old fashioned ways (eg record company advance) if he does.
A more apt one is a little-known up-and-comer raising $20k, as they currently might on Kickstarter or Patreon, but possibly using the smart-contract features of Ethereum to link the provision of rewards to some programmed metric like number of Spotify plays.
For a recording artist to raise funds in this way still requires that they deal with all the administrative complications - laws just tend to not be enforced very frequently in this new space.
If Jay-Z launched Jay-Zcoin and raised $100M, the SEC and IRS are going to be poking around his finances and looking for any place he violated the law and imposing fines.
I think a lot of the "potential business models" for ethereum that people discuss may be (sometimes) technically robust, but the are also usually extremely fragile politically.