[ryandrake]

Regardless of the intention behind the rules, the actual effect of so-called accredited investor rules is simply that the most potentially lucrative investments are only available to the already-rich class. The general public gets the dog investments.

If I want to gamble away a windfall $200K inheritance, I can easily and legally go to Vegas and have my loss "impact society." Why shouldn't I instead be allowed to invest that in a startup?

[bobthepanda]

The country is generally not all at the slots at the same time, and if you do dumb things in Vegas that basically impacts you and the casino and any immediate creditors.

The entire country is in the stock market (401k and pensions, etc.) so gambling with valuations has real impact on things that aren't just you, and the blast radius of harm is so much larger. We already saw this happen in the Great Depression; bank runs, sudden, massive tightening of liquidity that screwed over creditors and suppliers in a cascading fashion, etc.

The real fundamental issue is that QE as the overwhelming response to 2007 mostly just massively inflated stocks and other rich people assets without meaningfully improving the financial prospects of middle and working class people, so now everyone is clamoring at the gates to be let in at the stock market. Look at how quickly BTC became a numbers game rather than the actual useful intrinsic value, with people who couldn't give two shits about the blockchain.