[tomhoward]

> There's nothing stopping a recording artist from incorporating and listing shares on any traditional exchanges

There absolutely is: it is almost unimaginably expensive and administratively complicated, hence the only entities to IPO these days are companies valued in the tens of billions, who have exhausted all other options for raising capital privately and need to raise at least hundreds of millions or billions more.

I’m no expert on Ethereum or blockchain generally, but the potential for low-friction micro-investing in small businesses, artists or even individuals seems highly compelling to me.

[cwkoss]

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.

[tomhoward]

Of course tax laws still apply, as they should.

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.