[notahacker]

Casinos are heavily restricted in how they're allowed to represent themselves though; in particular they usually can't masquerade as a good proposition for increasing your savings, or emphasise you'll earn so much more with them than at all the other casinos. I'd be all in favour of allowing public soliciting of investment which basically restricted it to statements along the lines of "if these hunches are right there's a small chance you'll end up with more money than you started with", which for most ventures relying on retail investors is basically the only pitch which is honest.

I'm in favour of people that believe in the mission or want to be a customer spending money on startups, but think the Kickstarter model of soliciting the funding without pretending it has a nontrivial possibility of financial returns already nailed that.