This post by Fred Wilson suggests that unregulated crowdfunding would be a good thing. The advantages are clear - it would be open up the VC market to more people, enable greater liquidity and generally remove a lot of the "friction" from current the early-stage capital raising model. And his goal of creating more innovation is laudable.

However, there are some grave dangers. In particular, there is an asymmetry of information in early stage companies. In an unregulated model, there would be no need for the management team to disclose anything which would mean that just when the company "strikes gold" all of the levers would be in-place for some appalling discriminatory behaviours. Minority shareholders, in particular would be in jeopardy.

I realise I'm not being very utopian but sometimes, regulation is a good idea.