This is usually how Cow Shares work; in practice it's closer to a deposit entitling you to benefits, which is probably the best type of contract for this situation.

If 500 customers did this, I think the SEC would label this as a "security" and the company would be required to register as a public company, more or less. This is essentially what happened to Facebook which led to them going public: the private equity pool became too diverse and triggered this threshold, so publicly listing made sense.

Why don't Kickstarter campaigns have this problem? AFAIK it's because they are just presales, there's no notion of ownership so they aren't treated as securities. A poorly-designed kickstarter that looked like micro stocks would probably get shot down.

If only there were some way to issue digital “tokens” in situations like this..

one bitcoin transaction consumes 1,449 kWh, or about as much as 50 days of power for the average US household

>one bitcoin transaction consumes 1,449 kWh

Thank you, I knew it was an energy hog, but had never looked at it this way.

That's enough electricity to melt 2 tons of aluminum, or about half an hour of peak production from an average size US wind turbine.

Bitcoin is not the only digital token technology. Ethereum consumes a fraction of the energy Bitcoin consumes.

Right Ethereum is really lucky to have Bitcoin around to make it look good. It (very recently) cut it's energy usage by ~99.84% yet one ETH transaction is still 50x the amount of energy as a MasterCard transaction

Thanks for clarifying. This seems to be a better picture of reality compared to your previous comment.

You mean stocks?