>>As someone who watched all this quite closely back in the day I cannot believe the amount of money these hucksters pulled out of people and still are to this day.
I don't like people promising the moon to hype up speculative investments, but there are non-government solutions to this, like reputation markets.
In fact we see these non-government solutions working already: token investors today are unrecognizable from those that were giving a website with a white paper $40 million worth of cryptocurrency in 2016. This transformation has occurred completely independently from any regulatory action. The collective intelligence of the market has increased from hard-won lessons in the need to do due diligence, and the emergence of numerous sites for rating token sales (mind you, there's still a lot of room improvement in the curation market).
Regulations can obviously address some of these problems too, but any restriction on how consenting parties choose to interact is going to have massive unintended consequences, and in my estimation the unintended consequences do much more harm than what's alleviated by the regulations.
Also worth mentioning is that the regulations that the SEC is trying to impose on token sales go far beyond prohibiting issuers from promising big gains. They try to micromanage how an offering is conducted with inflexible cookie cutter rules that inhibit innovation and make the entire market dependent on a centralized gatekeeper, which is a monopolistic and fragile situation prone to systemic failures.
It's obvious to me that a free society should not tolerate this level of control being exerted on how people engage in voluntary interactions with other consenting adults.
The problem is that the idea that we ought to be free to do with our money what we wish threatens many powerful special interests, so we get a never-ending stream of rationalizations and emotional appeals for restricting people's contracting rights, and for funnelling commerce through centralized gatekeepers.