The ones who can buy off the SEC may only get a handslap (e.g. Erik Voorhees who afair refunded all the money to participants and paid a fine), but the other smucks will wear the blame nametags on orange prison uniforms:
Consensus amidst crisis
Last month, the deputy director of the SEC’s trading and markets division, Gary Goldsholle, pointed to the hack as illustrative of his concerns over consumer protection in similar instances in the future, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
To minimize the negative impact the hack might have on those consumers, Jentzsch said a series of measures have been organized within the community.
And that risk doesn’t stop at the company level. Founders and directors could be personally responsible to investors, or even face criminal charges.
So far regulators have taken a light touch, but since The DAO debacle we know the SEC is paying attention to the crypto-equity world, and it’s safe to assume that someone, somewhere is going to get hit with the regulatory hammer. Don’t let it be you.
Yeah, I tend to think it's coming. Like black friday for online poker players, I expect to wake up one morning and find various crypto sites with sec/fbi seizure notices on them. It might not go down exactly like that, but someday, push will come to shove, and forces will collide. If/when it happens it will be interesting to see how it affects the different projects. It could be that those projects designed with more plausible decentralizability have an upper hand in survival under those environmental conditions. That kind of legal action by the government might push crypto back more towards its roots.