Listening to Emma Channing talk about token sales, I've realized that the regulatory situation is actually much worse if a token is NOT a security. This is why people say that crypto is not really legal until it's regulated: because there are already a ton of regulations that apply to what crypto does, so without specific regulation you're not protected from whatever any given local or regional government throws at you.

Channing gives lots of good advice for people considering ICOs. In my opinion the most important bit of advice is that, to be qualified to give advice on ICOs, a lawfirm really needs to have a global perspective.

Once there are decentralized exchanges not under control of any entity that can be targeted by governments, perhaps it will become possible for a DAO to have an ICO that is completely immune to regulation. For such a thing to be valuable, that means the DAO will have to be able to exert control over other things of value. Real estate won't work because it's unlikely governments will allow real estate to be owned by unregulatable entities. But purely virtual resources like storage and compute power in a peer to peer network might. And a DAO could potentially issue contracts in a decentralized "work exchange" for, say, programming jobs.