Erick — thanks for the feedback. I took a look at your article and very much enjoyed the read! Ideologically speaking I think we are largely aligned, and our primary difference as it relates to STOs is one of pragmatism. I’ll address this from three perspectives:

1. The Company. My experience has been that a company’s primary concern during a fundraise is to raise capital quickly, efficiently and at a fair valuation. Compliance is viewed as a cost of doing business and a necessary one to remove regulatory overhang. You may not believe in regulation as a means of protection ideologically speaking, but that does not mean that companies are free from the burdens of a regulated society. Companies must operate within the regimes existing today or take on the risk that an agency will shut them down. Most companies are not comfortable taking on that risk.
2. The Investor. Why do people buy tokens? Is it to ensure a functioning network or do they do so with the expectation of making a profit? My guess is largely the latter. Even where a person purchases a token with a view to accessing a network, incentives to hold diminish over time (the network user wants the service and the company wants money; nobody wants the token). See an example here from the Multicoin site you linked to in your article as well: https://multicoin.capital/2017/12/08/understanding-token-velocity/. A solution to this problem is to make tokens function more like securities (profit share, interest payment, right to residual cash flows, etc.). In this way, the investor can assign a value to the token based on the success or failure of an enterprise rather than relying on broader market appreciation as the sole means of recognizing a return. I think you take a view that equity is simply not worth owning because (1) management is under no obligation to return capital and (2) equity stands behind debt in a liquidation. This is the area I most strongly disagree with — where companies do not credibly signal to the market their willingness and ability to return capital to their investors, the free market will reflect that information in the form of a lower price.
3. The State. My background and experience is in the United States, so I admittedly take a US-centric view when addressing regulation. Your article suggests that issuers should abandon regulatorily unfriendly jurisdictions in favor of those more open to the crypto community. That’s fine, but what if companies want to access US markets? The US has some of the deepest capital markets in the world, and simply relocating to a more favorable jurisdiction does not mean a company that reaches out to US investors is free from the obligations of US regulations. STOs allow a company to compliantly access these capital markets.

Obviously your article contained a lot more than what I address above — in particular, you very correctly point out the problems of truly democratizing access as a huge hurdle in the US and (not sure if I agree with this goal) maintaining anonymity. As always, happy to hear other thoughts you may have on the subject.