Crowdfunding of equity capital for startups is one of a handful of jewels in the crown of the JOBS Act that swept through the House and Senate in a rare and refreshing show of bipartisanship, and was signed into law by President Obama April 5, 2012. But the crowdfunding jewel is fool’s gold, and is inherently incapable of harnessing “people-to-people power” and the “wisdom of crowds” to “democratize access to capital for entrepreneurs” in order to “create wealth and make things happen,” as crowdfunding sites publicly proclaim. As a savvy tech entrepreneur told me the other day, “I love crowdfunding: it is cheap money for me. I know it is not good for the investors.” That is the problem: crowdfunding will at best be good only for the entrepreneurs and middlemen, paid for by unwitting consumers who simply cannot know enough about the highly risky ventures or the highly complex venture investing process to make informed investment decisions.