How does buying an ICO link me to a company? does it entitle me to a dividend for investing in them? Are the company under any obligation to share their success with me?
Some ICOs effectively did exactly that. Then the SEC started rumbling about how that made them securities and obligationed them to the same restrictions as securities. So, now lots of tokens try to skirt the law by making the dividend more indirect. Ex: you don't just sit back and collect, you must contribute to the system to be rewarded. Of course, the size of the reward scales with the success of the system naturally.
Speaking as the world's biggest ethereum believer: ICO have pretty much have zero obligation to share their success with you and it seems crazy to me that anyone would buy into an ICO.
Well they have as much obligation as you when you read TOS/EULAs and click "Agree". So there is an actual obligation in most cases when it was specified in the terms on their website. It's very hard for most top ICO teams to deny their ties to the ICO and it's terms.
Not only are they not under an obligation to share their success with you, it's illegal to do so. If I get Future_Technology_01 and sell ICO coins with the knowledge that any engineer in the world can understand my white paper and sees the value in it, it's illegal for me to offer to repurchase the coins at a whateverx multiple in 36 months after using the ICO raise to get to market.
That's because it's illegal to sell coins if the primary motivation of the buyer is to make money from their increased value. It's literally illegal for the company to let you invest in it via ICO's while providing a mechanism for the money from the ICO to make it back to you after the company has used it to get to market.
