Word choice aside, I agree many ICOs are scams, and in general I think it's not a great idea to give someone very large sums of money up front to build something, with very few strings attached. The immediate global liquidity of tokens is both good and bad. Having access to a lot of funding early on, especially with no accountability, even with most well-intended projects often leads to building the wrong thing, stuff people don't want or need, since there is less pressure to validate the product (for instance via revenue).
I would like to believe self-regulation and peer pressure, once transparency standards are established, will happen. De facto tools for governance and transparency of token projects is something I think is sorely needed, and it's something projects like Aragon - https://aragon.one - are building.
I think ICOs are an interesting way of funding certain types of projects that would not be viable through traditional VC funding - certain types of open source projects for instance. And I think we could see the token concept take off in unexpected places. But I hope the cryptocurrency/token ecosystem will move towards a more sustainable direction that generates real value for people instead of the casino like atmosphere today.
This is a fundamental shift in how markets have traditionally worked. Accessible by few, siloed by regional boundaries.
This post comes off as another angry bitcoin maximalist, upset that blockchain isn't being used the way they want it to be used
Sorry, what? this is literally untrue, and pure bullshit.
Anyone can buy any of these at any time already. There are online marketplaces that trade these things 24/7.
The only restriction is that a potential investor has to prove that they realise that the value of an investment can go down as well as up. That, in other words, they're not an idiot, and won't demand that the government "do something about it" when their investment tanks.
Of course, because of that niggling little regulation, you can't spam everyone with ridiculous promises of untold wealth if they'll only invest their life savings in the latest ponzi scheme. Until ponzicoin came along, of course.
So an ICO for something like Filecoin, which is monetizing a storage protocol built around IPFS, that's a utility token. There are plenty of legitimate ICO projects out there that have either 1) already shipped 2) have a working beta or 3) are risky but have strong teams. It doesn't take a lot of time to look for them.
I'm not a lawyer, but security tokens and the tokenization of private equities, and everything from startup shares to real estate to gold-backed tokens, these are positive developments. Raising money for business IS hard, and especially so if you're not one of the privileged tech elite in Silicon Valley. Author seems to forget this.
Furthermore, there's other sectors of the economy too. Have you ever tried raising money for a non-tech business? It's not easy. Money isn't exactly abundant in these sectors. Blockchain/token fundraising has the potential to bring more efficient capital markets to underserved industries and underserved jurisdictions (including other countries with different securities regulations).
Leaving out all the blockchain dogma and speaking purely from a technical perspective, I do think ICOs are pretty interesting in that they allow low-tech people to spin up digital tokens that can be traded in a decentralized manner. Of course, this is of dubious utility which is why close to 100% of ICOs are scams, but it is pretty fascinating to think that the fundamental primitives that emerge from a piece of open source software are capable of facilitating billions of dollars worth of fraud.
Edit: to elaborate a little further, the use of the word "fraud" there is not meant as a cynical jab, I think it is an uncomfortable fact and an ethical indictment of blockchain software, but if we suspend those considerations for a moment, I think it is interesting to think about the fact that the fundamental "coin-like" behavior of the software actually works (for all its extraordinary costs) and is such a tangible and captivating concept that it has spawned what has essentially become a real-life cyber-punk religion. It's kinda cool that it even exists. It'd be like if a malevolent AI emerged from the internet bent on destroying humanity, it would actually be a really scary situation but I think the HN crowd could not help but be somewhat amazed that such a thing actually existed.
It's not like the author works with the metaphor, either. The word appears exactly one time on the page, in the title. It's pure clickbaiting.
Is it insensitive? Probably. It's fitting though, if you see the analogy as "something that will kill the host if not treated".
:) Peace & Love
This approach to engineering rarely if ever works. The first casualty of contact with the enemy is the plan, and in engineering the "enemy" is the problem domain and/or the market.
I see a lot of ICOs that have raised a lot of money that are going to spend that money doing a ton of engineering to build the wrong thing.
This is the real reason ICOs are "cancer" insofar as cancer is a disease where a bunch of cells over-replicate and over-metabolize and crowd out the body's legitimate activity. ICOs are sucking all the air out of the room in terms of not only angel and VC capital but also talent and trapping all those resources in long death marches to nowhere. In the end we're going to end up wasting vast amounts of capital building things nobody ever wanted or that solve problems that only existed in the minds of their creators.
Meanwhile well-scoped competent projects trying to solve real world problems are starving for capital if they don't have "block chain" or "AI" somewhere in their name. I have actually seen investors' eyes glaze over after they ask if something is using "block chain technology" and get an answer in the negative.
Last but not least ICOs are legally questionable. This means that if you want to raise money this way you're exposing yourself to the possibility of lawsuits and even jail time. In other words the investment climate is now such that if you're not doing something possibly illegal in many jurisdictions you are not investment-worthy.
This isn't dot-com all over again. It's much, much worse. While I think cryptocurrency tech is awesome and does have some fantastic use cases, this bubble around it is indeed cancerous in the extreme.
That's actually why (shameless plug) I made one that's sort of an anti-scam: https://initialcornoffering.com
ICOs are a scam.
Learn the difference.
> Access to liquidity for early investors. Would you buy stock in a company if the senior management was dumping that stock?
There are lots of cases where an early investor, or early employee, might want liquidity on their holdings. For example, there are many cases of employees being essentially "trapped" at their companies, waiting for an exit.
> Stock is effectively a claim on a company’s dividends and the governance ability to hire/fire management in search of better cashflows. Token holders waive all of their rights.
How many dividends have Facebook, Amazon, Apple, or Alphabet issued exactly? And how many people have common shareholders hired/fired?
> Fundamentally Incompatible with the Legal System [...] Unless courts decided to cede their power (don’t hold your breath!), they will always be able to override the blockchain through blunt means like seizure of bank accounts, physical property and/or arrest of principals involved.
There are lots of tokens where this is the case, and I have to agree that ICOs make no sense for those cases. However, if it's actually a decentralized tokensale (e.g. cryptocurrencies, all DAOs)
> Lack of Basic Investor Protections
I think that, for a lot of (especially early) crytpo people, this is viewed as a strength. While it's unsurprising that a professional investors is going to miss the rules and customs that favour capital over all, there's a pretty big movement of people who were frustrated watching banks devour billions of dollars of taxpayer money in the form of bailouts, who've seen private capital groups walking away with millions from failed investments, and who've seen earnings for capital outpace every other form of income for the past several decades.
> Bitcoin is the world’s first (and best!) censorship-resistant digital store of value, and has amazing potential to improve the world by helping individuals regain their financial sovereignty.
Gee, I wonder if the author owns any bitcoin lol
This is just a very old story: "A fool and his money."
