One of the things that bothers me about the ICO world is that even those ICOs that are not scams seem to mostly be trying to boil the ocean. I see a ton of massively over-specced ICO projects with huge road maps about how they are going to get somewhere very far away. That somewhere is usually blah blah AI blah blah smart blah blah IoT blah blah global blah blah blah-- in other words a vague mirage that might not even exist.

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.