You'd be stuck with all that money in a crypto currency, unable to transition it to fiat, of which that crypto will likely be worth zero in a couple years. ;)

He's the one selling the coin...

Initial coin offering

How do you think he'll be selling the coins? He'll be charging them ETH and/or BTC. Anyone will be able to see the wallets the coins end up in and he won't be able to cash it out without everyone making a big fuss about it.

He doesn't have to charge ETH or BTC, u he could just as easily charge USD. And why would people make a fuss of he cashed out? The point of an ICO is to fund developement, not to serve as some sort of escrow.

Are you familiar with ICOs? You don't "easily charge USD" because all of them are held using crypto. Yes, some have used bitcoinsuisse to allow some to preorder their slots/amount using fiat, but that's the exception, not the norm.

Moreover charging fiat only prevents them from legally allowing US citizens to participate whereas using the blockchain, they really only have to "warn" US citizens that their participation is not allowed.

People have made a fuss for cashing out (e.g. Status was trying to cash out on a sizable chunk of ETH from their ICO, which led to a lot of angry ICO participants calling them out) in the past. It shows that they don't fundamentally have faith in the system if they're building an ERC20 token but they're selling ETH. No one minds them selling a bit for runway, but if you're liquidating your entire ICO amount, it'd be a huge red flag.

Give me some counterexamples if you'd like to disagree but I'm fairly convinced you're not too familiar with the landscape.

Somewhat unrelated, I'm curious if there are documented examples of raised coin from an ICO being laundered/tumbled.

You might infer such a valuation on an ICO with a coin that is tenuously that valuable, but 1.1b for Tumblr was an outright acquisition, cold cash.

You could probably claim a value of 1.1b on any hackneyed scam via ICO, but the issues with that eclipse any meaningful discussion we could have about Tumblr as an idea or viable business in 2017.

Hello :-) Could I just ask what ICO stands for? Thanks

Initial Coin Offering.

The IPO of a cryptocurrency, more or less.

"Initial Coin Offering", a way to crowd fund with cryptocurrency.