We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14688593 and marked it off-topic.

Nope, HN can just see when a 'crowdfunding' system is designed to support scammers.

For fucks sake, even kickstarter etc is full of scams that never deliver - and they work within a legal system, with clear lines of identity and responsibility, and build things that are much easier to understand ahead of the time.

It's obvious that the ICO buyers are half clueless people who can't evaluate the risks, and half folks exploiting the former by buying early and trying to flip the tokens once the market opens up.

Sure, there's certainly some teams that are trying to build legit things with ICOs. But when you have two funding systems, where one is completely open, and the other requires certain guarantees (identity, legal responsibility), the first is always going to be full of scammers.

> But when you have two funding systems, where one is completely open, and the other requires certain guarantees (identity, legal responsibility), the first is always going to be full of scammers.

Exactly. It always cracks me up when people tout the completely deregulated nature of cryptocurrencies as a good thing.

> It always cracks me up when people tout the completely deregulated nature of cryptocurrencies as a good thing.

Well, I'll acknowledge that there are real downsides, but I think it might be feasible to (over time) build opt-in layers on top of the existing layers which serve some of the same purposes as some regulations and handle some of those issues.

States are good and important and all, but if we can build something that makes some of the roles of the state unnecessary/redundant, that would be cool I think.

I don't know, maybe this is largely an aesthetic preference?

Just to be clear: I wasn't making an argument in favor of states, merely in favor of a regulating body.

Some industries already self-regulate precisely to preempt regulation by a government agency, as in: "we're well-behaved amongst the rules we made for ourselves, so please don't step in and start making rules we cannot control".

It's worthwhile to note that not a single once of the thousands of "ICO" things that have been launched in the last year have actually done anything of value. They all generate hype, raise money, and then give up and go to work on other things. It happens over and over again with no memory of the past failures, apparently.

That said I wouldn't fault you for believing that a lot of the $xM raised in x ICO just turned out to be largely the creator seeding the pot and a minority of other people buying into something "big". You could even take out a loan, there's nearly zero risk other than the operator of the ICO running with the scratch.

>It's worthwhile to note that not a single once of the thousands of "ICO" things that have been launched in the last year have actually done anything of value. They all generate hype, raise money, and then give up and go to work on other things.

I agree that many ICOs are scams, but I disagree with your statement for the following reasons:

1. Most large ICOs have not been scams, but several have failed (see theDAO). Because you choose a short time horizon (launched in the last year) it excludes both successes like the Ethereum ICO and failures like theDAO.

2. We say "They all" however most of the larger ICOs have not been scams. I only need to provide a single counter-example: look at the Brave ICO.

>It happens over and over again with no memory of the past failures, apparently.

I'd be interested in seeing some examples? What ICOs over 5 million USD in the last year were scams? For the record I don't doubt you can find some.

> It's worthwhile to note that not a single once of the thousands of "ICO" things that have been launched in the last year have actually done anything of value.

I honestly thought there was like a few of ICOs to date, and that the whole thing is like a month or two old. Does anyone track these things? A continuously updated list would be great!

Here is a list I've come across, I'm not sure how exhaustive it is: https://www.smithandcrown.com/icos/

Oh no, this has been going on for about a year, with increasingly more ludicrous amounts of money when random people living in exotic countries with questionable jurisdiction are starting companies and without any product, just a whitepaper (so PDF file with some nice pie charts and buzzwords) raise tens of millions of USD in exchange for blockchain tokens which then get traded on exchanges where speculators further drive up their price.

It's becoming especially more concerning now that we have one man companies raising hundreds of millions of dollars in couple of hours/days. This can't end well.

HN doesn't need to be a place where we can "teach the controversy" about stealing people's money. Imagine Amazon raised money by selling people BezoBucks, but promised "BezoBucks are totally safe because their value is tracked through an incorruptible distributed ledger". I think you would probably not be ok with this. I see no difference.

I considered this platform innovative, but I must say like someone stated above that most of the comments here have no clue about what we will see in the next year. The evolution of venture capital. The future of finance. And most of users at HN just see all of this as a scam.

The money raised will be invested and you will see then the result of the investment.

It's funny how people think about the future looking at the past.

I doubt it. What we will see next year will be thousands of unsophisticated naive investors losing their life savings or ending up with big credit card debts because they tried to get rich quickly without any effort, just by flipping tokens. This is a disaster in waiting.

I don't hate on cryptocurrencies but I think it should be blatantly obvious to anybody that this ICO system, as it is today, is a "get rich quick" scheme that should raise all possible red flags.

Extremely complex and abstract "products" based on an incredibly complex and unproven systems and yet managing to raise millions of dollars almost daily? I don't know what is a scam and what is just extreme optimism in the long term performance of those blockchain startups but it feels more like playing in a virtual casino than investing in a startup.

How many of these ICO investors/gamblers would be able to explain in details what the startup they're funding is doing and how they're planning to generate revenue in the long term? Not many I bet.

I think there's quite a big difference between hating on crypto-currency as a concept and hating on ICOs. People here very much do the latter, for good reason.

Don't confuse ICOs for cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency is great. ICOs are almost universally scams.

I'm a strong believer in the promise of cryptocurrency, but 90% of these ico's are scams and the recent run up in ethereum and btc is just based on nonsense speculation.

There are currently three cryptocurrency threads on the front page.

That's because HN is run by VCs and ICOs bypass VCs.

inb4 downvotes