Right. Now convince me to buy the coins, that's the challenge.

At the moment, the convincing doesn't seem to need to be very much, particularly where ICOs are involved. Copy someone else's white paper, post in a few forums with the word ICO splashed around liberally, and Bob's your uncle.

I think that's kinda why people are welcoming this move - there's a lot of trash coins and trash ICOs with no hope of anything ever coming from them, with a relatively low input of time and effort. But because they offer trade-able tokens and some of them might take off, and at least some of them might get a hype-cycle and increase in value whether there's any underlying value or not, and it's all new, shiny, crypto-magic-money...

I'm not sure this argument holds much weight. All investments have inherent risk. It's the job of the investors to assume how much risk they're taking. You cannot ban all digital currencies simply because a large amount of ICOs are poorly thought through, if not malicious. That would block a huge amount of innovation in a technology with huge potential to revolutionize many markets, if not all markets.

It's the equivalent of banning startups to protect investors from stupid/malicious founders, which has obvious negative effects on the economy. And with crowdfunding making its way to startup investment, it's not a reach to compare the two.

In this subthread I am arguing that someone who can create an altcoin or ICO from their home in a weekend is not necessarily a financial genius who should be paid millions, as it's fairly easy to do.

In other subthreads I am saying why I think the ban on ICOs might be welcomed, even if it could take the good down with the bad. I'm not arguing in any thread for an outright ban on digital currencies.

You only argued a portion of the point I was making. Simply making a cryptocurrency isn't enough. Differentiating in a way where I would be convinced to buy it, now that will obviously take genius since the mere creation of a cryptocurrency is commodity code. And it's not fair to say that just launching an ICO will mean an influx of money either, that is, token buyers are just shoving money into anything, because I can show you failed ICOs as well.

>> Differentiating in a way where I would be convinced to buy it, now that will obviously take genius

Evidently it doesn't really though, because we're in a stage where these are magic, and people are investing based on a little bit of hype which becomes self-sustaining.

There are lots of altcoins out there, most with not much value, but slowly trickling along. And there have been lots of ICOs of dubious value.

I obviously don't know what it takes to persuade you, personally, to invest. But it seems not to take much for the crypto-currency world at large to dive in right now.