most ICOs are done by startups that haven't built their businesses yet - that's why they are raising money. Many of them seem like legitimate businesses that could fail but also could succeed.

So you can't name a single legitimate business that's doing an ico?

filecoin. storj. factom, ripple, omega one. golem, iconomi there are tons of them.

Filecoin? Consider Bit Torrent seeding/bandwidth. It is too cheap to count for at least 10 years. Even tit-for-tat is no longer necessary since LEDBAT was rolled out (circa 2010).

The stuff they are going to count "on the blockchain" is too cheap to count! Well, and blockchain transactions are kind of expensive and slow. See the problem?

the question was to name legitimate businesses doing ICOs. filecoin is certainly legitimate. You are talking about how their tech might fail and how their business might not work. that's great, and you could very well be correct, but that's not what we are discussing here

I am rather certain that guys consumed less-legal substances while drafting their whitepapers. That is my top reason not to consider their business "legitimate".

You didn't make a point, sorry.

ok, to those who didn't get my point. Everyone is certainly entitled to make up their own definition of "legitimate". However, as long as we are all speaking English, we can agree on what legitimate means. And it means the following:

le·git·i·mate adjective adjective: legitimate ləˈjidəmət/ 1. conforming to the law or to rules. "his claims to legitimate authority"

so, it's great to have a learned opinion on filecoin's tech, but its irrelevant to the discussion of whether filecoin is a legitimate business

Those companies have products available that consumers pay real money for?

Some of them do, like factom. others are raising money through the ICO to build those products. Is that a bad thing ?