A lot of people will lose a lot of money, and some will come out of it with huge profits. The problem is we don't reliably know which will fail and which will succeed.
And come to think of it, I think Flooz reached better merchant adoption than any blockchain-based digital currency has managed to get.
But here are a two.
Startup that issues you a Mastercard that is backed by your BTC, ETC. So you can shop at any store that accepts CCs, but never hold actual Fiat currencies. You recieve tokens as a form of cashback for your CC revenue. And all tokenholder get a share of all the revenue that happens on all the TenX issued CCs. https://www.tenx.tech/
An online casino that shares it profits with the tokenholders (shareholders) https://www.edgeless.io/#!/index
They're almost all flat.
Why does anyone think that anyone will be interested in buying 'Kin' tokens?
These tokens are magic numbers that someone made up.
You people are buying Monopoly money. Worse - Monopoly money is at least made of paper you could use for something possibly.
Kik's Kin tokens are way down, and they are not coming back up. Why on earth would they?
Billions of people around the world are going to start sinking all their money into thousands of fantasy tokens that have no use, and have no value? I don't think so.
https://www.visa.com/splisting/searchGrsp.do?companyNameCrit...
(I don't own any, but I've been watching it since I heard)
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/opskins-founders-to...
no, that's dismissing the mechanism (buying stuff over the internet). the problem with ICOs is that they're essentially penny stocks, but worse (at least penny stocks are somewhat regulated). ability to raise funds anonymously + promise of riches + unregulated market = maximum potential for scams.
a more accurate description would be to dismiss online pyramid schemes (not saying all ICOs are pyramid schemes, but bare with me) because their offline counterpart is flawed, and doing it online doesn't address any of the issues.
Sure people will get scammed a ton. But we can't ignore the insane liquidity that those types of fundraises allow. This has huge overall benefits for the society, after the first few waves of mania settle down.
After a while some people will stay away from it, others will benefit.
We have a ton of high variance financial instruments on the market already, like options, and tons of people got burned. We kept the financial instruments because they were overall beneficial for price discovery and liquidity in the market. The people that got burned now stay away and we didn't need to ban anything.
What I always notice is that those discussion tend to be very nationalistic, which means that its usually 95% of the world is excluded from the picture.
There are maybe guys in Israel, Ukraine, Singapore, Japan etc. that want to raise money with an ICO or that fund to fund an ICO with 100$ or 10000$.
I think the next silicon valley will be the jurisdiction that will offer the best legal structure to run serious ICOs. It will be a no-brainer for the founding teams to move to this jurisdictions. Just like many international startups setup offices in Silicon Valley to get better access to capital.
Your point that most ICOs so far were shitty companies actually shows how much potential this mechanism has. Serious founders with a track record will be able to raise billions this way.
that seems like a liberterian cop-out, and it doesn't take into account that it takes time and energy to do due diligence, most people are naive and can't do due diligence, and there's a huge incentive for ICO founders to lie, which creates an asymmetry of information.
>We have a ton of high variance financial instruments on the market already, like options, and tons of people got burned. We kept the financial instruments because they were overall beneficial for price discovery and liquidity in the market. The people that got burned now stay away and we didn't need to ban anything.
at least with those instruments, you know what you were getting into. all of that goes out the window when it comes to unregulated securities, where the seller can outright lie to you.
>What I always notice is that those discussion tend to be very nationalistic, which means that its usually 95% of the world is excluded from the picture.
how? is it the mention of the SEC?
>I think the next silicon valley will be the jurisdiction that will offer the best legal structure to run serious ICOs. It will be a no-brainer for the founding teams to move to this jurisdictions. Just like many international startups setup offices in Silicon Valley to get better access to capital.
SV = in US = SEC jurisdiction. the ideal jurisdiction would be somewhere where banking privacy is high, and securities regulation is low. so probably a random Caribbean island.
People learn surprisingly quickly. A consumer base has a sort of collective wisdom that evolves as it gains experiences. Years ago, people would trust fly by night Bitcoin wallets that store the bitcoin client-side, and numerous scams and hacks cost people hundreds of thousands of bitcoin as a result.
Now everyone stays away, even new users, because only highly secure and reputable wallets that store cryptocurrency client side, or credible exchanges with cold-storage, are recommended on all major information portals, and everyone (including any likely first contact point for a new cryptocurrency user) strongly warns users to avoid storing their cryptocurrency on untrusted websites.
>people would trust fly by night Bitcoin wallets that store the bitcoin client-side,
In contrast, I'd be willing to bet that the bulk of ICOs to date will in 10 years time be seen as failures.
Countries like Switzerland and Singapore created and will further create a legal structure to connect the real world transactions to the tokens.
Sure some countries will ban it, just like China has banned free internet access, this doesn't mean that free internet access is bad.