ICOs disappeared because the SEC stepped into what had been a kind of legal gray area and said “Lol, no. All of this is illegal.” They didn’t really go away on their own.

> ICOs disappeared because the SEC stepped into what had been a kind of legal gray area and said “Lol, no. All of this is illegal.”

This demonstrates that the blockchain promises of decentralization and avoidance of government is generally impossible in countries with functioning governments.

Oh yeah, a proper great power could snuff out Bitcoin, to say nothing of the smaller coins, if they put their mind to it.

If there's a real non-bubble use case, it will have to be around making a bad but much less expensive version of something that's already possible offline, but that requires lots of lawyers to set up.

I’d argue that the US government has done a great job at leaving crypto alone. SEC jumped on ICOs because they were scamming people left and right making promises that made the tokens securities.

ICOs still happen though - there’s coins getting launched almost every day. They just went the DEX route, and for some reason the SEC isn’t as active stopping them as in 2017. But they didn’t go away.

The ICOs were mostly trash. That was obvious. But yes, Ethereum is still around that was ICO. Polkadot. Algorand. Lots of serious projects with interesting solutions.

You’re clearly out of the loop so. Just do more research.

There are still ICOs for instance there are auctions happening right now on Polkadot.