[ashnyc]

ICO are the best thing that ever happened. This is no different then kickstarter.com started. People where saying the same things. People put up lot of BS project and they got funded, in time these kind of project will fail on there own. This is just the start, no government or bank would have supported such system. For once, the small guy can participate in this market. I would have loved to invest in amazon, facebook, etc when they where private. You had to have the connection and access .. here the little guy in columbia or Africa has the same access to such a deal

[ailideex]

> I would have loved to invest in amazon, facebook, etc when they where private.

I'm sure if you wen't to them then and said here is money plz give share they would have considered it. Everybody want's to have gotten into the big giants when they were small - but there are many small cap/penny stock companies you can invest in now ... yet people don't. There are even non listed share trading options. And the reason is because hindsight is 20/20 ... it takes experienced and diligent investors to make good investments that beat the market - it's exceptionally rare.

ICOs are not like getting into Amazon/Facebook/etc early. It's like penny stocks or worse. Could it pay out big ? Sure ... why not. So can the lottery. But there is no enforcement on any of these things in the real world, no shareholder rights and no protections.

> People put up lot of BS project and they got funded, in time these kind of project will fail on there own.

People keep funding these BS projects and loosing their money though. Let's not pretend nobody is loosing, and I'm actually pretty sure with kick-starter garbage most of the time nobody is winning.

> For once, the small guy can participate in this market.

I'm not sure what market you think you were excluded from, but I doubt this was the case.

> You had to have the connection and access .. here the little guy in columbia or Africa has the same access to such a deal

... this is just wrong.

[sharemywin]

- try investing in a high flying startup as a non-accredited investor.

[ashnyc]

Thank you, that is what i am talking about. I don't mind trying my chance by investing a few K in a good idea, that can get me astronomical return.

[ailideex]

There are options for investing in Reg D companies - and I would like you to give some actual examples of where you would have done this for Reg D companies if you could - and how you tried to invest in Reg D companies and how you were turned down.

The main reason why your line of thinking is flawed is - most cases if you know the people to a point where you trust them to invest in them - you will be covered under Reg D affilated investor - and in other cases you probbably would not invest anyway.

Further, so far I have yet to see a practical example where crypto actually acts as shares - with the same protections (but via smart contracts or whatever). So while maybe one day, so far it has not delivered on this promise.

Your basically happy that at the moment crypto allows you to do exceptionally stupid things with your "money".

[Cakez0r]

Participating in ICOs are not the same as investing in the company and receiving equity in return. The vast majority of tokens are not backed by equity in the company that created them.

[michaelscott]

The concept behind the tokens is that they take the value place of equity in a company. A person buying tokens is saying that they believe that the core product the company is providing is good enough that the tokens will increase in value in the future.

Replace the word "token" with the word "equity" in the previous sentence and it would still be true.

[sjg007]

They can't be equity by definition otherwise they are unregulated securities and then the SEC will step in and shut everything down or make you subscribed to the new equity crowdfunding rules.

You want them interpreted at best as as in game currency or at worst as gift cards.

[michaelscott]

I didn't say they were equity, only that they follow the same conceptual structure in investment practice. That said, the days of unregulated ICOs are definitely numbered and you can count on regulatory legislation coming to a city near you soon.

The only problem with the idea of tokens as "gift cards" or "in game currency" is that it restricts the conceptual range of possibilities of what a token can really do. It's an assumption to think they NEED to function that way, because they definitely don't have to. Better to think of the blockchain tech from first principles.

[Cakez0r]

But when you own equity, you own a tangible piece of a company. I could say I believe in Amazon's core products and create an Amazon coin, but why should the value of my Amazon coin be correlated to the market cap of Amazon when it has no link to Amazon shares?

[michaelscott]

I just mean that tokens indicate buy-in value for a product in the same way that equity does, not that they're perfectly analogous or the same by definition.

If Amazon were to decide to set up some kind of coin product it wouldn't really work unless it were backed by something internal. So it's perfectly feasible that some kind of blockchain product the guys at Amazon come up with necessitates a token and this coin would certainly be correlated to the future of that one product's success, but as a company because they've already had an IPO and trade publicly what's the incentive to adopt a coin for the whole pie?

It's definitely not a case of blockchain-all-the-things (although that can be almost impossible to see just by glancing into the ICO space).

[empath75]

If you wanted a hit rich quick scheme, amway and Herbalife have been around for decades.