[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).