[roywiggins]

The Internet is a great technology but the dot com bubble still burst.

[brndnmtthws]

Indeed, and we will probably have another bubble or two. Or perhaps an infinite number, if society lasts forever.

Does that mean we should shun and shame this new technology? Doing so would seem—to me at least—to be something that's really not in the spirit of HN.

[adventured]

> Does that mean we should shun and shame this new technology?

You're inventing a straw-man. It's not the technology that is being primarily shunned or shamed in this thread. It wasn't the technology being shamed during the most extreme quarters of the dotcom bubble either.

It's the extreme valuations, backed with no products at all, that is being ridiculed. Properly so.

[brndnmtthws]

Those valuations don't really mean that much. It's simply number_of_coins * price. Saying it's worth $1bn does not mean you can take all of those coins and turn them in for $1bn. If you owned a large portion of the coins and tried to liquidate them at that price, the price would quickly drop.

The ICO funding model is new technology.

[taysic]

When the users buy into the ICOs don't they send ETH or Bitcoin thus giving the founders a currency which is far more stable and less likely to tank?