[gruez]

>Dismissing ICO in this early stage is equal to dismissing eCommerce 20years ago because someone got scammed buying something online.

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.

[mrwong]

I think your opposition is a political one. I would argue that the free market will sort it out.

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.

[gruez]

>I think your opposition is a political one. I would argue that the free market will sort it out.

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.

[CryptoPunk]

>>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.

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.

[CryptoPunk]

The "client-side" should be "server-side" here:

>people would trust fly by night Bitcoin wallets that store the bitcoin client-side,