[root_axis]

Cancer sounds like a pretty fair description to me; a destructive mechanism that sucks up tons of resources while turning the tables on something we usually consider a good thing (growth). It's not literally a disease that kills people.

Leaving out all the blockchain dogma and speaking purely from a technical perspective, I do think ICOs are pretty interesting in that they allow low-tech people to spin up digital tokens that can be traded in a decentralized manner. Of course, this is of dubious utility which is why close to 100% of ICOs are scams, but it is pretty fascinating to think that the fundamental primitives that emerge from a piece of open source software are capable of facilitating billions of dollars worth of fraud.

Edit: to elaborate a little further, the use of the word "fraud" there is not meant as a cynical jab, I think it is an uncomfortable fact and an ethical indictment of blockchain software, but if we suspend those considerations for a moment, I think it is interesting to think about the fact that the fundamental "coin-like" behavior of the software actually works (for all its extraordinary costs) and is such a tangible and captivating concept that it has spawned what has essentially become a real-life cyber-punk religion. It's kinda cool that it even exists. It'd be like if a malevolent AI emerged from the internet bent on destroying humanity, it would actually be a really scary situation but I think the HN crowd could not help but be somewhat amazed that such a thing actually existed.