[jazzyjackson]

I lean in the same direction, I thought ICOs were a very cool way to replace kickstarter: raising funds, staking ownership, if some enterprise was successful you could even sell your share at market value, or cash out early if you're starting to doubt the campaign's ability to ship the product (if you can find someone willing to take the risk at a lower price)

Unfortunately even more than that they lend themselves to raising funds for vaporware, and I don't think there was a single ICO that actually resulted in a real-world product.

NFTs are essentially a reboot of ICO, except instead of a million tokens each representing a small percentage of ownership, you sell a single token representing 100% ownership. I think they could still be used to fund artists (I think of them more as patronage than trading cards), but very few artists are actually raising funds this way, the market is almost entirely trash being wash traded and plots of land in metaverses that don't exist yet.

I think they will suffer the same fate I see in crypto over and over again, any legitimate use case is totally overwhelmed by the number of scams, makes the whole thing wholly unattractive to participate in.

[jollybean]

This is misunderstanding of the situation derived I think from a believe that the technology somehow changes the use case.

ICO's are a scam because they are essentially unregulated securities.

If all securities were unregulated, then they would all be scams.

The moment you strongly regulate ICO's, then they don't get their pop, they lose their allure, and they make no sense.

There's no material or commercial advantage to Crypto or NFT's, or rather, any advantages they might offer are outweighed by the drawbacks.

And so the big remaining advantage is for scammers, which is why they take advantage of it.

[MacsHeadroom]

There are literally thousands of dApps developed and governed by DAOs funded by ICOs which tens of millions of daily active users derive economic value from. Sure, lots of ICOs find vaporware. But so do the overwhelming majority of VC investments.

[jazzyjackson]

Sorry, by "real world product" I was thinking the kind of thing that gets funded on Kickstarter, e.g. hardware or at least some kind of entertainment production.

I'm aware there's thousands of dApps and DAOs but I don't know what any of them actually do besides pay early participants with funds derived from later participants.