Completely agree with everything you're saying. I hope the SEC prosecutes any criminal activity that is found to be intended to take advantage of unsophisticated investors, but I don't think its appropriate to characterize ICOs as a cash grab as some have in this thread. I participated in the Ethereum pre-sale in 2013 and think ICOs in conjunction with the relatively new SEC regulation surrounding crowdsales (https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2015-249.html) could potentially facilitate new, organically-grown companies that reward individuals for their independent analysis of a project that they believe has value, irrespective of how much capital they have - people should be able to measure the risks they are willing to take, and exercise the judgment call accordingly. Currently regulatory limitations force potential investors with less capital to limit their participation in projects that they may want to have a stake in - I don't think that's fair.
I do think that there are some projects that have tremendous promise (more specifically in the Ethereum ICO space, since Bitcoin smart contracts are basically dead in the water at this time).
For example, Swarm City markets itself as a sharing economy platform (after the rebranding from Arcade City due to one of the founder's shady dealings), and intends to compete with the class of organizations with business models like Uber and Airbnb. While they have a ways to go in terms of developing the intended product to a level that could be acceptably called production-quality, this is exactly what decentralized applications could be used to build. The fact that Swarm City is trying to work through its earlier issues and still has active development/plans to release a real project is very promising, and shows that small-scale decentralized development can work in the real world. Whether a real product can be released remains to be seen, but I'm cautiously optimistic and advising my peers to just be really, really careful - especially as new highs are tested every single day.
Aeternity is another interesting project that builds on top of Ethereum but is focused on scaling and the issue of oracles right off the bat, which is something that is kind of brushed off as a trivial and minor detail, but that will really make or break these decentralized application platforms on the whole. The technical lead, Zack Hess, has experience working on cryptocurrency projects (@zack-bitcoin on GitHub) and I think its amazing that all this cryptoasset technology is enabling people to raise money easier than before.
While abuses need to be dealt with as swiftly and dramatically as the scale of the crimes deserves, it does seem a little hostile to characterize the class of these projects as completely fraudulent. But the valuations for some of these projects is just insane. People don't need two prediction markets valued at >$300m and a variety of distributed supercomputing platforms with no real-world use-cases this badly...
I do think that there are some projects that have tremendous promise (more specifically in the Ethereum ICO space, since Bitcoin smart contracts are basically dead in the water at this time).
For example, Swarm City markets itself as a sharing economy platform (after the rebranding from Arcade City due to one of the founder's shady dealings), and intends to compete with the class of organizations with business models like Uber and Airbnb. While they have a ways to go in terms of developing the intended product to a level that could be acceptably called production-quality, this is exactly what decentralized applications could be used to build. The fact that Swarm City is trying to work through its earlier issues and still has active development/plans to release a real project is very promising, and shows that small-scale decentralized development can work in the real world. Whether a real product can be released remains to be seen, but I'm cautiously optimistic and advising my peers to just be really, really careful - especially as new highs are tested every single day.
Aeternity is another interesting project that builds on top of Ethereum but is focused on scaling and the issue of oracles right off the bat, which is something that is kind of brushed off as a trivial and minor detail, but that will really make or break these decentralized application platforms on the whole. The technical lead, Zack Hess, has experience working on cryptocurrency projects (@zack-bitcoin on GitHub) and I think its amazing that all this cryptoasset technology is enabling people to raise money easier than before.
While abuses need to be dealt with as swiftly and dramatically as the scale of the crimes deserves, it does seem a little hostile to characterize the class of these projects as completely fraudulent. But the valuations for some of these projects is just insane. People don't need two prediction markets valued at >$300m and a variety of distributed supercomputing platforms with no real-world use-cases this badly...