I am in Argentina. I can do an investment on a company being founded in France tomorrow and cash out in 3 months on a secondary market to a buyer in Angola. The friction involved in doing this in a pre-crypto world makes it a non-starter.
One of the reason VC has its characteristic geographical distribution is because exit opportunities are extremely localized. No more.
This in turn unlocks a ton of talent-capital synergy opportunities for a myriad of projects outside of the large tech hubs.
But you're not doing it because of any intrinsic property of crypto-coins. You're doing it because they haven't been regulated yet. (I am not implying any ill intent on your part.)
You could do the same thing with normal investments, if trading houses and banks didn't do any KYC checks.
I don't know about "intrinsic". No other asset class has the same characteristics. It's making investments viable that were not viable before.
No regulation exists now in conventional banking that prevents me from doing that investment without crypto. It's just not practical and therefore unviable. I would need to surf through 3 different bureaucracies in 3 different languages and currencies. If you are doing this kind of thing, it's in your best interest to always do KYC, mostly not for AML - just for general due diligence purposes.
The fundamental thing is disintermediation, not deregulation. Regulation might be able to kill the space, but it would really be a triumph of the incumbents over a real progress opportunity.
PS I'm going at it from the investor angle here but it goes without saying that enabling investment enables entrepreneurship.
Most ICOs don't sell security tokens. They sell utility tokens. But many ICOs have happened that sold security tokens, they just tend to be more discreet these days because of the limits on public security offerings. The security token space is also very immature still.
On the other end of the discreetness spectrum, The DAO was a security ICO and it was the largest crowdsourced project in history at the time.
I am not familiar with any exit scam that was done based on issuing crypto-powered company shares, which is the topic of discussion. None of the ones you mentioned seem to fall into that category. Most are MLM type stuff.
Where you got the idea that I'm denying the existence of ICO scams, I'll never know.
