>If you're doing a legal ICO it has almost no benefit over traditional fundraising,
The way I read that is there are benefits. Seems to me it’s significantly more cost effective than a private offering and order of magnitude more cost effective than a traditional IPO.
>and some huge regularity drawbacks (not knowing who owns the shares).
Not knowing who owns the shares is in fact illegal.
If you're doing a legal ICO it has almost no benefit over traditional fundraising, and some huge regularity drawbacks (not knowing who owns the shares).
I was under the impression ICOs could now only target accredited investors. In that sense it's really no different from raising capital the traditional way.
But there's a difference between a public ICO and a public IPO: the ICO doesn't require transparency of the account, doesn't give legal ownership of the company's capital shares, and doesn't give a formal right of voting on classical issues, like electing a board member.
The ICO is a way to raise money out of chumps without giving anything in exchange, but it's not more efficient, faster or better in any way than an IPO. It's just shadier.
>Another common feature of ICOs: there's never any equity on the table. The founders are gonna cash in on the ICO and then later do an exit (sell the company, IPO, whatever). ICO "investors" are not gonna get much for their money here.
Which interestingly makes escaping regulation easier.
Not quite right. They raised from their own investors and the public, which may be part of the problem.
If their own investors bought into their own ICO to "seed" it, which tricked the public into thinking there was genuine demand, that might constitute fraud.
> a way to filter for 'wealthy' people that can afford to lose the money
The part I didn't appreciate is it's also a filter for people who can hire a lawyer/adviser to conduct basic diligence. Raising $1 million in $10,000 cheques guarantees virtually zero oversight. That, much more than anything legitimate, has been what ICOs have enabled.
> It's just an interesting technological gimmick to deal with some of the superficial difficulties of the process. I guess that's what tech companies are into these days.
This applies incredibly well to current ICO craze.
> but most of them were also not scams [...] most ICOs were not put together by scammers, and many of them have made an honest effort to produced technically advance systems
As someone who's had the misfortune of finding myself at events offstage around many famous practitioners in this space... I cannot say I agree.
It's my experience that only a small minority appear to have remotely credible beliefs in their prospects. The best I could say is that many appear to be indifferent to the prospects of success for their headline venture, but extremely interested and invested in their success in collecting investments from unsophisticated buyers.
Many I've witnessed are outright contemptuous towards the victims that buy into their offerings. You can see this contempt reflected in the contractual terms of the ICO offerings which go out of their way to make sure that absolutely nothing of value is transferred with the sale of the token. You'd have to be either an idiot or simply ignorant of the terms to accept them in virtually every ICO.
>"The bit that wasn't initially obvious to me is that these are all literally just investment rounds. They're just raising money and the "coin" is in many ways similar to a share."
This is kind of where my understanding of ICOs falls short. My understanding was that ICO coins don't entitle one to any equity in the company just the coin:
"ICOs are the Wild West of financing — they sit in a grey zone where the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and many other regulatory bodies are still investigating them. The main problem is, though, that most ICO’s don’t actually offer equity in start-up ventures; instead, they only offer discounts on cryptocurrencies before they hit the exchanges."[1]
If that's the case it's not like a share at all. Wouldn't it be more like a credit default swap or other derivative?
> It'd be so easy to spin ICOs as a matter of fraud that's taking advantage of uninformed investors, a Ponzi scheme, or any of the other buzzwords that historically work pretty well in convincing voters of criminal financial activity.
Indeed. The fact that ICO's have generally been fraudulent get rich schemes aids greatly in this "spin" of which you speak.
> will likely leave a lot of "investors" out of money.
Do you think this is a bad thing? I’m on the fence. If someone’s dumb enough to buy into these obviously stupid ICOs, chances are that the person getting the money will spend it better than the buyer would have.
Until one or more ICOs bring successful and innovative products. At the fundamental level ICOs are a frictionless way to fund your project. There will be a lot of scams and unproductive projects until the community makes an error correction looking for more due diligence and stronger evidence. There is a huge gap between ICOs and IPOs that make it difficult to fund new companies globally.
The way I read that is there are benefits. Seems to me it’s significantly more cost effective than a private offering and order of magnitude more cost effective than a traditional IPO.
>and some huge regularity drawbacks (not knowing who owns the shares).
Not knowing who owns the shares is in fact illegal.
reply