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RE: Towards transparent & responsible ICOs.

in #ico7 years ago

Overall I love your message and the specifics here. I'd like to suggest some important thoughts on exemptions to the rule for ICOs though as well.

As background, it's important to note the status quo for companies seeking capital to grow/scale/finalize their value proposition. Family & friends, angels, VC & PE comprise the big pillars of startup financing with crowdfunding as a newer way to mobilize capital that has it's toe dipped in all of them. If we look closer at what ICOs are supplanting in the marketplace, have their predecessors met high standards in startup mode? Maybe a few, but I'd suggest the percentage is fairly small.

There are a great many stories spanning decades of companies that have made a huge impact on the world that were barely controlled chaos through multiple phases of their early evolution.

Relatedly, high failure rates for startups are a fact of life. So when urging ICOs to recognize that the scrutiny is heightened, and that big impact ideas, transparency and better communication are fantastic ways to embody the best of what ICOs can be, it is also very important to not establish a higher threshold for ICOs over more traditional startups at the precise moment when the risk of failure is highest. It is a crazy journey, and a vital force in our economy, so we need to be careful to not equate chaos and swagger and some other rough edges with unscrupulous or unethical intentions.

Keep in mind some of the biggest names in venture capital poured $125m+ into Juicero: a now defunct company that created a wifi enabled press for juices that a child could have pressed out themselves in seconds. They had planned to charge well over $500 for it initially too, until a few reporters figured out how silly it all was, and the mercy killing was underway.

Juicero to me is an extraordinary example of stupidity, greed and how low the bar can sometimes be set in the traditional innovation pipeline. But you won't see the attacks and presumption of ugliness like the coverage of the ICO space.

So in short, please keep sharing your ideas to help solidify the long term growth of the ICO space and protect it from heavy handed intervention. But remember to leave room for the rogues and the kooky geniuses to break and remake and create some carnage, because that's part of what startups do too. I think your encouragement to think big and to build far deeper transparency into new business models are powerful guideposts.

Let's just be sure a flexible, dynamic and realistic framework for due diligence still allows the full range of worthy investments to take a shot at the power of rapid capital infusion with lower cost and red tape if called for. If we strike the right balance, maybe we learn over the next 5 years that failure rates drop for startups that got past the early stages where the obstacles are front loaded when seeking capital. And maybe the foolishness of a Juicero is then seen as no better or worse than the overzealousness of some of the lesser quality ICOs.

Again, just refining some thoughts I hope add, not subtract from your recommendations. I've started following precisely because I like your focus and ideas very much.

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I appreciate your comment so much! Thank you for taking the time to read my post and sharing here your thoughts. I believe what you add up here is most valuable! You are right, we should still give room for ideas to flourish, and not suffocate them from the very start.

Actually, here is a post I published a couple of weeks ago that says why I am open to new ICOs. In principle, for me, ICOs are a great way froward, we just need to work as a community to improve the mechanism and support those that have indeed done a good work, separating them from those with incomplete, and even fraudulent ICOs. Here is that article, maybe you will like it, it is called "Reasons I am long on BTC, ETH, EOS + open to new ICOs":

https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@cryptotequila/reasons-i-am-long-on-btc-eth-eos-open-to-new-icos