Ask HN: Will there be an ICO bubble?

4 points by dayve ↗ HN

15 comments

[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 43.8 ms ] thread
what does ico mean in this context? http://www.abbreviations.com/ICO
Initial coin offering. Basically selling a cryptocurrency instead of shares to skirt around brokerage laws. But it also removes a lot of the investment protections offered by those laws, so it's a lot easier to get scammed.
I think they are talking about the underlying cryptocurrencies being offered in ICO's.
What is already happening is people realise that there is a high probability that ICO is a scam.

1. Set up some paper on how your coin works

2. Launch ICO

3. Tell you got hacked and silently close your coin

4. Profit

There are too many Altcoins and Tokens, you actually can create one within minutes using Waves Platform or Forknote
Our company raised more than $12M recently(a few days ago). It only spent 9 minutes.

Another company raised nearly $50M yesterday in 18 minutes.

Unbelievable!

what's your company solving?
They'll be releasing an e-book on how to raise millions in 9 minutes.
What is an ICO bubble?

I'd probably define as a scenario where the majority of ICO tokens are selling above intrinsic value.

I'd say that is very likely to happen, if it hasn't happened already.

Although it's arguably another flight-from-fiat asset bubble. Look at stocks P/E ratios and global real estate for example.

There should be. Scams aside, so many of these ideas simply don't make any sense, especially for a token. What we will see, what we are doing, is to issue shares instead of tokens (token-shares). We'll payout dividends. But that's because we have a solid business model and will have very large revenues and profits.
> But that's because we have a solid business model and will have very large revenues and profits.

Thanks for making me snort my coffee. Spot on!

This is already happening. Why else would the SEC issue something about it this early into its course?
It doesn't have to be a bubble for the SEC to issue something. After all, most of the ICOs seem like attempts to skirt SEC regulation in order to raise money and they see that too.
Bubble is already here. And it will blow. But some players, that have a substance, will survive or rise from ashes. And they will be very valuable. The tech will also survive and evolve. This happens all the time - dotcom bubble was the same, but there are more examples: we all know now that alchemy was a total scam, with lot of shady players milking naive people, but eventually from its residues the real chemistry was born. Hopefully we will learn one day how to jump over this kind of inital scams.