Rather than thinking about the businesses that currently are trying to get rich by doing ICOs, I'd like to point out that the idea of creating tokens out of thin-air, and having them obtain value purely by speculation, is an interesting system we should ponder more about.
We're now capable, thanks to these consensus systems, of creating tokens that have certain properties. For instance Bitcoin is a specific kind of token which is scarce - hence will work more like gold. Other tokens (perhaps Ether or Dogecoin) instead are not scarce at all, and new tokens continue entering the system all the time.
What's interesting about these systems is that we're converting money from the "real world" into this "speculation world". And purely because of speculation, real money is essentially being converted into this digital world.
In a very abstract way, we're essentially converting FIAT real-world money into these digital tokens that are hackable and can take on a myriad of different attributes.
To me this smells like the future - even though we're still far from it. Capitalism and the banking system we have created for ourselves is certainly not going to cope with the technological automations and the sheer amounts of jobs we're going to lose (hence automate) quickly.
Universal basic income is only part of the solution - but something like a world of tokens that behave in very different ways might be part of the solution as well. Even though we might not see the possibilities nowadays, to me it's very exciting to see how something can gain value simply because of speculation.
Perhaps in the future we'll have to redefine even what "money" is, or what "valuable" means. Again, if we're thinking about fully-automated societies, perhaps the idea of having a scarce token that only banks can create (our FIAT system) is not ideal. Perhaps the future is any kid creating his own token with some funky properties for his own videogame, and living off the "likes" he gets on some social network.