The first ICO unicorns are here

Here are my concerns:

* These ICOs are raising Series D level capital from investors at Seed Round risks. So while we can expect that most of these will fail, it's tens of billions of value erased. The market cap for Ethereum (and their ICO tokens) is close to $100bn[1], largely in the last 3 months. It's one thing when 90 startups at $1M in investments fail. Not when they're a billion a pop. The total market cap for Cryptocurrencies nearly doubled in the last month.

* September has over 100 additional ICOs slated[2].

* Most of these ICOs are a slick website and a PDF document. Take decentraland. It raised $25M in 35 seconds. Here's their website[3] and their PDF plan. It's a virtual reality game, and they spend twice as many pages talking about their token economy than the entire engine of their platform. Here's how they're going to "solve" their decentralized content distribution:

> The current solution uses the battle-tested BitTorrent and Kademlia DHT networks by storing a magnet link for each parcel. However, the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) provides a compelling alternative as its technology matures.

> However, hosting these files and the bandwidth required to serve this content has significant costs. Currently, users of the Decentraland P2P network are seeding the content without compensation and out of goodwill. However, in the future, this infrastructure cost can be covered by the use of protocols like Filecoin [...]

They similarly gloss over 3D meshes, sounds, scripting languages with payment (!!!), voice chat, etc. I could go on. Out of 7 people officially involved, only one is a self proclaimed tech. This is MOST ICO proposals. Remember that got $25M in 35 seconds. Does this look like a proposal for a serious investment? I'm shitting on Decentraland, but they are hardly alone in the lack of clarity or seriousness for such an ambitious project.

* On a pragmatic level, the constant shift in value of the various coins makes it nearly impossible to build stable marketplaces to actually USE the tokens. I have to shelve a bill-and-rent-splitting app for now because I can't trust the token not to drop/inflate in value over a day. The same thing with attempting to price a good or service over more than a week, as seen by the spread on Ethlance[5].

* Fraud, scams, phishing, hacks, it's all there. Half the time these ICOs have their websites and email lists hacked, and the hackers send out pre-ICO notices and pilfer coins. Happens all the time. Enigma, the security ICO, was comically hacked when the founder used the same password as Ashley Madison[6].

You might notice I haven't talked about the tech much. Honestly it's some of the coolest stuff I've seen ever. Or at least since BitTorrent. The concept of machine-managed economic transactions, housed in a distributed, secure, and consensus-based public ledger, has the power to disintermediate in ways not possible since the Internet first started. But god I wish people would stop setting money on fire.

[1]: https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/

[2]: https://www.coinschedule.com/

[3]: https://decentraland.org/

[4]: https://decentraland.org/whitepaper.pdf

[5]: https://ethlance.com/#/find/candidates?cat=10&o=0&xhr=10

[6]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/21/hack-enigma-500000-ico/

EDIT: I can't type grammar good.

Crypto is definitely a bubble. Perhaps one of the biggest bubbles to burst when this happens four to five years from now.

> I need to start thinking of a few product roadmaps

I know you are being facetious, but it really is not as simple as putting out a roadmap. Think about it: If you could pull this off, but are not doing it, you'll have us believe you are willingly turning down millions. If you can't pull it of, your comment becomes a cheap meaningless jab at things bigger than you. Both options are quite unbefitting of HackerNews.

> You also have to write a whitepaper.

http://plasma.io/ Pay attention to mentions of "micropayments".

> The incentive for holding OMGs, is to take part in the network validation process. We also see a long term value/appreciation in the OMG price as more and more transactions take place on the network.

So you can stake your tokens for a cut of the transaction fees (much like miners do).

So, the infinity:1 ratio of "bubble!" to "econ 101" doesn't speak well to the thinking going on here.