The destructive force of ICO's on the ethereum blockchain
INTRODUCTION
We've all seen it happen in the past couple of weeks, lots of ethereum has been pumped into several initial coin offerings such as Bancor, SONM, status and many more. Most of these "start-ups" are just paper companies that don't even have a working product. Besides that we don't even know whether these companies will actually add value to our economy in the long term meaning that most of them probably won't even exist anymore in just a couple of years. But what will happen with the loads of ethereum that has been invested in those companies?
THE PROBLEM
These funds need to be liquidated or swapped for other tokens/crypto's at some point in time to fund the projects meaning that they will have to flood the market with ether. This would add an excess supply of ethereum on exchanges and add a lot of downward pressure to the current market capitalization.
THE URGENCY
This is something that we don't want to happen. Worthless ICO's and a price crash will affect the trustworthiness of the whole ethereum project and might even cause it to fail. At this point in time, I don't think it's too late to prevent such things from happening. It's time that developers start to take their responsibilities and stop accepting ridiculous amounts of ether that they're never going to need to fund their projects. I think that the financial crisis in 2008 learned us damn well what happens when people start to get too greedy and prefer short term profits over long term sustainability.
If we don't manage to do something fast the crash is near and it won't be a healthy correction like we have seen numerous times, it will be a severe one that might take months/ years to recover.
Please let me know what you think about this topic and how it can be solved before it's too late.
Very well put. I don't think any of us really know what is going to come of these ICOs.
Problems can only be solved if the one at fault accepts their fault. You're right, we don't want to see a cryptoGFC (2008 style). I guess contacting such companies directly could be a solution?
Or a more extreme method of boycotting or blacklisting? Not advocating anything, just a suggestion haha
I guess that the hype is unfortunately too strong to achieve such things :D
Well even with hype, people can come to sense eventually. You are clearly highly educated on this topic, so if you continued posts that demonstrated issues and perhaps trends (everyone loves graphs), it could definitely have a major impact. I'm gonna follow to see such posts, as this post really opened my eyes to possible consequences.
Thanks for the feedback, I will definitely write more about this subject in the future. And i'll do my best to make it more interesting to read.
The many unintended consequences of the Ethereum design.
Very good blog. Same mindset here. It's facinating how people invest 10's of millions of dollars in "just an idea". This is quite an interesting website I found: https://www.coincheckup.com I really missed a platform that analyses every single coin in depth but this site gave me all the answers.
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