ICO: There’s No Such Thing
I learned a long time ago; if you act like a target, people will take shots at you.
There is no such thing as an initial coin offering or “ICO”.
Why all the insistence on the part of a radically smart group of people to use an antiquated, grossly inaccurate term to describe a process that has absolutely nothing to do with coins?
We are not offering coins. In fact, the term “Initial Coin Offering” is a gross misrepresentation and a material misstatement of what is actually occurring. If you are developing true network utilities, it has nothing whatsoever to do with coins.
The fact that network utilities develop a value is incidental. From the perspective of the developers of such utilities, it should remain that way. You don’t see Bob Metcalfe conducting an offering of new Ethernet tokens. Do you?
As the world of finance changes so does it’s culture. I’ve witnessed significant cultural change in the last 30 years I’ve been practicing. There; I just dated myself. I assure you, this time it really IS different. But not in the usual delusional way.
Just because the original Satoshi Crew showed the world that pulling a lever no longer effects positive change for people, doesn’t give their newly sovereignized, constitutionalized descendants the right to spit in the face of the sleeping guard dogs who regulate the world under old sovereign constitutions.
I operate under the misguided assumption that most of us are actually trying to build something highly disruptive dispite the fact that some of you are tokenizing arrays of fire hydrants and party favors. If you’re doing the latter, please stop. If you have the aptitude you can join our incubator. If you can’t stop, file an S1 or seek an exemption. Either way, please tell the truth and we beg of you; be good actors. Otherwise your just building a Trojan Horse for the SEC or CFTC to roll into our sovereign city.
I have been conducting securities offerings my entire adult life. At one point we were leading or co-managing one IPO per week before Gramm-Leach-Bliley destroyed small to medium sized enterprise IPO.
I lived in the time of the invention of Ethernet by Bob Metcalfe. Strangely, a lot of people who claim to be in Blockchain don’t even know who he is. There’s a big difference between a securities offering and an emission or release of new distributed network utilities.
First of all, when it comes to this business of ICOs, Merriam-Webster defines a coin as “a small, flat, and usually round piece of metal issued by a government as money”. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coin so there’s no coin involved in what we’re doing. Second; a distributed ledger network “DLN” is initialized at the genesis block or at the fork of an existing DLN so the word initial is also not accurate either. Third; NO OFFERING IS BEING CONDUCTED!
What is actually occurring, is an exchange of one or more emitted or released distributed network utilities for the emission or release of a new one in an ever widening and infinite distributed network loop. Again, this assumes you are actually building something compatable and disruptive and your network utility or “token” is exactly that; a utility in the Bob Metcalfe sense. Please call it what it actually is.
The use of the term token is also somewhat confusing but far more accurate, however, they are currently developed parallel to DLN initialization and emitted as incentive for DLN role participation.
Basic network protocol actually relied on tokenization of its components and is superceded by Ethernet. This time it’s different and the difference lies in the nature and integration of utility as well as its separation and transferability all based on decentralization. As far as custody, it’s debatable where these digital assets lie since they are, in fact, virtual.
The development of value of network utilities and the frequency in which they are exchanged depends on the extent to which they bind a network together or govern the behavior of network protocol. The more utility they have for and in the network, the more valuable they should be. The value of a network however should STILL be measured in accordance with Metcalfe’s Law.
Decentralization and emission just accelerates the basic principles of Metcalfe’s Law. It doesn’t supersede it. There’s no such thing as an ICO.
When those ferocious sleeping dogs wake up; and they WILL wake, the first count in the enforcement action will be misrepresentation and missstatement of material facts. Those are regulatory words. The DOJ calls it fraud. There’s no such thing as an ICO.
Under that vein, for those who are emitting or releasing true network utilities, the moniker “ICO” given to these processes is exactly that; a misrepresentation and a material misstatement of fact.
Are Satoshi descendants in such awe of their new found freedom that the need for adult supervision must supersede misguided and inaccurate cultural expression?
The cultural evolution of our crowd has given rise to an inaccurate term that could very well interrupt the greatest technical, political and monetary revolution since…well…there is no comparison.
Please continue to govern yourselves but do so accordingly lest intervention by government centralize the very decentralized movement that’s changed us forever.
Jason Meyers is a venture capitalist and a Blockchain incubator based in NYC
