Disclaimer: This article in inspired by many of the same, most recently I was triggered by
@David Drake's note here:
I have my mind set on the evolutionary approach to every industry. ICO industry is not an exemption.
This is natural, that it faces hurdles during the growth. There must be hurdles, otherwise it might go to the moon in a total disconnect with other industries and the society as a whole, which may lead to an awful burst, if there will appear a compliance problem with existing environment, which will be to big or too complex to fix. What is going on with the current ads hurdle is actually very positive, since it will force ICO industry to adapt to the environment, to invent ways around the arising problem and to negotiate conditions for a better integration with existing businesses and the modern society.
What are these ways? Let me assemble a brief list and feel welcome to add to it or correct me:
Follow the guidelines and the best business practices before they are becoming a law or a regulation of some type. It is a very well known problem, that many ICOs have an insufficient information disclosure, utilize misleading marketing practices, have poor security on both internal and external ends and are in general poor business ventures posing as something trustworthy. This is a huge concern, and it is yet to be better addressed by the crypto-community. Until we develop a better self-regulatory approach, there will be action taken by big corporations ad governments to take care about the public safety and legality. I do not want to go down to the discussion of how crooked all those guys are, ebcause it won;t benefit this discussion. Here, I suggest, that platforms like ICOBench shall push their updates faster for a due diligence requirements, ranking standardization, overall better information disclosure to public and some others, which would be required as if those ICOs would be an investment assets. You do not have to make it harder for website visitors, but the background work have to become up to the investment industry standards. It is logical to see changes from the market leader, which is ICOBanch, since there is no noticeable competition in a crowd-sourced field, and ICOs is very natural for a crowd-sourced assessment and audit.
Clean the field on our own.There is a problem of fraud attempts through ICOs. That was expected, since all the money flooding into the industry had to attract fraudsters and high-risk professionals, which are not always easy to distinguish one from another from a moral standpoint. These guys are be default OK with leaching liquidity and goodwill from the industry providing close to no value to their clients and investors, which may be natural and can be dealt with during the early hype, but becomes a problem to address now (or couple months before). Let me explain the problem: if some crooks use the words "ICO", cryptocurrency", "Investment", "token", "echange" and many more to make people loose their money, that hurts every good guy in the industry. That also hurts old investments industry professionals, since their potential clients lose liquidity and are not willing to invest in their products. The search engine and the social network lose trust of their users, if they become gateways to fraudsters. And since it's hard for them to distinguish good guys from bad guys, they may be at the point, where any gains from being such gateway may become lower, than losses in user base, click rate, excessive regulatory costs, and many other metrics, which are crucial for their business.
Develop better standards for ICO reviews. There must be a system to differ a nonsense review with 0 value from a professional review. Looking at the ICOBench, I can see pieces with 4-4-4 rates and a 1000 reasonable words, and I can see just a blank rates with 5-5-5 making the higher impact, This is wrong, has to be fixed.
Work on the scientific proofs, that will support ideas of better performance of ICOs in case of different project types. There is not enough evidence now, that would support the obvious idea, that crowdfunding in a form of the ICO is the bst fit for the whole class of assets, that it may be a safer approach, that it may implement a sufficient level of due diligence and information disclosure, that will be more affordable and more trustworthy, than any previous private research and limited data access approaches. Only pure scientific publications and corresponding discussions will bring the industry to the level, when it will be perceived as a real alternative to the obsolete practices, which it is dedicated to eliminate or substitute in some appropriate cases. Currently we have more proofs of concepts, that would be required, but we see a lack of theoretical papers, which would advocate and support the approach on the abstract level.
This piece looks to be extensively long already, so I'm pausing here. Would love to here some feedback here.
