1/ A paraphrased response kicked off by a friend asking about Angus' claims in this thread.
2/ Angus is laying down why ICOs can't succeed. And why they are all cynical money grabs. Yes, he is saying that shoehorning a token into whatever system you’re building all but guarantees failure.
3/ "Removing intermediaries by rewarding and incentivizing market participants with worthless tokens is bound to fail?"
4/ Tokens do not remove intermediaries any more than bitcoin does. Tokens do not reward or incentivise market participants any more than bitcoin does.
5/ When these shitcoin salesmen talk about incentivisation - they're just using unnecessarily fancy words for really boring, standard things like a *market* and an *economy*.
6/ Shitcoins _hamper_ markets. They introduce non-trivial friction and complications that make whatever system is using them considerably worse.
7/ Typically, this debate descends to: A) bitcoin is not ready yet; B) tokens turn users into stakeholders/marketers/shills; C) fundraising / business model for open source / tokens incentivise development HALLELUJAH!
8/ A. Contribute to bitcoin until it is. Because it will be ready. And when it's ready, it would wipe out your entire model and all your “investors”. Sorry, this does not allow you to get rich quick for no product and no users.
9/ (The upside is you are contributing to one of the most important human projects in history. And if you hold a small amount of bitcoin, and it succeeds, you will become wealthy faster than most people in history.)
10/ B. MLMs and pyramid schemes work the same way. Therefore this is not necessarily a feature. Users and "crowd investors" still only ultimately want to dump. No one has any reason to hodl any tokens, therefore they trend to infinite supply. 📉 
11/ C. The incentives are totally broken. Everything is front-loaded: present = risk-free riches; future = high risk of failure. The devs ultimately want to dump - the core of their “incentive”. After they have completed their dumping, who is incentivised to build?
12/ Then you have all the complexities of having to obtain the tokens on an open market for each individual application, and the service providers subsequently liquidating after receiving them for providing the service.
13/ Participants of the platform are forced to engage with exchanges, order books, and liquidity issues. They have to assess pricing in a market with 1-2 floating exchange rates. *TOTALLY INSANE*
14/ Some people counter this with the suggestion of hyper-efficient, decentralised exchanges with instantaneous, trustless atomic swaps. This would be *worse* for any token "economy".
15/ There would be even less incentive to hold any tokens. Users would hodl value in bitcoin, then convert at the *instant* they interact with the platform. Any tokens are passed to the service provider and would be *instantly* convert back into bitcoin.
16/ These are some of the core reasons why ICOs *can’t* work, and *don’t make sense*. It ignores the fact that ICOs - with all their fancy "incentives" and HEAPS OF MONEY - have failed to produce one convincing application or service that brings value to anyone.
17/ Billions and billions of dollars. Nothing.
18/ Then you get solutions like Segwit, Lightning, BTCPayServer, Trezor, Opendime, Electrum, Samourai, Casa, Wyre, which are built on bitcoin for *free* or with modest equity funding.
19/ These are real projects with real use-cases and real, immediate value-add for the people that use them.
20/ Satisfaction of intellectual curiosity, ethics & ideals, or good old fashioned revenues (or expectation of them), are all looking like *far better* incentives than token speculation.
21/ TLDR: In ICOs and token "economies", everyone is incentivised to dump; no one is incentivised to hodl; and forcing users to exchange is suboptimal vs. a standard unit of account. Therefore any shitcoin is doomed to be worthless.
