Thread by @el33th4xor

I believe many ICOs raised far more than their worth. But this franken-toothbrush shows that there's still lots of money chasing dumb ideas in the fiat world.

Beam raises $55 million for a connected toothbrush that lowers dental premiums venturebeat.com/2019/05/29/bea… via @VentureBeat

Sometimes, there's a problem with the zeitgeist, the state of the world. These issues are typically coupled with a demographic shift. We often fail to analyze the root cause of the problem, and chase down some of the symptoms.

Right now, that problem looks like a combination of intellectual malaise + lack of creativity + incumbents with government protection + big companies sitting on giant cash reserves instead of investing them. End result: there are few good investment opportunities.

Quick check: name a company that really excites you, without mentioning Tesla or Space-X.

The system wants and needs everyone to save, and it offers Amtrak shares and Berkshire-Hathaway. What passes for high tech is really spying on people and showing them ads, or calling cabs for people while lying to them about how many cabs are nearby.

No wonder that young people, almost always the canaries in the coal mine, are balking at this. Do you want to finance this spy-toothbrush? Can Silicon Valley interest you in a juice squeezer instead? Why don't you play?

Crypto represents an upending of these paradigms. It promises (regardless of whether it can deliver) an end to many incumbents, a flat playing field, and new business models. That's why young folks are excited by it: because it disrupts a system that has run out of ideas.

Were ICOs excessive? Certainly.
Were many ICOs scams destined to fail? Most definitely.
But despite all this, people threw their money at them. If we don't understand the root causes, we can't effectively fix the problem.

Evidently, people are seeking to finance alternatives, no matter how risky, to the current set of investment opportunities. They are seeking to find efforts that have higher risks but much higher ability to disrupt. In short, they are sick and tired of the old drek.

You cannot regulate social movements into compliance. Not in the long term.

You cannot force people to drop their dream of disruption and put their money into an incremental juice squeezer or a spybrush.

One internal issue is that the first generation of coins was nowhere near ready to deliver the dream they promised. We'll sort that out, we know how to build better systems now.

Regulators cannot clamp down on all the disruptive platforms in order to drive people to spybrushes, medical payment processor stocks and Coca-Cola shares. There's a big crowd of people who have already voted with their feet and wallets that the system isn't serving their needs.

Overall, ICOs were just a symptom of a much larger problem. That problem cannot be regulated away. And we have weekly reminders that the traditional finance world is failing to deliver what people demand.