Ask HN: What Happened to ICOs? - ushakov
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Mattasher
I worked for a company that was on the vanguard of trying to make ICOs legal
and mainstream. Among other problems, there were tensions between trying to
achieve regulatory compliance, transparency, and privacy of trades. I worked
on a potential solution involving ring signatures, but it never made it into
production.

There were some other important tensions too, happy to discuss if anyone wants
to get into the weeds. FWIW I still would love to see a highly fluid market
for shares in small businesses and pre-IPO startups.

~~~
Jugurtha
> _FWIW I still would love to see a highly fluid market for shares in small
> businesses and pre-IPO startups._

I would have loved to be able to buy shares for startups I believed would
succeed (Tesla, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) way before they got to IPO.

I live in Algiers, Algeria. Even buying shares of classic public companies is
a challenge: I had to email, and call a _lot_ of brokers on the phone and be
passed from one extension to the other. I have been denied account creation
due to "company policy" reasons. The only one that has accepted to open an
account was TD Ameritrade. I'm talking like ten years ago or something.

Payments: one virtual card provider after the other dropped support for this
geographic location. One payment provider after the other did the same. The
are others that pop up every few years that support this geographic location,
but the policies change in ways that make it impractical for me. Fashion is
more stable that payments support. It's hard to commit to markets without
utility like payments.

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72deluxe
I still use them for the window's main image. Simply put them in your .RC and
they'll be embedded as a resource for you to use.

~~~
ushakov
you can tell this guy is old

~~~
72deluxe
Darned right! These kids today eh!

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songshuu
Regulations were the big one. It's hard to magically bootstrap instant utility
for tokens.

The rest were all trying to either replace fiat or replace stocks, both of
which are heavily regulated.

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cjbprime
The US SEC declared them to be securities offerings, which are extremely
heavily regulated.

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zzo38computer
You should perhaps explain what you mean by "ICOs", rather than only using the
abbreviation.

