It already came out upon initial investigation and most likely subpoenas:
>the company’s management predicted internally that it would run out of money in 2017. In early 2017, the company sought to pivot to a new type of business, which it financed through the sale of one trillion digital tokens. Kik sold its “Kin” tokens to the public, and at a discounted price to wealthy purchasers, raising more than $55 million from U.S. investors. The complaint alleges that Kin tokens traded recently at about half of the value that public investors paid in the offering.
Curious why? Investment in new & emerging technologies or markets is always high-risk: I've had years when my Emerging Markets index fund lost half its value, and I know friends that basically lost everything in the dot-com bubble. Hell, the S&P 500 lost 40% of its value in 2008.
I would hope that nobody is putting money into crypto that they need to live on. But for money that you aren't going to need for years, there's a good chance that some form of cryptocurrency will end up replacing much of the current financial system, and it makes sense to diversify bets across them.
Can you sketch what you mean by there being a good chance some type of cryptocurrency will replace the financial system of today?
Is the idea something along the lines of the double forces of greed and fear causing the perfect bubble? The one that doesn't pop because it eats its own downside on the way?
Why won't governments just shut down the on-ramp exchanges if the space ever looks like more than a way to gamble or make hidden-ish transactions?
Over the long-term (40-50 years) I would only call it a bubble in the sense that humanity's a bubble: yes, it may pop, but a bubble that lasts > a lifespan simply becomes reality. Over the short term (4-5 years), I think we're going to see some very bubblicious behavior and many people are going to lose their shirt, but that averages out.
My reasoning is this:
Fundamentally, the financial industry is about time, risk, and trust. The reason the industry exists is to shift productive capacity from individuals that are able to bear it now, to enterprises that may or may not pay off later, in a way that everybody who contributed to the success of an enterprise gets paid off later (when they need the funds) and gets to do it again. Currency is an information-carrying device that both lets you shift production from the consumer to the person best able to provide the service (medium of exchange) and records that a person provided valuable services at some point in the past so that they can claim services in the future (store of value). Stocks and bonds are both different ways of transferring money that people don't need now to people who can do useful things with it now, in a way that the investor can receive a payoff later. The banking system does the same, but with institutionalized, standardized practices. The insurance industry spreads risk from people who cannot bear it now across people who can; the futures & derivatives markets transfer that risk from firms who cannot bear it to firms who can.
When I look at the ICO boom of 2017, I saw the beginning of a functioning financial system. All the basic elements were in place - the ability to transfer value and claims of future value between participants, the ability for people with an excess of credit (assets) now to fund the development of projects that may pay off later, and the trust that if those projects were successful, they would benefit. It's all in a very rough form - the network got clogged such that it took ridiculous times for transaction confirmations, most of these projects continued to fail and end up worthless (I actually have hard data on this - roughly 90% of ICOs are either scams, failed, infeasible, or otherwise abandoned, while 10% are still going concerns 2 years later), there've been a bunch of hacks of exchanges and smart contracts, market manipulation is rampant, and cryptocurrency prices look like a roller coaster. Basically, we're making all the mistakes of 19th-century finance again: the crypto market looks a lot like the stock market did in the 1840s.
But we're doing it without needing any people involved in transactions. That's hugely powerful, in a world that software is eating. Finance is a $13T industry accounting for ~20% of world GDP and employing millions of incredibly high-paid people. In the sense of crypto being a cheap software-only competitor for extremely high-paid people, it's quite attractive.
And all of the problems that happened in 2017 are fixable. There are already lots of people working on the cryptocurrency scalability problem, between Bitcoin Lightning, Ethereum Casper, and new consensus algorithms like DPoS and SCP. People are working on the energy consumed by PoW, too - almost all new coins are proof-of-stake. Distributed exchanges like the 0x protocol remove the need to trust third-parties with your funds; you can keep them all in your own wallet. Continued bugfixes to Solidity shore up smart contract security. Stablecoins like MakerDAO and USDC remove the volatility of pricing in terms of crypto. Oracles provide a way to get more "facts" onto the blockchain so that smart contracts can rely on a disinterested third-party to make decisions on data. Each bubble distributes more crypto out of the hands of early-adopter whales (other than the Satoshi-coins, these account for less than 15% of total Bitcoin supply) and into the hands of ordinary people.
I think that governments if they acted now could shut down the fiat on-ramps to crypto, but I don't think they will. Too many people that use it for legitimate investment purposes, who will be very upset if they do. Government always tends to react a little too late to the social changes presented by new technology - we're only now seeing a backlash to the Internet, 30 years later, and at this point it's a little late to shut off the net even if certain governments are trying. Besides, if a technology makes the group of people who adopt it more efficient than the people who don't, the former will outcompete the latter. At some point, once people are directly selling goods for crypto and getting paid in it, it becomes too big to fail. I think that's a few years off (I expect crypto adoption to be slower than WWW adoption, because finance is more fundamental to society than communication is), but ultimately I think the ability to fund & partake in the benefits of new ventures without needing permission from Wall Street or Sand Hill Road will outweigh all the downsides of crypto.
But there's a difference between a public ICO and a public IPO: the ICO doesn't require transparency of the account, doesn't give legal ownership of the company's capital shares, and doesn't give a formal right of voting on classical issues, like electing a board member.
The ICO is a way to raise money out of chumps without giving anything in exchange, but it's not more efficient, faster or better in any way than an IPO. It's just shadier.
The value proposition for the investor in an ICO is that if the currency sees adoption for real transactions, its value will rise. The value of a currency is fundamentally determined by supply (total units in circulation) and demand (what you can buy with it). If you start being able to buy more things with it, and supply remains constant, the value of the currency rises. This is why the Fed is constantly injecting money into the economy: economic growth means that you can buy more things with a dollar, which means that if the money supply remained constant (as it did under the gold standard of the late 1800s), the value of the dollar would continually increase and prices would continually decrease.
With an ICO, you lock up some of that money supply in speculators' wallets, in exchange for the initial capital infusion. As the normal use-value price of the currency rises, they will sell and take their profits, injecting money back into the economy.
The wrinkles right now are that a.) nobody really knows how to value a currency with few-to-zero users and b.) a lot of these projects didn't deliver. That meant that a number of people lost their shirt in 2017 (actually, I suspect that number is less than commonly reported: I think most ICO investors were early Bitcoin and Ethereum hodlers who had already cashed out their initial investment into the bubble and then had some play money to diversify). But if you can pick winners now, when all the initial hype has disappeared, you stand to make a fair bit as people start using these platforms for real commerce.
I read your thinking as being centered around transaction costs, is that right? That cryptocurrencies can lower the transaction costs associated with the funding of productive endeavors.
This seems right to me. We can avoid things like accredited investor status and allow small amounts of capital to be invested without needing much legal overhead. And (for better or worse), ventures funded this way will also have a market price and never be private in the sense of today.
Of course, ICOs or whatever they morph into will need to be much more like securities than they were 2 years ago. Investing without actual equity makes little sense to me. To make these more reasonable, companies will need to know they aren't breaking securities laws when they issue. Once they know that, the ICOs can look less insane.
I buy the transaction cost argument in this sense. But I think there might be too many other issues for this to come about. Though I'm currently not confident enough in bill or bear status to bet either way.
Let's grant that scaling can be solved and volatility will not remain incredible like today. I think there are maybe deeper issues.
There's a lot of emphasis on 3rd party risk mitigation in the crypto world. But this new world reopens more 2nd party risk than it minimizes 3rd party risk to my first approximation.
Governments exist as dispute resolvers and preventers (military/police and laws/rules being the functions a government must have to be a government). They protect citizens from outside threats, but much more often from each other. In crypto, the permanence of a transaction is a primitive. But this makes scamming and various forms of theft even more attractive. People like the comfortable feeling of a government protecting them from financial fraud. If cryptocurrencies became the main currencies, I think they won't be able to look as loose and free as they do today. Even ignoring the funding of criminal activity, people want a way to reverse bad faith transactions. They'll demand oversight I think.
It's hard for me to imagine the hypothetical end state crypto financial world being anywhere near as libertarian-feeling as today's cryptocurrencies. Digital money is a government's dream. A government issued or one in which governments have a back door allows perfect monitoring of transactions and monetary policy controls.
The whole thing just seems too early to be predictable or investable to me. It's just for momentum trading today in my current view.
Though this is an idea space that forces me to change my mind back and forth. It's too complex to remain a settled, comfortable member of the landscape.
>the company’s management predicted internally that it would run out of money in 2017. In early 2017, the company sought to pivot to a new type of business, which it financed through the sale of one trillion digital tokens. Kik sold its “Kin” tokens to the public, and at a discounted price to wealthy purchasers, raising more than $55 million from U.S. investors. The complaint alleges that Kin tokens traded recently at about half of the value that public investors paid in the offering.