I've got conflicted feelings. I hate ICOs, because all the people doing them now don't need all the money they're raising, don't have an actual product or plan to build one, or a little bit of both. People jump in on them exclusively to make money without doing a lick of research. I don't think people should participate in them.
I also begrudgingly accept that we probably will need government regulation to get more people to join the crypto ecosystem.
So I think it's a good thing, in the short and the long term, but any time governments start to mess with crypto I get a little concerned.
IMO, if a "crypto-currency" or a "crypto-asset" is able to be banned or directly
regulated by some means, whether by the issuer, miners, devs, or protocol, by
a government or any enforcement arms, it should be done so immediately. Not
because governments are good and are helping people, but it must be done so
because the illusion must be revealed. Bitcoin was created to reveal how the
world economic system was parasitic against the average person who has
become a commoditized device. Your debt is your worth in their system now.
What Satoshi created was a very specific system type designed to circumvent
controls, either from outside or inside the system. All "crypto-devices" that
follow Bitcoin can imitate his specific design to be able to survive and
circumvent, just as Bitcoin does, and that was Satoshi's gift to the world. The
ability to survive in your own system type, without the outside world to be able
to easily stop you. Satoshi gave us true choice, when any other possible choice
was outlawed and enforced against.
If ICOs or other "crypto-devices" wish to take parts and aspects here and there,
which mix a match different ideas of Satoshi's system in order to create a new
device for a new purpose (ex: ICOs) they better understated they are walking
a dangerous line, where they will be easily capturable and made responsible.
Because things like Bitcoin now exist, doesn't mean all like devices are immune.
ICOs are very base and simplistic when compared to what Bitcoin does.
Free markets and all the economic talk of self regulation and other such things
are illusions and irrelevant when compared to the Bitcoin Network. ICOs and
the belief that they will be an important part of the economic system in the
future is an insult to what Satoshi created. Bitcoin ignores and negates all
current economic and legal systems. ICOs by their current design rely on
legal entities and thus will need to conform, and thus why they are being
"banned" or "restricted" in certain countries.
Very basically, ICOs are scams not only because most of their current uses
is blatantly a scam facilitation device, but because the backbone infrastructure
behind the ICO device system is itself a scam or an illusion. They are the
emperor who has no clothes right in front of your eyes, yet people think
the free market or self regulation is acceptable here as a outside subsystem
for the ICO. That is very wrong. The truth is that is a very flawed system.
ICOs are a falsehood and is leading people astray from true choice and
freedom. ICOs are a manifestation of complete ignorance of what Bitcoin
has archived and how it achieved it.
ICOs must be squashed, because they are able to be squashed.
If they are squashable, they are a lie in our ecosystem and must be
orphaned off like all invalidity.