The spiritual center of the industry needs to go REALLY FAR LEFT

The ICO Bubble

Bitconnect is just one example among many Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) that saw investors scammed of money. If you were paying attention to Crypto World or for some masochistic reason you watched “business and investment” TV channels geared towards boomer C-suite executives and College Republicans in 2017, you probably heard about the ICO bubble. An ICO is kind of similar to an Initial Public Offering (IPO), which is when the owners of a privately owned company wants to make a boat load of money and so starts selling shares of their company on a public stock exchange. Except in the case of an ICO, an organization is offering a crypto token to the public using smart contracts built on a blockchain cryptocurrency platform like Ethereum (If you want to learn more about smart contracts, check out Part 2 of my Blockchain 101 for Socialists series).

Keep in mind that ICOs are inherently different than IPOs largely because of the platform being used to raise capital (i.e., a purely digital blockchain vs. a stock exchange). Due to the inherent properties of blockchain, it is so easy to do that anyone can have an ICO, even one based purely on a whitepaper for using blockchain to communicate with Jesus or to incentivize people to read the bible, and people will give you money in the form of other cryptocurrencies. There is no State authority to say no to you unless you’re a licensed company and they probably couldn’t stop all of them if they tried. Only market mechanisms would be able to protect the masses from being scammed… This triggered sucker hunting season –err I mean the ICO bubble.

So is There no Alternative?

I know it may feel good to laugh at and ostracize those that believed the lies told to them by ICO scammers, but this would be feeding right into the jaws of neoliberalism. It further legitimizes the overreach of capitalist realist thinking and nihilism seen on the Left. We know that capitalism makes the world hellish to the point of absurdity for most by feeding lies to people using market logic so we cannot choose to also use market logic as a legitimate reason for disliking something or someone. People are frustrated with the status quo and are looking for alternatives. Cryptocurrencies happen to represent one of those alternatives that could possibly transport them out of their shitty lives, they just don’t know that it’s Capitalism that’s making it shitty. We instead need to be imagining an alternative to Capitalism. There are very obvious criticisms that we can make about ICOs as I’ve shown above but there could also be real reasons to use elements of ICOs for an anti-capitalist blockchain project.