What the Alt Coins Need to do to Avoid the SECsteemCreated with Sketch.

in #cryptocurrency6 years ago

Screen Shot 2017-10-06 at 9.54.51 AM.png
The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking at regulating Initial Coin Offerings (ICO's), tokens and coin offerings. The Alt Coin community needs to self-regulate so the government does not need to.

I understand and like the anti-government beginnings of Bitcoin. It was out of the Sub-Prime financial crisis, mortgage meltdown and Wall Street Crash that bitcoin started. Things are getting really exciting in the Alt coin world, and we are headed to go mainstream soon.

It is equally exciting that ICO now take place where computer programmers can raise funds to pay rent while they build the next great service. Steemit is an amazing site, but tons of other coins like Etherium, Ripple, Stratus, Bitshares, NEO, Lisk and many more have revolutionary services that could rock the world. The entire market cap of crypto currencies, is around 150 billion. That is less than the market cap of Home Depot ($196B), Visa ($243B) or Google ($677B). In a technical sense the current market capitalization of a company is the present value of all future good that company will do. I believe block chain and alt coin companies are going to do way more future good than one single company like Home Depot!

With all of the potential out there, the alt coin market is full of scams. I think we have two choices. Clean it up ourselves or wait for someone else to clean it up.

But lets simplify this.
Remember when you were a kid and mom told you to clean your room. There were two ways it could happen. Easy or Hard. You clean it up when asked, or mom cleans it up.

Some mom's have been known to clean up a room by taking all the toys and throwing them out. To the heart break of the kid. There comes a point. Which is more important a bunch of crappy toys, or teaching her lazy kid responsibility? The long term life skill of taking initiative is worth way more than a bunch of toys.

Lets talk about Uber...
As far as I am concerned Uber is a taxi company.
If aliens came from another planet, and asked what uber is, the simple truth is, - it is a taxi company.
It also broke all the rules, completely ignored government regulation, and served customers better than anyone else. Taxi's were the textbook example of the service where you could offer bad customer service and get away with it. A taxi only services customers once, most are from out of town, and then it never sees people again. They have long been know to overcharge customers, have dirty taxis and form cartels with artificially high rates and too few taxis. That is why cities regulated them. Taxis overcharged people and then gave kickbacks to city government in the form of high license rates.

Uber came in and did background checks. They used Facebook social profiles to make sure drivers and passengers were safe. They solved the problems and kept their nose (mostly) clean while doing so to become the biggest taxi company in the world. Now when problems happened- a rape or murder- they cooperated with authorities. But so few of these happened, and the company grew so fast that they used self-control to avoid government regulation. They still have a ways to go, but they grew up in a hurry.

I think alt coins are in the same place.

The community has shown that these alt coins work. We have a proven governance model. ICO is the new IPO.

If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, looks like a duck. It is a duck.

Unless the government doesn't want to deal with it. Then it will call crytpo-currency not money.

The government ruled -most likely incorrectly- that bitcoin was not money. Now the government needs to rule on ICO's. Are they "companies." I don't think the government wants to regulate. It is not easy, it will be really hard to be good at it, but from a public relations standpoint -they just don't want problems.

Which brings us back to the Alt coins. We as a community need to pick up the toys, act like responsible adults and make sure ICO markets are safe for the mainstream. If we want them to go mainstream. (It will means billions more in money and investment!)

This has been done successfully. Steemit has solved the problem on internet trolls. Comments here are professional and polite. Even when we disagree. Steemit solved the problem of plagiarism. It takes hard work. If Alt Coin markets want to avoid regulations, which the government doesn't really want to do... It needs to clean up the act itself. The wild west wasn't tamed when the sheriff showed up it was tamed when a bunch or ordinary citizens formed a posse and did what had to be done.

When the room is dirty, you can start cleaning anywhere. It doesn't really matter that much.

How, What, and Who are all open questions. We as a community can decide on standards. I think we have some good examples we can follow. This could include some things like.

Better listing requirements on exchanges for coins.

S&P type research reports on ICO and coins.

Trade associations and groups to endorse standards

Inspection and verification of claims.

I think an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If we clean it up now, we won't have government to deal with later.

Do you agree? What do you think we need? How can we clean this up?

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.35
TRX 0.12
JST 0.040
BTC 70733.96
ETH 3563.16
USDT 1.00
SBD 4.76