Ethereum Q&A: ICOs and financial regulation (video)
Andreas M. Antonopoulos | Ethereum Q&A: ICOs and financial regulation
What can we do with programmable money that's decentralised, re-imagines funding and escrow structures, with protections driven by crowdsourcing? If the crowd is funding, the crowd should be vetting. Banking is not the primary incumbent being disrupted, it is regulators and the institutional, centralised regulatory environment as well. In the meantime, I will not be investing in 99.999% of these ICOs because I don't invest in minimally viable whitepapers.
Are ICOs disruptive, democratic venture capital? Or bubbles fueling greed? Obviously, both. We're re-defining entrepreneurial capitalism, corporations, securities, fundraising, stock markets - everything financial and the regulatory system around it. There is a certain contingent that is looking at ICOs and revealing their very statist, traditional ideas. The SEC, securities law, and restrictions on initial public offerings came out of an initial environment that was a crazy bubble, but that kind of regulation is the old way of dealing with things. This ICO bubble will have negative consequences and people will malinvest. It's still created an opportunity to do something never done before: bridge the big gap between early-stage organic financing and stock market public offerings, for companies to fundraise from a completely globalised audience.
As a bitcoin entrepreneur, Andreas has founded a number of bitcoin businesses and launched several community open-source projects. He is a widely published author of articles and blog posts on bitcoin and is a frequent speaker at technology and security conferences worldwide.
Get Andreas's books: “Mastering Bitcoin https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mastering-Bitcoin-Unlocking-Digital-Cryptocurrencies/dp/1449374042,” published by O’Reilly Media and considered the best technical guide to bitcoin; and “The Internet of Money https://www.amazon.co.uk/Internet-Money-collection-Andreas-Antonopoulos/dp/1537000454/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8,” a book about why bitcoin matters.