The analogy between an ICO and a stock is pretty apt: they're both tradable contracts. One is enforced via math (as well as luck/naivety), while one is enforced

The analogy between an ICO and a stock is pretty apt: they're both tradable contracts. One is enforced via math (as well as luck/naivety), while one is enforced via governments and financial institutions. And a huge portion of those 1000+ cryptocurrencies are really just ICO tokens. I think crypto is in a huge bubble, and I think ICOs are dumb and will eventually die off or be killed off, but saying that there are 1000+ cryptocurrencies is pretty misleading. It would be like saying that due to the various stock exchanges we have millions of fiat currencies. It's only true given a particular definition of cryptocurrency. Outside of ICOs, there are probably only a couple dozen cryptocurrencies that are not piggybacking off of some other cryptocurrency's smart contract infrastructure.