ICOs are mostly useless - they are great for the founders but useless for investors. For now there is the hype that delivers new and new greater fools - but tha

ICOs are mostly useless - they are great for the founders but useless for investors. For now there is the hype that delivers new and new greater fools - but that will eventually stop and ICOs will face the hard reality of not being a very good at aligning the incentives of founders and investors. The problems are numerous - starting from the general problems of crowd-funding which can work for big companies (i.e. the traditional stock exchange way) - but is dismall for startups, to the specifics of ICOs which don't actually offer any formal claim to investors. TSOs seem to stay at the 'general problems of crowd-funding' level. There is also the theory that ICOs can enable funding of development of open protocols (think SMTP) so that the claim is on the network not on the company. I find this theory very vague.