Implode-o-Meter News - The Two Ways of Seeing ICOs/Blockchain Projects

There are two fundamentally different ways to think about "the blockchain" in finance. One way emphasizes the qualities that originally made bitcoin interesting: its trustless, decentralized nature, in which no one owns or controlsÂ the system as a whole. This is of course the philosophy behind bitcoin and Ethereum, but it is also the philosophy behind some of the more interesting and successful initial coin offerings. "The point of an ICO, done right,"Â I wrote recently, "is that you are not building a business; you're building an unowned system for everyone to use."
The other way to think about "the blockchain"Â ignores those philosophical ideasÂ and just treats blockchain as a technology improvement. ThisÂ is the thinking behindÂ most blockchain projects at banks, or clearinghouses, or central banks. Some centralized intermediary has some list of who owns what securities. It is a pain to manually update that list, and the systems it uses are outdated and don't sync up well with its customers' systems. "What about the blockchain?," someone asks, and then everyone nods reverently and says "yes the blockchain, that will make things more efficient." It probably even will!Â

Even outside of banks, though, a lot ofÂ ICOs are closer to this line of thinking than the other one.Â A token offering, inÂ this view, is not a way to fund the development of an unownedÂ protocol that exists for the benefit of its users. It's just a way to fund a regular business with a regular stock offering (or securitization, or whatever), only "tokenized."

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The Two Ways of Seeing ICOs/Blockchain Projects