The End of the ICO Wild West? Blockchain Advocates Weigh In On SEC Report – Bitcoin News

July 28, 2017

“It is now clear that some digital currencies will be viewed as securities, depending on how the tokens or coins are structured,” Spencer details. “Secondly, and more importantly, it is now clear that the regulators and law enforcement in the United States will be enforcing these laws. The pipeline for ICO’s just got a lot smaller.”

Source: The End of the ICO Wild West? Blockchain Advocates Weigh In On SEC Report – Bitcoin News

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Bubble? So What? Token Summit Marks Cryptocurrency’s Revitalization | Forbes

July 26, 2017

Chris Burniske, blockchain products lead at ARK Investment Management, the first public fund manager to invest in bitcoin, explained, “It’s important for us to figure out what’s utility and what’s speculative, because, in times of correction, we will likely compress through speculative value until we hit utility value.”

… fielding an audience question about why a startup would go for an ICO in which it would raise a lot of money but also give away much of the company with a low probability of being able to get more funding, Wilson responded, “If you think about it as just a way to finance your company, you’re not thinking about it properly. The way to think about it is that the token is also the native monetization model for your business, and if you execute your business well, the value of that token should rise as the utility of the product you ship goes up in value.” Then, he said, though you’re giving away a lot of the tokens right away, the value of the tokens you keep should rise substantially and net you a tidy profit. For example, he and Mougayar speculated that Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin had a half percent of all Ethers, which at that moment was about $90 million.

Source: Bubble? So What? Token Summit Marks Cryptocurrency’s Revitalization

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Disrupting the trust business | The Economist

July 19, 2017

Will the centre hold?
These efforts give a taste of what will be possible, says Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures (USV), a venture-capital firm. He thinks that such decentralised organisations could one day disrupt the tech giants. At their heart, he argues, those tech titans are gigantic centralised databases, keeping track of products and purchase histories (Amazon), users and their friends (Facebook), and web content and past search queries (Google). “Their value derives from the fact that they control the entire database and get to decide who sees which part of it and when,” he says.

In some areas the blockchain may even make life easier for governments. Last year Dubai announced that it wants all government documents secured on a blockchain by 2020, a prerequisite for agencies to become completely paperless. The technology could also be used as a cheap platform to generate what poor countries lack most: more efficient government and trust in contracts. And some hope that the blockchain could make the United Nations work better by helping it keep track of all its programmes, creating transparency and reducing waste.

Source: Disrupting the trust business | The Economist

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The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology, by William Mougayar (Examples)

July 18, 2017

A sampling of Blockchain implementations sited in
Mougayar, William. The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology. Wiley

BITNATION: Governance 2.0

Otonomos your instant company incorporation| Manage your companies online with Otonomos | Otonomos BCC Pte. Ltd.

BoardRoom | Blockchain Governance Suite

Guardtime secures over a million Estonian healthcare records on the blockchain

La’Zooz – A value system designed for sustainibility

MaidSafe – The New Decentralized Internet

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The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology, by William Mougayar

July 18, 2017

Innovators Dilemma
It is difficult to innovate within your business model, because you will typically attempt to tie everything back to it, resulting in a shortsighted and limited view of what is possible. This is especially true if your business has a trust-related function (such as a clearinghouse). Current intermediaries will encounter the hardest change, because the blockchain hits at the core of their value proposition. They will need to be creative, and dare disrupting themselves while folding some blockchain capabilities under their offerings, and creatively developing new value proposition elements. They will need to realize that it is better to shoot yourself in the foot, rather than to have someone else shoot you in the head. This will not be an easy transition, because changing business models could be difficult to achieve in large organizations for a variety of factors.

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Want VC Returns? This Firm Makes It Possible For Everyday People

July 18, 2017

A venture fund digital token could solve a problem in venture capital. “My phone is blowing up with other VCs saying I want to do this — not blockchain and bitcoin VCs — because the biggest problem with venture, the thing everyone hates about venture capital, is that it’s delivered fantastic returns but no one wants to invest in an asset that’s locked up for 5-10 years. The idea you can invest in a venture fund and have liquidity is probably the most innovative thing that has ever happened in venture capital.”

Stan Miroshnik, managing director of the Argon Group, an investment bank focused on cryptocurrency- and token-based capital markets, which will be managing the crowdsale, said the BCAP was significant for several reasons.

“What you don’t have in traditional LP investment is the freedom to sell your limited partner interest. There’s usually a redemption period, a redemption notice period, a valuation process and then it’s unclear what the value of your piece of the portfolio is. What’s unique here is not only do you have the freedom, but the secondary market tells you what the market’s view of the worth of this asset is,” he said

Source: Want VC Returns? This Firm Makes It Possible For Everyday People

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Want To Hold An ICO? CoinList Makes It Easy — And Legal | Forbes

July 18, 2017

These crowdsales of new cryptocurrencies give entrepreneurs access to funding from the crowd, and token buyers, in turn, get something akin to a form of equity in the network, since, if the platform becomes more popular, the price for their shares should rise

Some of the thinking around the legality of ICOs stems from whether or not the token has utility, such as how people who buy a golf club membership presumably do so because the buyer wants to use the club, not because the value of the membership may rise. However, if developers sell a token before the network has launched, that muddies the distinction.

One characteristic of the sales on CoinList that may help curb some of the current rampant speculation is that they will only be open to accredited investors who earn $200,000 or more a year or have a net worth of at least $1 million. On the other hand, that might also dampen some of the enthusiasm for CoinList, because some have felt that ICOs have been democratizing finance and making venture-type deals available to the average retail investor rather than only the wealthy.

Still, both CoinList and SAFTS could be good antidotes to the problem of groups raising money before they have a product. It could get more groups to hold an ICO is held at the same time as the launch of the network, which, he says, “makes the crowdsale more about getting a piece of software instead of being an investor in a future piece of software.”

Source: Want To Hold An ICO? CoinList Makes It Easy — And Legal

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