If you have your own currency, you have your own governance, so each currency becomes their own mini-government. Mini-government is a big word, but it's a body that is governed in a decentralized manner where users have a say, where there's oversight and transparency.
My advice to many ICOs is to start reading about startups and focus on the product, customer, and market as soon as the sale is over. And don't get distracted by post-ICO euphoria and the price of ETH or BTC.
As much as one would like to think that what China does doesn't matter, the reality is that when China sneezes at crypto, the rest of the world catches the cold.
If you think about the web, the web has been an incredible development platform, and everything today is developed on the web. In the future, everything is going to be developed with the blockchain in mind.
Let's hope the Canadian public sector starts putting the blockchain on their agenda so we can see a significant difference in how government services are delivered.
When (not if) regulators start looking at ICO deals they might want to investigate, they will likely start with the ones that exhibit weaknesses.
You have to think of the blockchain as a new utility. It is a new utility network for moving value, moving assets.
Owning a token bestows a right that results in product usage, a governance action, a given contribution, voting, or plain access to the product or market.
Blockchain infiltration will be met with resistance because it is an extreme change.
I'm looking forward to seeing more ICO projects provide increased clarity about the performance metrics expectations they plan to exhibit during their future adult lives in addition to the assumptive utility of that token they are selling.
For the first time, companies can be their own payment processors without the cumbersome or costly aspects of traditional financial settlement options. Tokens offer a much lower barrier for processing end-to-end transactions inside a given market.
Conceivably, blockchains could rely on a number of standards above the Internet's existing standards to allow a smooth bridging from one layer to another. That would be a breakthrough.
A new DAO is like a startup. It requires a product/market fit, business model realization, and a lot of users/customers.
How do we create new value? You create value by running services on the blockchain.
In order to grow-up, blockchains will eventually need a lot of standards that are vendor- and solutions-agnostic. So many areas are ripe for standards developments: smart contracts, tokens, security, storage, messaging, identities, naming, record-keeping, and more.
Just like paying a toll to use a freeway, the token can be the pay-per-use rail for getting on the blockchain infrastructure or for using the product. This also ensures that users have skin in the game.
Public blockchains are almost like the public Internet, which is open and widely accessible. If you can get on the Internet, you will likely be able to get on a public blockchain via a specific application.
Most blockchain platforms don't share that much in common, resulting in choice lock-ins, lack of interoperability, and potentially dead-ends that are hard to untangle.
Many regulators are quick to apply existing compliance practices that treat tokens as a security, therefore elevating the barriers and costs of implementation for entrepreneurs.
In my opinion, one of the most exciting potentials of the blockchain relate to creating new business models, whether in public or in private settings. In most of these cases, the new models don't care for incumbents because they are mostly on a disruption quest.
