(2017-11-06) ICOs Are Attracting The Wrong People

ICOs Are Attracting the Wrong People. Addressing attendees on day two of the Scaling Bitcoin conference at Stanford University, Joi Ito, director of MIT's Media Lab, gave an impassioned talk about complex systems that sought to encourage thinking on the larger, societal impacts bitcoin could have, one that pushed back that these motivations should be purely economic.

The problem is we’re creating a system where people can pump or dump and speculate. Anyone who has issued an ICO needs to sit down and meditate: are you making society better? Or are you making money unfairly?

Ito framed the "whole point" of cryptocurrency as being about using technology to prevent the societal ills he believes have resulted from economies defined by government-issued currencies and the financial institutions necessary for their use.

Does making money make us happier? We have this really stupid one currency that causes us to be greedy and I think we want to think of ways to break that model," he continued.

Ito framed bitcoin as perhaps the open blockchain network best positioned for success in eating away at these layers underneath, even as he called the market "pre-TCP/IP" in describing where he believes development is in relation to the internet.

We haven't won the battle yet. [But] I think the thing that is interesting is that Bitcoin Core has substantially more brain fire power than any of the other networks."