Digital Currency Monetization and Initial Coin Offerings

See our Cryptocurrency Primer for the background and basic explanation of an Initial Coin Offering as a major means of monetizing a blockchain application. Be prepared to put in the months or years of work necessary to devise and bring to functionality a killer blockchain application.  These pages are not for the snake-oil sales tactics full of empty promises of great results and wealth.  ‘Dust-Coins’ from just the past few years now litter the trading floor, with little or no value, to be swept into the dust bin of history. But probably not before their investor’s money has been siphoned off into the pockets of the promoters, who have long ago ridden off into the sunset in their new sports cars to their new beach front estates.  Since the ICO is still not regulated, ‘Buyer Beware’.

According to the SEC, an ICO is a term that describes the offer and sale of digital assets issued and distributed on a blockchain. A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger, or peer-to-peer database spread across a network, that records all transactions in the network in theoretically unchangeable, digitally-recorded data packages called blocks. Each block contains a batch of records of transactions, including a timestamp and a reference to the previous block, linking the blocks together in a chain. The system relies on cryptographic techniques for secure recording of transactions. A blockchain can be shared and accessed by anyone with appropriate permissions.