Its interesting for me to recall why I decided to give up the most precious years of my retirement to join this industry over four years ago. As a part of my research, I visited many forums and was astonished by the level of hostility and destructive conduct.
I was intrigued by the concept of decentralized entities, being trustless and leaderless. Then I came to realize that those were precisely why our industry has been so chaotic and destructive no leader; no rules the wild west, which still hold true today.
My mission was to help provide some leadership, especially, to DNotes, but hopefully to our industry as well. I am grateful that we are seeing some positive impact and continuing to gain respect and followings. The credit should go to all of you for supporting our cause in building DNotes as the trusted inclusive digital currency to the benefit of everyone worldwide. We are only getting started with a lot more work ahead of us. We are primed for exciting times ahead.
I've definitely noticed the hostility in this space, especially on this very forum. I wrote about it here:
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@wiser/victims-of-scams-should-feel-free-to-share-their-storiesAs for providing leadership, another place where solid leadership is needed is in the whole area of ICOs. On a technical level, it's a cool concept. The part that is destructive is that people have used them to bypass many of the needed investor protection laws, many even maliciously taking advantage of their investors with many more well intentioned people simply failing to deliver for various reasons. The other piece of the puzzle is that investor protection regulations may have gotten too stringent and compliance too expensive leading to the side effect of making it too difficult for truly great innovations to make it. I don't see the US Government as deliberately setting out to squash innovation and small players. However, they would need some guidance in the whole area of updating and streamlining regulations to be more inclusive as needed but without leaving investors unprotected. But without solid industry leadership, I think ICOs as a group will in the end have the opposite effect, which is to squash innovation even further because bad actors tend to breed strict rules to shut them out but which may also shut out good people.
This article from CoinDesk was originally distributed to Consensus 2018 attendees, so I think may represent the current thought process of the industry.
https://www.coindesk.com/initial-coin-offerings-setting-capital-free-thats-huge/