"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
- Thomas Alva Edison
To innovate, one must experiment. To experiment, one must continually find new ways of doing things. The catch is that not all of these new ways of doing things will succeed, as Thomas Edison found out. The sensible conclusion to draw is that out of all the thousands of ICOs created so far, most of them will fail. In fact, many have. White papers and GitHub source code repositories have been deleted and any remnant of LinkedIn profiles for the ICOs removed, that is, if they were real in the first place.
The rise of speculators and opportunists is of no surprise to those in the industry and it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone else. It happened in the dot-com bubble, the housing bubble, and even the various gold rush eras throughout the world. However, as the clampdown begins in 2018, from regulators and governments, and closer scrutiny is placed on ICOs, we will start to see...