 And I think we are live. Addy, welcome to the show, man. How are you doing? Hey, I'm here. Thanks for having me today. Thanks for making it. Let's first tackle some really interesting and exciting things you want to talk about. First, I want to say you're bio, then I want to state a cool contest that you're having everybody for in the audience. So first of all, you know, you're Addy Creasy or a Bitcoin and blockchain enthusiast since 2013. You're also a crypto investor and the CEO of BlockShow. But before you came on the show, you and I were talking about some interesting stuff and you presented a really cool contest for my audience. So everybody who's listening, get this. This is really interesting that Addy's offering. So below this video right now, you'll see the description, but I'm just going to read it out for you. So this is the contest. So if you go to the BlockShow YouTube channel, so there's a link below this video to click that or just type in BlockShow on YouTube and make sure that you subscribe to the channel. So that's the second step. Third step is if you watch any of the Blocky Talky videos, Addy wants you to share your thoughts on how they can make it better, improve it, etc. And the people that have the most interesting and greatest ideas for improving the Blocky Talky show will win the contest. And these are the prizes. So first prize, if you have the greatest suggestion and they pick it, first prize is you get $1,000 worth of Bitcoin, plus two tickets to any upcoming BlockShow event of your choice. The second prize is you get two tickets to any upcoming BlockShow event of your choice. And third prize is you get one ticket to any upcoming BlockShow event of your choice. Alright, so to summarize, go to their channel and make sure you subscribe, watch your videos, and comment on how you can improve it, and hopefully you'll be the ones that win. Did I get that right? Absolutely. We just started, so it's a Blocky Talky, but we will add a bunch more stuff like interviews with blockchain experts, webinars, opinions and so on and so forth. So yeah, that will look much better than now. We just started. Cool, awesome. Well, once again, thanks for coming to the show, and the title of the show is really talking about ICO madness, ICO bubbles, pros and cons, where the future is heading, etc. So we're going to just jump right on into it. What is your current take on the current landscape of the ICO ecosystem? Okay, yeah, that's great. So I really like the subject that we defined. So before actually talking about ICOs and about finding the pros and cons, I would like to look back to the past, I guess, and to find the definition of the bubble, right? So we're not, we're saying ICO bubble. So bubble is something negative in economics, right? So it's like, it's an unpredictable and justified and unclear rise of something, of something that will explode 100%. So my opinion is that ICO is definitely a bubble. And I will try to explain it to you today, but before actually touching base the ICO, I would like to look back to the past. For example, around like 15, 20 years ago, I don't want to look back like to the 17th century when all this stock exchange was started, right? But let's for example start with the Dockcom bubble. I guess that is what happened around 20 years ago. And it's very similar to what is happening with ICOs now, right? So what is Dockcom bubble, right? It happened I guess in 1995 and ended in 2001. And it all started with the IPO of Netscape in early 1990s. If we look at the ICO, the same happened around three years ago when the first really great and bright ICO happened. Not ICO, but the crowd sale of Ethereum, right? That's what happened. So, okay, getting back to all these Dockcoms. After the Netscape IPO, really a lot of companies started raising money through ICOs on Netscape, right? So that's millions of money were invested, even not millions but billions. As I know, it's around 25 billion which were invested during the ICOs and during this Dockcom bubble. And an interesting thing here is that after the start of the ICOs, the price of the shares went up by 80, 90% on average. And only in a year, on average, they went up by 200 to 250%. So that's ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. And what finally happened, we all know that they were crashed, the bubble was crashed, right? But why actually it happened? Why people started investing billions of money into companies with no products and with no clear business models? Personally, I see one fundamental mistake here and this mistake I call the substitute of concepts. What does that mean? It means that different experts, media, investors, entrepreneurs, they were telling that Internet, right? Internet is the new economy. That everything should be done in the Internet, that the industrial era is over and now everything should go to the Internet and all the business should be done on the Internet. But for me, that's the biggest mistake because Internet is just an instrument for improving your business model, right? For connecting you to the world, right? So this fundamental mistake I call substitute of concepts. And following this substitute, investors invested billions of money into companies that didn't talk about profits at all. All of the talk about is market share. So finally in 2001, the bubble crashed and the NASDAQ composite trader, I don't remember the exact name, went up 5 times down from 5,500 to 1,100. And listen, in that period, 8, 5 trillion billion dollars were lost. So 25 billion invested, 5 trillion lost. Just imagine what happened during this dotcom bubble, right? That's totally crazy. What I'm talking about is just for you to understand what was happening at that time and then I will tell, compare it to the I sales going now. After this crash, around 50% of investors to these companies and entrepreneurs were telling that around 50% of all companies survived. But in some years after analysis, people in the crowd realized that they survived only by speculating on their own securities. So they were not releasing any product or service. They were speculating on their own shares, on their own securities and spending millions of money on marketing. So they didn't even have a plan to deploy something. So that is what was happening because of all this hysteria, as I say. And if we get back to nowadays, from the past, to the current ICOs, as I've said, around 3 years ago or 3 years and a half, we had the Ethereum crowd sale with 15 million dollars raised. Then, around a year ago, we had the Dell project, which raised 150 million. Okay, that's not like a total ICO because the funds had to be in control of the investors because they could vote. But anyway, that was the start of this hysteria, this ICO hysteria or ICO bubble madness as you called it in your today's video. And nowadays, we have around, tell me if I'm wrong, but I think that it's around half of a billion dollars already invested via ICOs during the last year. And the fundamental mistake of this bubble, the fundamental thing, is the same. It's a substitute of concepts. So the main problem is that many experts that I know personally in the community, during the talks in different blocks and in different media, they say that ICOs and blockchain is the new economy, right? That it's a whole new economy. But in my personal opinion, that's also false. Why is it false? Because I think that ICO is just another instrument of raising funds and not more. So using this ICO instrument, you can just easier raise funds rather than comparing to, I don't know, angel funding or VCs. But it's not totally not a new economy. You can't build everything on blockchain, right? There is a limited amount of industries where you can really implement this distributed ledger. So in my opinion, that's the main problem. Now all media and experts say that it's a new economy, but it's not. It's just an instrument. And starting from this substitute of concepts, we should go further and analyze the whole ICO market. And we can actually do that in the nearest time. Let me just drink a little bit of water. You have something to say, Amir? You are listening so attentively. No, I'm not. Actually, one second. You have a headset? You're in ICO? Yeah. It's okay. Yeah, now it's better. Awesome. So yeah, everybody brought history because a lot of people forget about the history. And the funny thing though too, even if we don't go back that far, let's say even the Dallas dimension last year, a lot of people who got into space this year aren't even aware of the Dallas whatsoever. So basically what I want to get into is like, I'm glad you were talking about the past. Let's talk about right now what we think that are some of the issues that we don't have to name names. But what are some of the issues that you see some projects doing in the ICO space that you don't personally like? Okay. So the main problem with the current projects that are raising money, I was just before this call, I decided to take a look at like, to Google different ICOs happening now. I did that around two weeks ago and I'm doing that. I did that like a few minutes ago. And I realized that nothing changed. So most of these projects, they have only white paper. And some of them have something more. So maybe they also attended some conferences. They are doing some pilot somewhere or, but none of them, almost none of them don't have any business model. So they don't want, they don't know how they want to earn money, right? So they only say that, okay, this is a new project. This is a great idea. No one did that before. And we are the new like players of the crypto economy. Firstly, I don't believe in crypto economy. Secondly, they don't show the business model. They don't show me how I can't evaluate the token price without knowing the business model, right? It's almost impossible. And without evaluating, without having instruments to evaluate the token price, I can't invest. I can't support the project. I remember only two projects in the past, I guess it was 2016. They were stating some business models. That was economy and singular DTV, I guess. So they were raising like economy is something around 10 million, maybe. And singular DTV is something around 6 or 7. Economy is like, all of them are really good projects. So economy, it's like a crypto index, right? So you can put your investments there and put your fund management there. And singular DTV is something documentary and TV series with management of your digital... Actually, I don't remember for sure, but it's about documentary and TV series. I think now they want to do more royalty rights. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they were really stating some business model and that was great. I personally didn't invest at that time, but I took a look back at them after the ICO was over and they're really moving forward. And actually, singular DTV is backed by consensus, right? So these are good projects. But for example, if we take a look at the current projects that are raising more than 100 million dollars, for example, Banker, which actually was the participant of BlockShow, like a startup. But anyway, I don't believe in startups that don't do market caps. So they raise hundreds of millions at one time. I don't believe in such tactics because I'm like, let's call it old school. I believe that you have to have multiple rounds to have pressure on the founders' shoulders. They raise for a single idea of 150 million dollars that can make you crazy. And I guess that will. And in a year or maybe a year and a half, we will see 90% of this project not delivering anything because that's the market, right? These are startups. From 1,000 startups, only 10 show real profits. So I guess in a year and a half, we will see a real crash because it will start with one project not showing something according to the product roadmap. And you really should focus the news because after that, all investors will start cashing out. The price of crypto gold, Bitcoin, and Ether will also drop out because people will follow the panic. So you should really watch out that. And the main problem now is that no one shows real products and the real business model. What's your take on this though? For example, all the ICOs majority of them are doing on ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum. Ethereum crashes. Let's say, for example, Bankor, they raised more than 150 million on untested code. I don't know how good the code is. I haven't looked into it. No idea. So let's say Ether crashes tomorrow. Then what happens with all this? They only get burnt. Yeah, sure. And that's a big problem. So yeah, around more than 50% are raised on Ethereum. I guess around 25% on Bitcoin, blockchain, beach years, and waves maybe. And around 25 on privates, on private build blockchain. So yes, that's also a problem. That's like a problem of all this mining stuff, right? So that more than 50% is owned by Chinese stuff. The same here. Almost all of the ICOs depends on the Ether and on their politics. Or how's that data to say? So yeah, that's a problem. But that will change, right? More projects will come. Not only blockchain-based projects will come. And the percentage of Ether will go down. But the main problem right now, if we're talking about nowadays, is of course all this no product and no business model stuff. And there is no due diligence, right? So we see a lot of companies helping to do ICOs. ICO helps, helping to create an escrow, to do legal stuff, to do marketing and so on and so forth. But no due diligence, no analytics. And I guess in one or two years, when the bubble crashes, we will see a lot of companies going into analytics of ICOs and doing all that stuff. Right, so that's what actually will happen. And the most important thing here, after the crash, everybody, so what is the fundamental as well of this hysteria, right? It's unregulated stuff. So ICO is not regulated. So I believe that regulation will only make ICOs better. I mean, what I mean is that it will make investors safer, right? The actual issue of tokens, it's the initial thing that should be regulated, right? It will be regulated. And the funny thing here is that issue in tokens is just computer science. But regulators will state it as a financial instrument. And that's really cool. That's something that's like a new era, right? But anyway, that's what the regulators and the governments will invest money to and time to. They will actually regulate developers. So developers who are the ground breakers now, they develop all of the projects. They are usually the founders. They're not businessmen, right? They will be regulated because there will be issue in tokens and they will need to be regulated. What's your take on something like Nebao's doing with CoinList? CoinList is just the crypto version of AngelList. I didn't hear about that. CoinList? Yeah. So if you know AngelList.co, Nebao, he started that. The angel-funding, angel pools. So they have CoinList now. We're only accredited investors. If they have crypto or fiat, they can invest into it. It's like going into the future, do you see the issue? Like regulation, it's a double-edged sword. They're good things and there's a lot of bad things with regulations. But do you want everyone to have access to the crowd sale or do you want specific people to have access? What do you see as good, say, foundational principles for launching an ICO for the future? Okay. So I don't believe that it's really... So I don't believe that it's accredited investors. So I think that we should regulate the companies and founders that actually offer something. So that's where the regulation should be. I know that such companies like Blockchain Capital, so they're accredited investors, so they're in a regulated area. But I believe that it's definitely... My opinion is that in the future, the regulation will come to factual projects. So the people that are invested actually, they should not be regulated. So I don't like this accredited stuff. The initial idea of ICO is that you can invest any amount. You don't need to spend months or weeks on becoming an accredited man. All you need is just buy some ether or Bitcoin or whatever and buy the token and invest in the crowd sale. So regulation of the project is good because it makes us safer. Regulations of people investing... No, I think that... So let's talk about regulations of the developer or the founding members of the team. How would that look like? Do you have some kind of basic foundational principles you would implement? I can't say for now because I didn't like most of the talks in the community now. I'm more about regulating the issue of tokens. So that's the initial thing that should be regulated. So the token is like a shear. So many people think that it should be. Like it's nothing. So it's just the thing in the internet and it's so unregulated. But in the future, I think that a token will equal a shear. And when it is like that, it will actually change the whole market. And I guess we even spoke about it during our audio podcast. Yeah. So the only thing that changed since that time is actually that more money came and more newcomers came. But the ISOs ago... What I think should be regulated is issue of tokens. I can't tell you how it should be done because nowadays not so many even lawyers know how it should be done. So they don't have any necessity to do that. They don't have necessity to investigate because all of the interested parties now which are entrepreneurs, investors, they are not interested in that. So they like what's going on. The only interested party is government which wants to make money out of it as well. And in around the year, they will start, they will regulate it and we will see and we will be able to talk how it will be done. But for now, I can't tell you the process because I'm not a lawyer. My issue with these regulations is how they are going to regulate, like for example, status just had their ICO and they didn't allow American people to come in I guess based on IP. Civic is having their thing too and they are having some of their own personalized KYC policy. So I think you have to prove who you are with them as well. So what I'm trying to understand is from a regulatory aspect how are they planning to actually regulate their ICO? Like let's say you and I, I don't know, we live in Hong Kong for example and we want to do an ICO there. How are they going to regulate us? I mean, even the investors. Or no, not the investors, like the team, because you're talking about regulation of the team, like having certain guidelines to follow. We need to think about it, but I guess how is it done now? So most of the ICOs they have this Switzerland and Singapore entities, right? So I guess it should be done when actually you are doing that legally. Some governments will say that okay, we don't allow all these ICOs happening in our country. Such countries as Switzerland and Singapore they will say okay, here are the process which you should follow. Like for example you should have a legal entity, then you should legally say that I for example issue 100 tokens which equals 100 shares. So it's something like that through the government only and in order to actually make an ICO legally, right? For investors to believe you, you will need to have this entity and follow the process. So something like that. In order to understand the initial process how it should be structured it's better to talk to a lawyer. When I'm talking to lawyers now they are more investigating. But I think that yes, there will be seven different countries focusing on that wanting to make money out of it. I see two issues though in the space right now. One is the scalability issue. For example, state has shut down EVM yesterday. Same thing with bank or when was that two weeks ago? Obviously the scalability issue and even if one of these start-ups or dapps are successful, EVM can handle it for scalability. Number two, another issue is people can't get their transactions. So let's say everything is on par and you and I want to invest some ether in whatever project, project X over there. Some of these whales and some of these other investors they have scripts, they have bots, they outpower us with gas. Somebody paid like $25,000 in gas or maybe more yesterday. Have you given any thought into how can we actually make this more democratic where people have more distributed accessibility to actually enter the ICO as opposed to getting bullied out which is happening right now. So you mean the fact that ICOs are backed in seconds, right? There's whales out there they'll suck up all the gas outgas you because they had to ether have scripts, automatic scripts to search for ICOs and out script you. Even though you and I have money right now to invest in it, we are fucked. Okay. So I see how it can be done. It can be done, in my opinion it can be done very easy. For example, you can you can do an ICO but issue tokens month by month. For example, firstly that's good for your community because you will have a bigger community you will offer tokens to a large amount of people and that's actually democracy which you were talking about right now. It's doing that step by step and it's totally focused on having more people involved. When you're closing your ICO without a cap in seconds that's just about money. It's democratic, I think you should do it step by step and as I know some of the projects will start doing that so the nearest ICOs that will be coming I can't tell the names better than they reveal it but some of the others will be doing and following this scheme so they will issue tokens month by month and they say that it's a democratic way of and community so that's how it can be done actually. So that looks like for example this month we're releasing I don't know a thousand tokens and next month we're releasing another thousand tokens. Yeah, absolutely and so yeah people believe that it will actually make different but the ICO are more accessible right accessible for different people not only for early adopters that heard from the ICO creators that they are doing that actually the whole crypto society let's call it. What's your take on liquidity for example are you in the camp or do you agree that one should have access to their tokens right away and then maybe people dump them or do you believe something kind of like an IPO where you and I buy stock and stock is locked for at least a year before we can touch it or move it. For sure, there should be done like the second variant for sure the first variant is just it's all about now and it happens only because almost all of the investors coming now are newcomers so they don't care about projects they don't care about so all they see is crypto currencies and tokens at the coin market cap. They even don't know that repo is not just the currency there is a whole company behind right? I talk a lot to newcomers and they care only about mining if they should start mining if they should invest in Bitcoin on Ether and what is going on with all these tokens so they are not asking me what is going on with startups they are asking what is going on with tokens and if I should invest in them so for sure there are a lot of investors cute right after the ICO releases tokens on the right after the startups release tokens on the exchanges a lot of people cute right? I guess more than 50% just because they care only about 10x profits, not more so in order to make me say that for example you invest and then we have like 1-2 years of development no one can cute and they should promote, all of the investors should promote the project, they should write about it and so on and so forth only like this we can create liquidity but this will happen only after the crash in around 2 years now no one cares about that projects don't care, investors don't care and when government comes, yes people will be like this now well it's almost impossible because no one cares do you see other platforms coming up you think for example Rootstock with Bitcoin other blockchains would offer other platforms for companies to do their ICOs on as opposed to like 90% more let's say 99% of them are on Ethereum so yes nowadays even we see companies doing ICOs those companies that are created for doing ICOs on them and then following the ICOs you like all these tokens and the money are held in the escrows and you can actually reveal the money and everything only following the rules that you created before and they write smart contracts and so forth for that when you do something when you deliver something the money are revealed, of course they use oracles that's not 100% clear now how it will be done but anyway, yes these projects do appear and the major community that actually look at these projects they do understand that it's very important actually my personal advice is to analyze analyze analyze and to look and to wait for these projects going coming out and support all of the ICOs only when such projects appear and only the ICOs that have business and so on and so forth and look into the startups but not into the profits because all this stuff I mean with the token prices going up historically it will be over soon so yeah, definitely these projects are appearing they are already raising money and a lot of them are going out when do you think we're going to see real big institutional investors coming in they are already coming it's like many projects are raising funds through ICOs they are VC backed already so that's a sign so that shows that VCs believe in ICOs they believe in projects raising money like this and they believe in blockchain stuff that's mostly about US what about Asia it's also, I'm like a member of different chats ICOs and so on and big VC funds are focusing right now on ICOs and actually they are investing in decentralized VC funds investing in ICOs so that's how it looks now so yeah, definitely we will see only the growing market even when we are talking about the crash of the bubble the whole trend will go up we can't delete ICOs we can't delete this instrument so like in the nearest 2-3 years more and more money will come the bubble will crash there will be silence for around a year or two maximum because we are living in the era of internet everything is happening very quickly so maximum 2 years after the crash again all of the records will be beaten again and so on and so forth but all of that will be regulated we will have due diligence we will have a lot of platforms helping to do ICOs to make your tokens liquid and so on and so forth the market gap it's rapidly rapidly improving we've been talking for 30 minutes already but during this time a lot of ICOs started a lot of ICOs ended most of these ICOs and representatives will be skewed and went to jail soon but anyway that's a totally new instrument and my opinion is that guys if you're a startup so something try it but keep in mind that of course you should care about startups and about people that believe in your idea cool, we'll leave it at that I like that as a final thought so to summarize investigate everything before you go in what you are investing in look at the team, look at the founders don't just jump into it don't get caught up into foma-nomics if you're missing out economics and understand this, this is still a very new technology and we have many years to go before it matures into whatever it becomes absolutely you talked about the going ICOs I don't want to advise anything like an investment advice or something for example I'm planning to look deeply into this status ICO now so it's like I know the guys personally and I know that they have a project I don't think they invest in that but that's the thing that I think might take off and maybe you also mentioned ICO that it's a really really good they have a really great background but I don't know, I didn't look deeply into that so I didn't see if they have a business model or something I just say that I do remember that this is a great project we should analyze, analyze and analyze yes we will, cool, we'll leave it at that Adi, thank you so much for coming on the show and once again guys remember the contests go to their YouTube channel, subscribe, leave a comment on how they can improve it and you can win one of the three prizes and have a great day thank you so much for having me thanks to all of your audience for listening and watching us and thank you and bye bye, have a good day