The word 'stolen' doesn't have its usual meaning in the ICO world. Isn't all or most money made on ICOs, effectively stolen? Everyone knows that ICOs are a scam.
IPOs are regulated, so there isn't that much of a mess around them, and it's more difficult for people who shouldn't be investing to play that game. That's on purpose, and it came to be through some hard-learned lessons.
> If our monetary system was so good we wouldn't be in 19 trillion in debt
National / international debt is, first and foremost, a tool, and it doesn't work the same way the "regular" debt does.
> and cryptocurrencies would have no reason to be adopted
They still don't. They live as long as they get to be financial wild-west, where it's easy to get rich off fools.
> there is a reason why Bitcoin debuted in 2009 after the 2008 Recession...
Yes, because it was developed around then.
> When the government does bailouts and Quantitative Easing, this can be seen as a scam to some
Maybe, but then again taxes are seen as theft by some. We can talk about ideologies all day, but in the real world, the "traditional" system still remains somewhat suitable for running a technological civilization, whereas cryptocurrencies are not, and will not because they don't scale well.
It's too early to say anything about the economics of ICOs, apart from that people are being oblivious to their risks. Until we see a business redeeming tokens for goods or services which which cannot otherwise be procured and are improved by virtue of their tokenization, ICOs will remain closer to moonshots than investments.
Name three.
Was Ethereum a scam?
Furthermore the Ethereum foundation itself has been spending a lot of its reserves on research grants and other activities that directly benefit the members without providing much benefit to the public at large. Under Swiss law it should be audited regularly however no audit had been published publicly.
So what, many early adopters and sellers of Bitcoin have done the same - and heaven forbid Satoshi decides to cash in, that person / group alone is a billionaire (on paper though).
Honest question. Is there a single ICO where one can use the tokens to redeem a good or service which cannot otherwise be procured and which is improved by way of using a token to purchase it instead of cash?
I say potential case, because while the goal seems noble, so far I don't see the tokens available, and it seems the project is still knee-deep in some mathematical and technological issues around the coin itself.