The China ICO Ban
ICO is a distribution service on-top of a blockchain system. That&#x27;s not all that interesting in this conversation.<p>What is interesting is the same thing that has been interesting from the beginning of the blockchain discussion. Namely that these &quot;coins&quot; purportedly offer an alternative currency to sovereign national currency.<p>I have always held the view that, the fundamental utility of doing commerce through a currency that is outside of sovereign national control&#x2F;purview is a hard ceiling for any of these systems. Probably the biggest lever a government has on their nation is monetary policy. There is no way that a government would allow the subversion of that.<p>At the point in which any alternative currency based market becomes big enough to matter within the boundaries of an existing currency based market, then all a sovereign nation needs to do to kill it is make convertibility to the local currency illegal.<p>China is basically saying, &quot;look we don&#x27;t even want to come close to this type of alternative currency possibly getting huge&quot; - and the ICO method allows pretty much anyone to convert Yuan to &quot;coin.&quot; So they went ahead and did what I have been suggesting would happen, but much earlier than I suspected.<p>The only way that wouldn&#x27;t work is if nearly all necessary services, retail, logistics etc... uses the alternative currency. In which case the native currency has effectively failed and thus the government has failed as well.<p>So I don&#x27;t see what the real upside here is, outside of very tiny, niche marketplaces that require this kind of currency.<p>I haven&#x27;t heard anyone actually respond to this line of criticism of Blockchain.<p>Blockchain is a perfect solution for many things, but as a currency it&#x27;s dead on arrival IMO.