Probably ICO's as a stable 'investment' vehicle in it's current form, as the market will eventually correct itself to match the real underlying value.
That doesn't mean there isn't a ton of real value being generated here or that it doesn't have the potential to be at the scale it is now. It just might be too much, far too soon.
Building companies and innovating is hard, flooding capital to it will boost the value generated but you can't simply manufacture it artificially by throwing money at it unless there is real talent and business models underneath.
Just look at that Circle startup that raised a record seed round based on a nice sounding team and a half-baked idea. Too much money can actually hurt some companies chances.
> Too much money can actually hurt some companies chances.
And you can't really emphasise this too much when the company is a couple of developers, a handful of lines of code and an idea expressed on a WordPress marketing site, and complete strangers are chucking coins that can be converted to tens of millions of dollars of hard currency in return for a token conferring no rights whatsoever, because blockchain > legal systems that actually enforce fiduciary duties. Investors are usually keen to ensure founders can't just convert investments greater than "fuck you money" level into into yachts. But some ICO founders have already got a lot more, and even if they start with nothing but good intentions, they must wonder why they'd bother spending it building a company that in all probability won't be worth more to them.
Not OP, but here's a thought that has bugged me for a while: The bitcoin block reward is currently 12.5 BTC which equals to about 42500$. Put differently, this means that the market currently values 1MB of (transaction) data on the bitcoin blockchain at over 40'000 USD and miners will (collectively) spend about as much for mining each block. This is clearly not economically reasonable, unless of course you believe bitcoin will for some odd reason become the only safe haven for storing wealth. In reality though the price of a crypto currency and its blockchain should depend on the utility it provides to society.
If the system works then it must be worth $40000 to the users of the block chain. There is a valid point to be made about energy efficiency but this possibly is right for the price of securing a global "bank".
Mining protects all transactions that have occured not only those in the current block. But yes, long term the block size will need to increase or transactions will need to pay much higher fees (probably as a result of transaction aggregation, e.g. Lightning channels).
