Blockchain ICOs and Uber CEOs

ICOs.

Is there a good way to think about initial coin offerings? The idea of an initial coin offering is that a company builds, or promises to build, some blockchain-based platform that allows people to buy or sell some product or service. (It seems like it's usually cloud storage.) And then it creates a digital token -- its own "coin" -- that you have to use to buy or sell the product. And then it sells the coins, all at once, to the public, often before the product is fully up and running; the buyers can use the coins to buy the product, or try to sell them to someone else for a profit. And then the company goes to conferences to gloat about how it has disrupt ed the venture-capital funding model and shown the way to the future of capitalism and so forth: