@newageinv thanks for your thoughts. I think the challenge in terms of the good outweighing the bad is that none of these crypto companies have a track record. This is the downside of an ICO. You have an idea and without any testing put up an 8 page white paper and raise tens of millions of dollars and then you are trading. This makes for huge volatility on the one hand and a need for the ICOs to constantly hype in order to keep their token prices up. None of them have even the slightest fundamentals to examine and they unlike their blockchain foundations, are quite opaque. In this environment, outside data is the only data people should count on in my opinion. Anything else is simply too risky to bet your money on.
A final point is that I said there is a possibility that many existing cryptos listed illegally. There is a chance that the SEC will either not allow these companies to conduct business in the US going forward (and other places will follow the lead of the US), or they will demand that these companies simply start everything over. How that happens, and who would it apply to? I have no idea but I can tell you that this is the conversation right now.
It is the downside of cryptos being labeled as investments. The US did this because the guidelines for raising money as an investment is well formulated and the parameters are set already. They can take existing laws an simply apply them. And if you know anything about securities laws, you know that they are very strict.
From everything I am reading and hearing regulation proposals will be rigid and firm. Remember these guys have to protect the traditional investment markets. Imagine the uproar from Apple, Microsoft and markets like the Nasdaq and Dow if Dash or Cardano gets a valuation bigger than Amazon while being listed on an unregulated market and these companies were able to raise money completely unregulated and with no real business yet. It would be chaos. I cannot see that ever happening.
As I said, if these crypto leaders are not in rooms right now talking about regulating themselves, they are not as smart as they think they are. They need to weed out the graft, set standards for how both the companies and the marketplaces /exchanges can operate, and bring these to the table. I hope they are because you can believe the other side is doing just that. Thanks.