This brings me to the question of whither we need new token sale models to to return some security to the ICO market.
EOS had a pretty successful token sale over the course of this year we'll see a number of ICO's using Truebits "Interactive Coin Offering".
Using this method it's possible to return to the 'older' method of setting development milestones tied into funding rounds which in theory, offers some sort of investor security.
Quote
Ethereum has ushered in a remarkable new era of token crowdsales. In a recent blog post, Vitalik Buterin distilled two desirable properties of such distributions.
Everyone who wishes can successfully purchase tokens.
A fixed amount of currency buys at least some minimum fraction of the total tokens.
Unfortunately, as Vitalik argues, these two properties are mutually exclusive. Uncapped sales satisfy property 1 and capped sales satisfy property 2, however each of these traditional distribution methods fails to satisfy the corresponding complementary property.
Despite the “dilemma” noted above, we can construct a crowdsale protocol such that if each participant specifies a desired purchase quantity at each valuation, then the ultimate, universal, per token cost to sale percentage ratio satisfies all buyers. In contrast to a reverse Dutch auction, where increasing purchase power and limited supply may cause buyers to jump in too soon, we consider a protocol which not only monotonically converges to a sale valuation but also guarantees token availability and fair market information throughout the fixed duration of the crowdsale.
We wish to achieve a market equilibrium through buyer interactions. In the scheme discussed in the link at the end of this paragraph, buyers not only submit bids for tokens but may also voluntarily withdraw their bids after committing them to the sale (within certain limits).
Everyone who wishes can successfully purchase tokens.
A fixed amount of currency buys at least some minimum fraction of the total tokens.
Unfortunately, as Vitalik argues, these two properties are mutually exclusive. Uncapped sales satisfy property 1 and capped sales satisfy property 2, however each of these traditional distribution methods fails to satisfy the corresponding complementary property.
Despite the “dilemma” noted above, we can construct a crowdsale protocol such that if each participant specifies a desired purchase quantity at each valuation, then the ultimate, universal, per token cost to sale percentage ratio satisfies all buyers. In contrast to a reverse Dutch auction, where increasing purchase power and limited supply may cause buyers to jump in too soon, we consider a protocol which not only monotonically converges to a sale valuation but also guarantees token availability and fair market information throughout the fixed duration of the crowdsale.
We wish to achieve a market equilibrium through buyer interactions. In the scheme discussed in the link at the end of this paragraph, buyers not only submit bids for tokens but may also voluntarily withdraw their bids after committing them to the sale (within certain limits).
Above quote taken from https://medium.com/truebit/interactive-coin-offerings-7b05db0ff77e
For me the method seems pretty reasonable (if not a little difficult to understand intitially) but I wonder if investors are happy to just continue down the traditional route?