November 6, 2017· 21 min

History Has Some Ominous Warnings for Investors in Initial Coin Offerings

Orality
Model
69%
Oral-dominant (speeches, podcasts, storytelling)

Speaker Breakdown

HostTracy Alloway(1,430 words)
M:28%
HostJoe Weisenthal(1,041 words)
M:27%
GuestElaine Ou(769 words)
M:28%

Oral Indicators

Agonistic34%
literally, completely, very
Engagement60%
you, our, your
Memory Aids100%
listen, now, so
Repetition100%
like (47x), people (31x), token (27x)
Parallelism93%
And I'm Tracy Alloway...., So, Tracy, you know, there's t..., Or No....
Sound Patterns86%
32 question(s), alliteration: "markets move", alliteration: "barclays brief"
Formulaic Phrases5%
i mean

Literate Indicators

Hedging19%
could, probably, quite
Passive Voice11%
were disappointed, being launched, are often
Abstract Nouns26%
investment, recommendation, creation
Subordination13%
because, since, although
Sentence Length39%
Avg: 14.8 words/sentence
Word Complexity48%
investment, analyze, anticipate
Academic Markers0%
Impersonal Style40%
224 personal pronouns found
Descriptive Style85%
literally, completely, really

Description

You can't go a day without hearing about ICOs or Initial Coin Offerings. By taking advantage of a regulatory gap and buzz surrounding cryptocurrencies, companies are raising millions of dollars by launching their own coins. But what's the point of these coins? What are they supposed to do? And what are the pitfalls? On this week's podcast, we talk to Elaine Ou, a blockchain engineer at Global Financial Access and a Bloomberg View contributor about the economics of ICOs, and how previous attempts at creating similar markets ended up as failures. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.