Don Tapscott: South Korea is losing a historic opportunity

A week ago, the news from South Korea went largely unnoticed by the big cryptocurrency media. But the local Korean outlets reported about a rather interesting speech given by Don Tapscott, Canadian entrepreneur, scientist, futurist and author of several books on digital economy. The speech was given at the sidelines of an energy exhibition hosted by the state-run Korea Electric Power Corporation.

Unsurprisingly, Don Tapscott told that the ICO ban in South Korea was a failure to recognize the legitimacy of initial coin offerings.

“This is a valid source of capital and it's critical to build entrepreneurship and innovation in any economy… A lot of these ICOs are for companies that will fail. So what? One out of 10 venture capital companies is successful, and some of these are fraud, but criminals always use new technologies before anybody else”, he said.

That “so what” directly contradicts the view of Vitalik Buterin, who, as our regular readers undoubtedly remember, believes that 90% of ICO startups would eventually fall and this fact cannot be ignored or downplayed. But it is very hard not to agree with Mr. Tapscott when he says this:

"This year, ICOs have more money than all of the venture capital. So this is a historic opportunity for a country like Korea."

It is true, and this is, by the way, an exact reason why Russian ministers and even the conservative President decided not to ban ICOs within their country.