Imagine a market where almost anyone can launch their own currency in exchange for millions of dollars of liquid funding without so much as a liability. Now imagine a market where the only limit on how much you raise is not the viability of your business venture or its capacity to generate positive cash flows in the future, but the breadth and scope of your vision for decentralisation, code or capital appreciation.

That is the state of the $82bn crypto currency market. Here, the latest fad is not investing in bitcoin, the crypto currency pioneer, but in “initial coin offerings” which promise to endow tokens at some unspecified point in the future with a digital raison d'être.

At the latest count, more than 900 coins were supposedly active and tradeable in the bilateral crypto currency market, or else bore some sort of implied intrinsic value.