Bitcoin Forum

Despite legitimacy with a white paper and all necessary documents, what is the easiest way to explain the benefits of ICOs to someone?

What do you mean? If the project is promising, well organized and made up of a good team then people will invest. And of course you also need to invest in marketing not only to show how serious the project is but also to attract investors.

What can not be expected is that people will invest on unnecessary projects or full of failures just because they have a whitepaper.

People probably only make investments to profit. Make this clear and explain why you project can grow.

For investors, ICO is no longer a strange word, but for newbies, it is difficult to explain to them, instead of trying to get them to know it, we can say The easiest way to understand it, ICO is the time for people to invest in a coin and wait for its development.

no amount of white paper or documents can make an ICO investment valid or worth the risk.
just take a look at what others are doing with hundreds of ICO and how they are hyping up their thing and mimic them. you only can get greedy newbies anyways so it doesn't make much difference. :)

The best way to explain ICO's to someone is through the potential income. Just tell that somebody that if you buy coins at ICO you can buy more coins since you can have it at its cheapest value. After the ICO the price of the coin will increase and ICO holders will surely get a profit when the coin will be released in an exchange.

I thought the benefits were good profits. I mean all you really need to do is show how many ICOs were profitably and by how much. If you mean benefits to the real world ie innovation, that is project dependent.

The main point to introduce ICO is how to make investor trust you that the coin is not a scammed and if you passed that stage then the next thing the investor looking for is profit, you need to explained the reason why the investor want to invest in your coin and how big your coin can grow and influence the others to used your coin in the future

most of them fail as soon as people find a way to sell their coins. so it is best to not show them other ICOs because they will run away screaming.
and innovation in altcoins with ICO is overrated anyways, people only consider an ICO if they want to gamble with their money and make a big profit from its pump.

If you need to explain to someone, probably, those guys should not be putting money into ICOs as it is the equivalent of gambling.

BTW, if people are taking money and all they have is a pretty site and a 'whitepaper', it's a scam.

Usually when I do check a certain ICO most of them do really have the same aspects like showing their Whitepaper,roadmap,devs and other stuffs but some other cant able to show one which really a big minus for me. Transparency is the thing I do always find and if I saw its a promising project then I might jump on my own risk because not all ICO that are well presented cant still guaranteed that they wont scam after.

I think you need lots of things.

1. A good project, like Ethereum (for example). Their pre-sale was a huge success.
2. Put your face in front of the camera. It is bad for privacy, but people tend to trust more people whose faces and names are known.
3. Hire a good designer, for website, banners, etc. Most marketing should be eye-catching, otherwise you won't attract investors.

But remember the most important thing is a good project.

i generally agree, just show them that the project is trusted, to do so look at the face who is behind the project, if there is a premine, hwo the ICO is handled by their team and things like, one thing i look is if the project has a serious roadmap, this is very important, if there are no crucial point that the project is aiming for i stay away from their ICO

Tell them it is an investment that have a potential to multiply or worthless.  You should tell them the pros and cons, the possible income and possible lost.  There is no easy way than telling them how history of ICO performs.  Beside it is better to be transparent and honest than mislead them that may cause unpleasant result.

I don't agree with you. An investment is an investment, nothing more, nothing less.
If someone has money and is looking at investment options, ICO might be a good option. There was a time we didn't know about Bitcoin and couldn't invest, but if someone came and explained it to us we might. We should explain it to people and let them decide for themselves.

Explain it to them that it is like stocks in which what they have called an "IPO" or Initial Public Offering of a company in the stock market. The only difference is ICOs are not companies but currencies in which they hope to be one of the most demanded altcoins out there. ICOs are also a great way to look at an altcoin at its cheapest price (if it becomes successful that is).

Bitcoin is not an investment, there's no sales pitch, there's no company behind it, there was no crowd funding, no one to run away with your money.

All these ICOs are just the new name for all these crowd funding scams and failed businesses, go read about Bitfunder, CryptoStocks, BTCTC, HavelockInvestments, check what happened to all the projects getting funding in there, the same will happen to the vast majority of ICOs.

Buying an ICO is just like financing a project to its completion with the hope that the project will be successful and you can get your money back plus some profits or you can stay for good and just leave your coins/tokens sleeping until they become so valuable. But we have to be careful because there are now many ICO scammers.

No need to explain to the. All we need is to invest our money and earn the profit. When they see we have the money, they will ask us and learn more about the way we make money

LOL, and you might have some upset family members if your asset goes south, has a technical issue like slock.it, or is an outright scam, like the overwhelming majority of early cryptoassets. Educate those that ask to the best of your ability. It's your duty if you care about bitcoin. But at the end of your spiel, you must encourage them to do their own diligence. If they do, you will have two informed opinions on the matter, and you aren't as liable if an unknown thing makes everything go to shit. You cant predict the future, but you can educate yourself and other to hedge against catastrophe ;)

The best way is not to be lazy if you interested in any project whatsoever without having any knowledge other members of the forum will do the job for you all you just need to invest is your time in reading. The moment the thread is not self moderated, I am sure lots of comment from fellow developers to private investigators among like minded potential investors too will solve the whole issue and the moment the proposed developers cannot take the heat, flee.

Fortunately there was no ICO for bitcoin and nobody could have "invested" in it.
Probably this is the main reason bitcoin is a success and all the alts are just crawling behind feeding on the remains.

Also the "whitepaper" means 0.
Nobody cares about 10 pages of fancy words. This no longer the time when visacoin would attract 100 btc of investment just for a cool name.

Who said toppings on ice-cream induce people to buy it. It is flavor that matters.
There are hundreds of ICOs flooding through forum every month. Liberty to launch one own coins in internet world enthusiast everyone to go for his/her own. This also leads to creation of some shitty and nuisance coins. This is the main reason why critics and potential investors doubt each and every project which is justified too. After all someone giving out his money to unknowns over internet.
However, if your project has flavor to attract investors nothing can stop you. But provided you develop something more than just another ETH coin or so. ::)

Absolutely love this answer. This sums everything up in a nutshell. Perfect, thanks a mil !!  :)

nice to hear about your opinion because it is totally awesome. As veteran members, we can easily determine which ICO is scam so do not worry about that

Meanwhile this article came out, I advise everyone reading it, at least you know what you're in for when 'investing' in an ICO.

Dear SEC: ICOs & ‘Tokens’ are killing innovation

https://medium.com/@derosetech_10334/dear-sec-icos-tokens-are-killing-innovation-2f8d287f88c3

I would probably say the benefits are that you can economically incentivise people to behave in a certain way, which previously was not really possible. You can align incentives and create fair or some sort of desired behaviour in a system with tokens. And ICOs are good because if a token has a real purpose in a given system (e.g. it represents reputation, or it helps people achieve consensus over something in a stake-weighted way), companies can raise money without giving away equity but rather giving away "equity" in their product. And therefore, if you believe the product's demand will grow (e.g. Ethereum), the coin value goes up. Also, its completely liquid unlike equity, so if you're unhappy you can just resell it.