Bitcoin Forum

“I woke up this morning, checked my wallet and realized that I am now a millionaire. Now what?”
A boy of his early 20s shared his story about investment in btc and ICOs. he also talked the ICO market in terms of regulation. Deng Di, president of China Blockchain Research Center warns people the the risk in the market.
http://news.8btc.com/the-crazy-world-of-icos-200000-cny-to-6-million-cny-in-2-years

i skimmed through the "millionaire boy"'s story but i didn't see anything about any ICOs! it was a 200BTC easy money that fell in his lap and then he held it for a couple of years and make a lot of profit!

and the future of ICOs is very simple, it will be the same future as premined altcoins have. today you can no longer see any of them around, and soon we will get rid of this ICO method of scamming too.

i think there will be crazy pump and dumps like usual.. they need to keep their act together, its kinda making it look bad for the rest  :o

There will be a lot of ICO and new coin in the future and maybe one of the ICO  can actually makes us rich, but that chance is really slim and there will be more people got scammed from the ICO, for me although it is tempting I will never put my money on ICO, it is too dangerous

I want to have this guy's problems  ;D

I completely read the article lots of places its mentioned ICO is risky because of lack of regulation even the guy who claimed he is millionaire he only mentioned its just  happened  not because of lots of research and vision.

The future is high-risk, high-profit, just like the present 😏

I think the future for these ICOs is what most competent people have already commented on: this is not sustainable. Now the question is how many people will be aware of this in time and keep away from this madness.

ICO projects have their own vision as well their own usage in several applications. So the ICO market will grow higher by the falling days, I too have been holding a small amount of ICO tokens to profit big as the price has increased quite a little than the value during the crowdsale.

instead of just making a node and telling people the possibilities and then letting it wonder free in an open decentralised manner.. the ICO concept is very much different

unlike bitcoin, which never began as a ICO, nor organised by a 'company' who made promises(contracts) to hand X premined coins you customers Y over a term...

i see ICO's becoming regulated just like 'shares' are.

ICO's will be hit by bureaucracy of the 'founders' home country. all because of how organised and centralised the concept of ICO is.

that said. most ICO's are just crap coins, so treat them like penny share trading if your gonna risk it.
best advice is. only waste amounts you are willing to lose.

EG if you normally spend $20 on a evening take-out/fast food, which naturally/literally ends up in the toilet 6 hours later.. make urself a sandwich instead and use that $20 on an ICO.. that way you never 'lose' (british pun: never loo's)

If you want to research more would get 2 statements, namely:
- ICO can make you a millionaire.
- ICO can also make you fall into poverty.

ICO has a system that is sometimes profitable and also sometimes can be detrimental.

I personally try to stay away from ICO's as much as possible, but that's just a preference.
Only investing in coins that are truly open and decentralized, such as Bitcoin, Litecoin etc.

I mean, investing in an ICO could work out for you, but I prefer the other approach.

In one year from now you'll not even remember what ICO is.
It will gradually disappear from the cryptocurrencies world.

But I suspect that on the next giant jump of bitcoin price, a new crazy thing will join.
and people will put a lot of money in it, just to discover that in a few months it no longer exist.

Stick with the big ones, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and some others. Don't count on this ICO craziness.

Offcourse there are chances of getting rich through investing in ICO. But the problem with ICO is plenty of ICO are scam and investors are not protected from them. Some people just sell their shit coins without even investing a single dollar and scam people. This issue need to be regulated. Till then ICO will keep on going the way they are. Investors need to be extra careful.

It was before that investing in ICO wont give you good returns on listing day but now a days ICO are coming with full details and when this ICO are launced in exchange they do trading very good and returns are more then 5x but after some time they start to dump so it is good to just sell of in launch date and as soon as they are dumped fully you can start buying back for long term.

ETH was the first ICO project in 2014. Now this kind of project are getting very popular, because of - just look at ETH results! :D
I count it as high risk investment, cause of it's just can happen to all start ups pump as ETH did. Some of them will disappear. I think ICOs will not bring anything new on the market. It is the time of ups and downs, so, I suppose to see something like this from ICOs.

I believe that when ICO will be regulated by most countries, there would be less pump and dumps and it will become an altertanive to IPO (which is easier to partisipate in). So it would be not so risky, but harder to engage it.

When regulation from the Government happens,restrictions ,policies will occur, joing in once campaign might be too difficult for high qualification may happen same with few ico's might not able to sustain the law f governments . I think it will be better this ways we just need to be extra careful on where to risk our money.

It will go the same way Ethereum is going to go.... DOWN. You get a bunch of people who jump in early and they make a ton of money and then

they will disappear once these people has made enough money hyping and pumping the shit out of it. I will out of principle NOT participate in any

of the ICO's. Yes, you will become rich OFF the backs of others misfortune.  >:(

ICO is going to have a really big future as every week there is a new coin being added and ico are actually are  ot a bad thing as far as i have noticed. They launch a ico set a target raises money which they can keep all with themselves are necessary works so a good profit for the owners. Now after the coins are issued most of them launch at a higher price of exchanges so easy profit for investors also. There is surely risk involved but it worth taking it sometimes

ICO market will subside when the bubble bursts, just like the IPO market subsides during economic downturns.  Most of them are garbage with promises they won't keep as they take their millions and run.  Nobody needs these tokens. Even though I went a bit into WAGERR, I don't believe anyone will actually use it on any large scale to ever gamble with.

Given ETH can't even handle the load of these tokens, future ETH based token ICOs seem questionable. Time to work on scalability first.. see which coin get it done the fastest.  NEM and Ardor are my guesses.. Ardor could replace ETH as the token king.. time will tell. Tech based on NXT is right now the most advanced, in my opinion. Thus I'm holding some (not much) of my original NEM stake while the rest is invested in Ardor and various altcoins.

Though there's a few smaller projects like Pascal that have some novel technology. Blockchain trim is a big deal. I'm amazed that one sits there dead as a doornail.

The wind will turn, ICO's will crash and take hundreds of scamcoins, shitcoins, deadcoins with it. I can't wait!

I can't figure out how you relating ICO future with this story. But yes, I must say cryptocurrency's ICO future is bright. It is nice to see anonymous projects getting millions of investment just on the basis of quality of project. It is the start of new type of trust in society.
If ICO continues to be that profitable, no wonder if future ICO gonna collect 100 millions plus in crowdfunding.

Still not convinced why ICOs is bad. This seems like a typical ideological/emotional reactions to things we do not understand. I think current decentralized economy is by far better than what is obtainable in Stock Market where only the big guys corner all the money from crowdfunding.  I invested about $75 in a well regulated Stock market 2002 or 2004. all I gained to this day was a mailed Share Certificate.

Friends, change has come. There is an ongoing economic Revolution.. no need to resist it. It's the true democratization of Our economy. It's not going to stop anytime soon. I have a feeling the current startups from ICO will be the next big future companies  and the decentralized ICO becomes the main method of raising fund by companies, making it easy for ordinary folks with great idea to raise fund for their projects ...there will be far more companies on earth as a result.
ICO isn't a bad thing. If anything it's revealing to us the true amount we supposed to earn from our investments under a govt controlled economy.
If this were under government control only few will end up becoming rich in billions of dollars. Next everybody will feel like ant to them, next they start scheming how to take over other countries and the World.
 We deserve what we currently making because we put alot of time and energy into it. If this fails many of us probably have loads of other ideas to succeed in.

My second point today:  Someone said on this forum that money from Crypto will cause inflation around the world. I smiled at that  because he most certainly thought millions of people are into Crypto. I doubt if the actual number is even upto 0.5% of World's population... makes me somewhat sad that not alot of people are  involved. Poverty in the midst of wealth is a disgrace on our planet. It MUST DISSAPPEAR and it must be done by the people not government.

ICOs or whatever it's called should never be regulated by elite controlled government. It should be regulated by the best of the the people, stakeholders and participants. It should be self regulated otherwise poverty will never cease to exist.

ICO market looks very much like Dotcom Bubble. If you are not familiar with it, people were investing in any ".com" company that appeared on the market, similar to how today people invest in every ICO, regardless of its content. The bubble bursted and most of the companies vanished, but some recovered and are operating to this day. The same might happen with altcoins, most of them won't survive the crash, but a few top coins, with hard-working devs who deliver their promises and featuring real innovations, will survive and continue rising. It's unclear though how it will affect Bitcoin - will it crash together with alts, or will investors move their funds to it instead?

“It’s not about me being smart or visionary. I’m just lucky to follow the right person,”

It's plain luck, he did trust the right person at the right time.
But still he took knowledge first before stepping up in the world of ICO.
Regarding the future of it. I dont know if it will still continue as it becomes known. Some will be tired of this flow and just go and will think of another option. Same of what they do with altcoins, they come and go.

I truly believe that most of the promising ICO we have right now wont reach anywhere in a couple of years,the thing is that we are riding the market sentiment and people who are investing in it are making a good amount of profit if they are wise enough to exit at the right time,i am not a firm believer that most of the projects will exist five years from now,so all the money i invested i am not looking for the long haul,i will make my profit and get off before everything fades off.

Makes me laugh that many of you are criticising icos, but at the same time, actively advertising them in your signatures :D.  Seems a little hypocritical to me :o.  "Do as I say, not as I do"!!! ;D

The future is going to be what it is always was and what it always will be, is that a ton of dumb people are going to jump on the train for some shitty ICO that's not going to lead anywhere. After the first week the price will see a massive spike, people are going to sell, price is going to take a shit and then that's that the price increase is done. Some select few of people (including the founders, devs and whales) are going to make an insane amount of money from all of this but that's going to be that.


At some point, if gods on our side and wants to show people the light, this'll happen but I don't think this will happen before the Altcoin bubble pops. That's going to have to come first for all of this to happen and workout!

the chance to be rich through ICO is very small, since mostly ICOs turned to scam, and it's obviously risky to put your money out there. i remember the time when i joined the ICO, at the first the project had good purpose, they were trying their best to attract people by held signature campaign, twitter and fb campaign and they paid those members act like they are not scammer, imagine big capital that they need to build their reputation. Well some promising ICO will be launched at the end of this month i think i might join, hoping this is not gonna be scam, i will take that risk.

Lol. This is exactly what am talking about. I can never in my life think of participating in what I do not believe in. I had some really nice opportunity to work for an institution with fair salary, I didn't accept. I hate to be caged with bunch of noisy people in the name of earning a living. Lol

it all started in 2016 when he bought tokens of 5 ICO projects, one helped him earn 40 times of profit and one earned 70 times.

i see a future of government crackdown and jail time with insider dumps of epic proportions and many people crying over their losses.

It will eventually come to an end, people will being to understand that many of these projects are nothing but scams, and the few projects that could have something interesting about them are going to have to learn how to develop their projects without becoming millionaires overnight as they have been doing for quite some time.

Well he says luck really since he didn't envision this and he just sticks to the right person he says. Truly, ICOs can be so risky that keeps me at distance since I am not that veteran here and also there's a chance that they would just vanish together with our money. Stressed out being rich and want a sense of achievement, how I wish to have that same kind of problem.

^^^^I agree with this....not much more to add to it.  I have had considerable success throwing down a 20 or 50 spot on ICO's that I thought were promising....ethereum and augur are two of the more successful....but the 20 or 50 is worth the entertainment value alone  <--- way better than playing a slot machine or purchasing "loo" sandwich....smile.

I too think ICO's will crash, eventually there will be no one willing to invest in them.

Some of the ICO right now will just be succeeded in long term and most of them will just create hype and it will be gone as well as the team and development. So it is best to be careful in investing in ICO because they are all mushroom that are keep popping out now and if you are just greedy and all you do is invest and invest without research and proper source of decision then you will just get rekt and lose money.

not really understanding how people cant see how scammy icos are? i guess after a few run off with the money or something else horrible happens maybe people will wake up

To say scammy for a project, the team does not need to run off with the funds. They collect the money but they don't do anything they promised, development road map, prototype etc. ICO market will crash hard soon.

For Icos now were really too fast in developing some projects,its good to have a research first and check teams previous project if it went well or have issues. We can really gained in investing but we need to be smart on choosing.

This has gone crazy like dot com bubble now.

It is really hard to filter for the 'fair' ICO- premined- scam- free coins that have some real different features than bitcoin. I only encounterd ZCL here but I have not the full overview nor the time for analysing this...


The rest is just the model: Sell to idiots. Few make money.

Well, I think that it is a lot easier for the experienced cryptocurrency fans to spot the good opportunities than it is for the new adopters. It's hard to convince others that some of these projects are just straight scams....it's rare enough that a legitimate project finds its legs, but throw in all the scams and the noobs don't have a chance.  However, I think we're going to see some innovative markets in the near future. Do your research, place your money well, and you may be able to tell a story like the kid in the OP's article.

I still don't know the effect of ICO because Its my first time to invest my time thru signature campaigns in an ICO now also the ICO has Succeeded  and they collected more than 1000+ BTC. Still no idea how to use them in the future.

It depends on ico's objective ,if its for short period or long period of time in usage or in usefullness. Some ico were too interesting that we get attracted to it since it can benefit us long terms like those insurance , funds,banks and especially real estate. It will just depend on what we yhink we need the most that sometime the market adapts.

In my opinion it depends on the project.

Nowadays lot of ICO appeared and some of them raised lot of money that they don't currently need.
We should find and invest in those with real product and clear vision. I prefer if low-marketcap too.

Only few of those over-valued companies will survive, the others simply not.

yes some time ICO become successful because of the interest of the people, they study about the success of the project and then decided to invest their money in such project

Lately it's been really crazy.  These ICO's have been making a killing and there hasn't been too many that actually had a product ready for market....even Augur hasn't hit market yet and it's been a few years.  The best thing to do with these ICO's is catch them after the distribution of the tokens and collect the FUD dumps....the FUD dumps are inevitable.

ICO is in fact the introduction of new created coin or any other project which is going to be  properly launch I think ICO have a great effect and is a great way of introduction the project in your area.
Therefore we can see that a lot of ICO are introducing in bitcoin talk form.  ICO in fact play important role making the project more successful.

The ICO project will only be as good as where it's deployed.  Lately, Ethereum has showed signs of the possibility of having a worse scalablity issue than Bitcoin.  If Ethereum's model fails, that would be totally bad for the likes of Gnosis, Augur and the rest.

I hope some of those ICO's used Ethereum only for fund raising purposes because that's all it's good for due to the high number of newbies looking for the next big thing.

If you stated things real then your life luckiest . I came across lots of ICO recent 2 to 3 months most of them proved scam or useless so again you need lots of research before investing ICO

In fact it is also depending on the project that how much the project is successful. In fact the ICO is just introducing the project in the market and those people who are interested in this project to invest their money than they do more study about the project and after being satisfied then they think about to invest money in that project.

About 500m already went into ICOs this year. At this rate, another 500 will go into it. Thats a billion!

Is this too much? Well, that depends...

Depends on what sort of funding we are talking about:

1- Seed funding (concept ready)
2- First round/Start-up funding (product demo ready)
3- Second stage (product sold, customers exist, competition faced)
4- Third stage (expansion and maturity, scaling fund)

If this is 1 billion into type 1; it is way too much!
If this is 1 billion into type 2; this is OK
If this is 1 billion into type 3; nothing to talk about

For comparison, although data is not very reliable, US VC statistics show about 500m seed funding and 2bln first round rounding per year.

The keyword here is eventually, this is not going to end anytime soon, there are some projects that are worth your time, but most of them are coins that are probably going to disappear in a single year, people will realize this and will stop to throw money at ICOs.

Idea Coming Outs  are great 

I Cheat Others 

fits better

;D

hopefully it will stop!

i find ICOs as a disease in the crypto currency world. it leads to creation of useless projects over and over and it also leads to becoming lazy developers.

you can simply compare a developer of an ICO coin with the developers of real cryptocurrencies with no shenanigans such as bitcoin and litecoin. if you compare how active bitcoin developers or litecoin developers are and how much time they are spending on developing the code without getting paid to do so then you can see the difference.

The ICO market is still at it infancy and time is coming when regulatory agency will get into the market and sake it from this current unregulated operations we are having today. I don't think the market will  continue the way it is now, if governments fold it's hand and think thing will correct itself then we are in a long thing. Inflation and criminality will become the order of the day, many people will become rich with almost doing nothing, this in turn will influence crime and criminality. ICO market should be regulated as soon as possible by the governments so we can have a great transparent market.

I don't think ICOS market is something crazy even it gets millions USD, for the people who agree with ICO
it is just innovations, new ideas that never be think before.
ICO is new way investing in digital coins of course with high risk losing in them or ICO is new way to scam the investors
so the future of ICO everything can be happen to bad or good for the investors.

There are many ICOs that in no way require the technology they are launching on, the cynic, or realist depending on your viewpoint, in me thinks there are only so many ideas suited to this launch and so the volumes will subside

For many of these projects in fact the use of a blockchain does not make any sense. And if it is an editable blockchain, why have a blockchain in the first place?

when you want to invest in an ICO you have first to see how its going to have a ractical use in reality.
If you are old like me you probably remember a company that sold plots in the moon. yes it was fine with 20 dllars you cold have your plot on the moon  but that was it.
Focus in real world use and not in big words.

We will have very few valueable ico' and lot of scams and wothless project,will be similar like altcoin boom was after btc succes

I really like this ICO market and all ICO coins because if we can earn them for free why not and maybe become a millionaire for free without any risk what is really perfect for us.

As long as ethereum stays alive, ICO's will survive. Its a very huge market filled with potential I would say, but at the same time cunning scams will be all over the place. I read that many new companies will go mainstream with this form of an investment strategy in the near future instead of listing their companies on the share market and all.

I think the EOS may change the position the ethereum, recently, the EOS raised a lot of ETHs every day, and the cray ICO market seems to be over since other ICO projects are not so hot, so I think we should do some deep research before we buying some ICO tokens.

That was really the thing that we are making why we are doing there thing because we wanted to become a millionaire we invest to gain a great profit in the future so no doubt about that we can make it in investing like other did in the pass years maybe ICO today is great but there are a lot of ICO in that is happening .

You may like this crazy market but this does not change the reality that this craziness will crash soon very badly. It's not sustainable.

As an alt fund raising platform ICO looks good, but with a lack of regulation and cold minded people it is too crazy...
I think we will see attempts to use regulation mechanism in future.

there is quiet a risk but it's a matter of playing safe because there's profit.

Higher profits always come along with higher risks

90% of the ICOs are to loot money big time. Only 10% will stay in long term. You just gotta find out which ones  ;)

Agree, A lot of ICO is only a repetition with a few modification from past ICO already and I'm very stunned that there still many investors are risking on investing on that project, I will not mention names but there so many ongoing ICO's right now that are just looting money from investors that don't have any idea on what they are investing for and just following the trend.

The ICO frenzyness is just at its beginning I think. Even thought there are many ICOs at the moment, all of them catch many funds, so this means there is still a fund pool.

it has nothing to do with etherum, because even before ether there has been ICOs and also there are many other platforms to make smart contracts and start an ICO on. and it will eventually die because it is a shady way of making money which attracted a lot of scammers and it will eventually end badly and when people started losing big amounts of money because of getting dumped on they will stop trusting these scams like they stopped trusting premined coins scams.

and i seriously doubt any legit company would ever go near ICO or making anything of their own. it is not exactly a legal and regulated way of doing business you know.

In ambiguity whether ICO method will forever or not. Lots of them are coming into the market with greater ideas and smart contract. Most of them are dependent on the Ethereum as compared to bitcoin. Which makes it unclear why not choose bitcoin straight away. Anyway moving towards the profitability with this currency, the ICO, seems to be timely thing, that it can loose its asset and drop the projects at any time. Who knows we might loose big money in the process.