Bitcoin Forum

I dont have much time in the cryptoworld, but i'm interested on how so many people trust on ICOs and claim them to be a good way to simply x2, x3 or even x10 your money.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but a TOKEN Based ICO sell their unique tokens at a price, just so months later the token gets accepted on an Exchange then you can trade those tokens and double your money.
It it really that simple?

An ICO is an investment in the future of a business or technology.

Generally, a group of people will propose a project to build a technology or a business, and they sell the coins that the project will use. If the technology or business is successful, then the coins might have some value in the future.

ICOs are extremely risky. It is likely that most ICOs are just scams, and it is also likely that most of the rest will fail. And even then, the values of the coins for the few projects that succeed may never reach the value that you paid in the ICO.

That's the mechanics of how it works.

But don't expect to make 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x your money. That's very, very rare. Majority of these cryptocurrency ICOs go no where, they're rubbish, they're hype. Their promises of a great return aren't based in fact.

Take a chance on a flyer bet like this and know that most likely it will not pay off.

Good luck.

If it was that simple, everyone would be doing it. There are tons of ICO's that fail. You only hear about the successful ones. Do your own research. Find ones that you think have long term future potential, and get in on the presales.

Unlike buying a company's stock, where investors simply acquire a share in the company, the token holder's rights may vary greatly from one ICO to another.

In some cases, the buyer is entitled to a share in the company’s profit or in its internal currency. Or tokens are used as utility tokens to pay for provided services.

i like to think of it like this... you send them cash and they send you coins or tokens that have no verifiable value at the moment you buy them!

Originally I too thought ICOs were the way but not anymore. Tons of scams, tons of false promises, tons of changes to terms, and more. It just is not the best for an investor.

Not to mention that most tokens have troubles getting listed on exchanges which in turn provides crappy liquidity. You can imagine what would happen to price with bad liquidity

Ico is where the token get it's price, if it will go max cap it would be a bigger price and a easier to be in exchange

Before buying any token from any ico, research very well, example, does the team members expose more about themselves, is the company registered, is the idea cool and also unique, do they have a working prototype, read thoroughly about their whitepaper. What benefits the investors have. Milestone, and alot.. its hard and time-consuming but it pays off

ICO's, or initial coin offerings, are a spin off of initial product offerings, well offered, by companies launching into business. This is the same idea for digital currencies using ETH smart contracts.

ICO is similar to Crowd-founding in the conventional for the startup up projects. You invest your bitcoin or cryptocurrencies by send them to them physical address of the project team, and you receive in exchange a number of the company's token.
You become in that way shareholder of the company, and your profit or loss depends hence of how the company is performing.

It is true that most of the ICOs are scams, so be careful before investing. Hereafter are some advice:
1. See if the business roadmap is feasible and coherent
2. Is there any MVP? if no, pass you way. If yes what are the functionalities that are already implemented
3. Are people in the team knowledgeable? do they have a proper linkedin page with real work experience?

ICOs are, obviously, similar to initial product offerings but this is being done on the Ethereum network now and is almost always used for speculative gains in the end so it's nothing of interest, stick to the Bitcoin network that's where all the serious action is.

Hello. Where can I find bounty companies for Newbies ?

I think you will find what you are looking for in the bounties' section of bitcointalk  :)

Thank you. Could you give me a link please?

Of course, here it is : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=12.0  :)

I was wondering how much money it takes to start one's ICO. Example given: I want to issue X number of tokens worth $125.000. What will be my expenses like?

Good to see that people are finally looking at ICOs more critically. For a couple of weeks I thought the whole (crypto-)world went mad.



I think there's next to no money needed to start an ICO, you'll probably just need to look up on how to issue a token on the Ethereum network. The value of X tokens will be defined by how much people are willing to pay. How much people are willing to pay depends on what you have to offer.

Thanks HeRetiK,
so is the going rate updated in real-time depending on how much people buy them?
say, I issue some, they are worth $0.01, somebody buys a few, and they become $0.02?
another question is, how do you make sure there is a limited supply of one's tokens: just take their word for it?
(the point being, limited supply tokens are generally worth more, and someone can use this as a selling point)

oh... and most importantly... how is the initial price calculated?

ICO cost is mostly marketing.
If you want to release and maintain good coin, you need to create a market for it.
That means you need spend big amount money for marketing.
initial price itself doesn't matter. You can set any price you want.

Thank you, comes in line with my thinking (re:marketing).
Good to know!

personally, i think a successful ICO needs the following "ingredients":
-strong business case that's disruptive
-well qualified team running the project
-strong marketing to reach the right audience

Needless to say, technology plays an important role as well, however technology is just the 'plumbing" to the business solution unless the technology is a breakthru.

just my humble opinion.

Problem being, most ICOs seem to focus mostly on the marketing part while utterly neglecting the first two points.

This leads to the typical ICO business plan looking like:

1) Throw buzzwords
2) Issue tokens
3) ???
4) Profit!


¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is not problems of ICO's only - most of the businesses are like that, be it a start up or corporation that is on the the Nasdaq. They always allocate bigger portion of money and effort to the marketing rather than product,

Thank you very much. I'll try to find something useful :)

Marketing plays a big role in every industry, that's true, but nowhere is the actual substance as lacking as with your run-of-the-mill ICO.

Startups tend to be overvalued, but they get heavily screened by potential investors before they even see a penny.

NASDAQ companies have actual products and a market share.

Now I'm not saying that all ICOs are bad. I'm just saying that a lot of those ICOs are the tech equivalent of a neighborhood lemonade stand -- only they don't sell you lemonade, but tokens which may or may not be redeemable for lemonade in the future.

 ;D i like the lemonade analogy.

It is also about the maturity of the investors, we can draw parallel to IPO of a company, not all listed companies have great business solution but investors just punt and hope for a windfall.

Simply put it this way, in the future, basically, the majority of the businesses and other things that can help you get money will all be connected into crypto currencies. And that is getting a bit more closer with each passing day. That is why people are getting more and more drawn into crypto currencies. Because they see what is comming. But mind you, it isn’t as easy as what you may think. Because a lot of scam coins and other shitty coins are out there. Which can make you lose a lot rather than earn a lot. So better study about it more first before diving into it. Because believe me, knowledge about these things are really important and will always be of use to you. So take time and invest first your time in gaining knowledge before anything else.

I don't disagree, however i am sure investors are learning day-by-day and getting more knowledgable. They can cut thru all the fluff....hopefully.

It's not always to delivery your free 10x money as your thought. Some of them could be scam or illegal ICO and you could lost all money if invest into them

As I know it works in 2 phases.. How?

could you explain which 2 phases? then maybe the rest of the community can share their views?

ICO's are called initial product offerings that use Ethereum's blockchain to launch these ICO's as smart contracts are necessary for the pump and dumps for some reason.

i think pump and dump is not unique to ICOs, it happens at IPOs too.
The only difference is that regulators watch THE exchange tightly and "players" have to jump thru more hoops to pump and dump.

you just put some buzz words into the blender, man. ICO can be done with any coins, not only ETH-based. Pump&Dump can be made buy any rich person and is not a blockchain invention.

Well, now with ICOs anyone with the enough hype, chuzpe and pseudo-expertise can start a pump-and-dump, even without being rich! It's the ultimate democratization of financial scams!

ioc is one of the development paths of this period as the publisher called for investment in their projects. It's also possible that at this stage you invest in your project and the coin is not listed, then you lose the money so you should think and learn about it before investing in any. any ico project  :(

That's why we need regulations. I'm not kidding.

yes, basically you understood how ICOs work. It's a mix of old concepts like IPOs and crowd funding. When tokens get listed on exchanges you can trade them to Bitcoin, ETH, etc. depending on the exchange. Is it so easy to double your investment? yes and no. You need to choose the right ICO to put your money in it and then be patient until price rises. But if it rises, you can get very good profits!

Yep! Or rather... that's why traditional financial markets are cluttered with regulations in the first place. It seems like the crypto-world always needs to learn the hard way why the traditional financial system works the way it does.

Which doesn't mean that we can't improve on it without governmental intervention. Who knows, maybe people will learn to be more critical with their investments and the next wave of ICOs will actually be worth their money. Sometimes it takes something like Gox for people to act smarter.

refactoring is always hard
rebuilding classic "banking and co" system is f*cking almost impossible job

most effective way to build financial system in XXI century natural for global economy and fast internet - is to build it from scratch
that is what happening right now

it's not a "death of banking system". It's a whole new world. Like mail vs email vs messengers.

Just a development or an upgrade of the old one from an new developer who copy and adds new idea from other developers,that how it goes and we can which is better once were already doing research were to put our investments.

sorry, I don't get what you want to tell

An ICO is essentially the first public offering to purchase coins for their blockchain project. The chief advantage is the same as being an early investor in any company or business project. The objective is that the company or blockchain project is going to use those funds to grow and make the company and/or coin more valuable in the future. We have a blog post expanding on this, so check it out:

Bit.ly/GuideToExchanges

 :)

As a good promotion for startups
And to get tokens for a good price b4 ICO will be finished
 ;)

Hi guys,

Initial coin offering have become more popular with the rapid growth of cryptocurrencies. This model has helped a lot of successful projects and companies get the funding required to start their business.


Following are the steps explaining how exactly the ICO process works:

1. Pre-Announcement
2. Offering
3. Running PR-Campaign
4. ICO Sale.

ICO website (https://www.icoclone.com) can help to develop your business growth every day

If you want a description of the different steps of an ICO you can follow this link https://www.blockchains-expert.com/en/initial-coin-offering/

Its no that simple. filtering out the right project form the number of projects is not an easy task. ICOs are launching every single day before investing the ICOs you have to look into many things PROJECT AIM, TEAM, TOKEN SUPPLY, TOKEN DISTRIBUTION, RESERVED HOLDING. These all are the factors which is necessary to consider before choosing the right on.

That is true, if you even consider the fact that over 90% of startups fail within three years!

ICO is the way a project need to do when they begin their bussiness or platform. It's very risk for newbie in crypto market when you want to invest in ICO. Many scam project around here, even if it's not scam, it's not always give you benefit you want. Don't invest your money when you see your friends or people around you do that, they're not always do the right things. You need to research carefully about the roadmap, whitepaper, about their platform, etc.
I think you should trade or hold tokens before learing to invest in ICO.

do not expect to make 5x, 10x your money, That's very rare, unfortunately, not all developers are fair and many companies collect millions of dollars and do not follow their promises and roadmaps

Yes... as a few people mentioned before, research very very well before buying!!

I saw this other post and thought it was helpful: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3115076.0

Basically just do a ton of research before buying... just like any other investment!

Good luck

this vid was funny n helpful to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyuZ_bCQeIE

It's never that easy. What I did was I use my fundamental skills, meaning you guess the price according to the upcoming events of that particular token/coin then I buy then I would sell on profit. Other way around this won't make sure guess, and there comes technical analysis that you need to study the price according to price movements which I am trying to learn now. Just don't put to much money on an investment you are not sure of to avoid heartbreaks and just play the game cool

its like IPO, just ICO ;)

Investing on ICO coins is profitable but many people complain of the risk involved but, to me investment most especially when it comes to cryptocurrency is all about risk. As a beginner Pre-ICO investment  will really help you a lot you can even gain times 20 but you have to read all rules involved and always be careful.

Yeah I also think about investing in ICO and agree that you have to do a ton of research before. Everyone is saying that their ICO is great and give you arguments, videos and articles confirming that.

What you say, it seems right, some people just participate the ICO, then the tokens what they got befor go to online excchange market will double their money. but, sometimes, the token can't go to online exchange market, at the meanwhile, when the token go to online with difficulty,the price of the token become cheapper.

So the most important is find a good token which it have a good future.

Some ICO's do airdrops that can be lucrative if you pick the right ones.

Copy / paste the twitter url in my signature for a list of airdrops updated daily. I even have a top 10 ranking for the most promising ico's.

It is likely that most ICOs are just scams, it is also likely that most of the rest will fail. And don't expect to make 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x your money. That's very, very rare.

You need to research carefully about the roadmap, whitepaper, about their platform, etc. I think you should trade or hold tokens before learing to invest in ICO.

Many scam project around here. Don't invest your money when you see your friends or people around you do that, they're not always do the right things.

ICO means Initial Coin Offerings. With ICO, you can buy tokens before coming to the exchange or public market. But the thing is most of them are scam and not valuable one. It very hard to find good ico if you want to increase investment. Consider about bellow facts before going invest on any ico

* Project Idea
* Project roadmap and vision
* Team and advisory board.
* is it reachable idea with the current technology stacks
* Hard cap and soft cap


Do you own and proper research before investing on any ICO

Here it is necessary to understand that according to statistics 95% of ICO is SCAM. It is also necessary to understand that when the market in the fall phase, then even good projects do not give even x2 after listing on stock exchanges. Typically, a new investor will lose his money at the beginning of his journey in crypto-investment. You need to learn a lot of information in order to successfully invest