Bitcoin Forum

Hi,

Nowadays thousands of ICO companies come into the world and die! The problem is that big part of those ICOs are means of just getting money and nothing else. It causes lack of trust and people are afraid of investing their money in ICOs.

But there are many very interesting ICOs with high potential and ready product, which suffer from widespread opinion that majority of ICOs are scammers.

E.g. KickCity is a company that has existed for two years. KickCity an event platform that generates revenue and has a Helsinki government grant. KickCity needs ICO to make business bigger and to become a decentralized platform where every user is rewarded for ticket promotion. Such companies shouldn't meet obstacles because of scammers!?

What is your opinion on modern ICO regulations and investors' attitude to ICOs?

P.S. all mentioned above is my personal opinion and I glad to hear any attitude  :)

In my opinion, somehow ICO's regulation will be in favour of investors. Scam ICO's has left a negative image in mind of the investors, in consequence, genuine ICO companies like KickCity etc also do not get proper investors attention and unable to collect necessary crowdfunding.
Regulation in ICO's will give confidence and encourage investors to invest in ICO without any hesitation and fear.

Yeah, it is exactly what I want to say! But I heard from many people that they don’t want ICOs to be regulated! And I am like why? Do u want absolute freedom for what? I just can’t understand their state of mind. What do they want? So I wanna hear any reasons like pros and cons of both, maybe I can’t see anything?

There have been many scams and that has made people suspicious of icos, and when you add the regulation, KYC costumer policies and things like that then that has made the market of icos to move a lot slower than it did a year ago, however as long as the devs and their project is real and honest then it will attract attention and eventually make you money, in fact for the astute investor this is a great opportunity to buy into icos for cheap and make a fortune later.

Regulation can help a lot,but even without it,it`s relatively easy to separate the trusted projects from the scams.Usually the legit ICOs have big advertising budgets and spend a lot of money to promote their projects.
This is a good sign.If some projects owner invests his own money into the ICO,he is determined to build a legit business.All the scammy ICOs,rely on free promotion and social media spamming,because they want fast profits from their scam.

Well, what people don't understand that an ICO is just a kind of a shares offer from a startup, but without all the controls that a usual share offer has.

So, u mean that there is no sence in ICOs if they are conroled as IPOs?

it will be good if ICOs will undergo regulation since there are actually a huge number of ICOs that is present to just scam and take away people's money without their knowledge. because of that scenario, those ICOs with good vision and intent are generally judged.

Same vision, because I heard from so many people that ICOs are just scammers, but in reality they are able to generate better and more cost-efficient products using decentralized systems.

Same vision, since I got notification from such a large number of individuals that ICOs are simply con artists, yet in all actuality they can create better and more cost-proficient items utilizing decentralized frameworks.

Depend the regulation. If it's a soft regulation it's not a problem at all, but some agressive regulations can harm the ICO's business in general on the respective country. The truth behind the ICO regulations isn't the protection authorities want to give to investors, but the fear they have to continue losing money from taxes, as people are using ICOs as money laudering method.

Also, if a country is too strict about ICOs, the developer will just move himself to a more friendly country to execute his plans.

This is the way that any market operates, it is the same for many things and you can find a lot of studies on it, a common one is looking at the used car market and what is known as 'lemons'. You can easily buy a used car and it be broken and you've lost your money, this will always factor in to the demand and subsequently price across the overall market, like with a car you can do your due diligence in advance and reduce your chances of being the one who loses out because they made a poor investment.

Actually because of the image of scam ICO's left to the mind of people, other government are totally banning it to protect investors and what they do is that they regulate the existing coins specially bitcoin so that it cant be use to tax evasion and other illegal transactions.

But do u believe it is a proper decision just to ban ICOs, maybe they should create helpful regulation and rise people awareness about both scammers and good ICOs?

Undoubtedly, I am for the regulation of ICO. Unfortunately, this is too much scam. And really good companies suffer from it. And investors of course.

You are right but in the same time it is democracy and unfortunately there are a lot of rotten apples but still, i believe that those who make investments in ICO's they have the wisedome to make the difference between a scam and a serious company.

It would be really good, if all investors could really understand what is scam and what is not. But I heard from many people about one example of the ICOs that was on media, got several millions and disappeared on the next day when ICOs was finished.

the market is flooded and the competition has become very large, even for projects already established are facing a big competition, all fans of some project want that same project is in position 10 in the coinmarketcap



I agree, still a few days ago hear john mcafee commenting on this


unfortunately this was not enough to create fear in people since I see many ICOs are raising a lot of money


I am going to blame the creators of the ICOs, as it is unjustifiable that someone wants to create a business or some innovation and that person creates an ICO, but that person do not present the names of the people who are part of the project team and does not mention relevant data as where exactly in real life the project will be implemented.

Yes.Its right.Nowadays,even the institutional companies have started to enter the ICO for raising funds for their projects.They too might suffer due to the image that almost all ICOs are scam.ICO is a good concept but unfortunately there is no central body to control and regulate it since crypto market being the decentralized market and that's the root cause for all such problems.

Absolutely. There's nothing wrong with the concept of ICO itself. In fact, it is one of the most powerful economic innovations we've had in recent years.

I believe that modern ICO regulations are definitely not tough enough, there should be at least a working module of a product before you can start asking for any investments. Many investors including myself are willing to invest in them but there are simply too many scams, so we are very cautious. If we can remove the scams then the ICO ecosystem will strive.

"All men are evil and will act upon their vicious nature if given the chance" - Niccolò Machiavelli.

Scammers are a constant. So I believe we should regulate the ICO's. TO legitimize startup companies. They should submit documents and have government approval before they have an ICO for their company. I know it's against everything in the cryptoworld, but it's the only choice we have to protect ourselves.

That's why sometimes I will agree for some ICO regulations since it could help to minimize the scams and people could figure out on what is the best ICO to invest with. But if regulation will not happen but still those companies want to get in well they should do some good advertising to spread their awareness so that they will not be buried by scam projects.

Ico has grown for a long time in the digital money of the future. Has given opportunity to members who have the character of investing in digital money.
There are still many more they can use with the development that already exists. Nothing wrong ico has developed very well, this we have been looking forward to since a few months ago.
All members can find places to store and manage ico in the form of large projects.
What matters is that development with ico will improve and give freedom to ico projects that have survived better than the last days.
Any placement in the form of ico money can be managed, we can join a great ico project if we have a high science.

Is this a novel way of advertising an ICO of a company? I think regulating ICO's would be as futile as regulating cryptocurrencies. The ICO runners will just spend a little more dough to start their business is some obscure jurisdiction with vague laws. Of course, their number may diminish but does it mean that their quality will rise? Perhaps, the best way to regulate these efforts would be via raising awareness of wannabe investors, though as the saying goes you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. Most people would still prefer to learn the hard way.

There is a need for some form of a regulation because in any kind of industry there would always be scam artists who are ready to exploit the platform if it is open to everybody. However, regulations should not be an excuse for the government to kill what has been regulated...there has to be some balancing act otherwise everything would just be futile like what China did last year. We have to let the ICO platform flourish while at the same time flush out those who are here just to exploit the weakness of other people.

If the ICO project is unprofitable, it should not survive.
It needs to be wise and recognize whether the project has a future or not.
If you need help with the right decision, please contact, for example, "daneel" team that could help you.
It is important not to miss and not lose money.
Marketers will do their best and the best will survive.

Whatever you wrote in the OP was perfect analysis of what’s going on with the ICO’s in general. The year 2016 was the hottest one to provide big market for the ICO while the trend become ATH in the year 2017 with innovative and real ideas. Until the middle of 2017 everything started to decline in the ICO because the ratio of Legit:Scam was growing on the right hand side!

About the modern ICO, I would say upmcing ICO, they are the same thing as the previous one and they are making the market more spammy day by day. They are existing today as well because of free giveaways, bounties which people get through forum and airdrops all over the internet. People know that any scam ICO will run at least until hitting the exchanger so that ICO investors will attract post investors too. When they hit the exchanger people sell everything like crazy and make some fortune out of it.

However, the money generated for the ICO is way lot and ICO makers can layer the whole thing later on. This bullshit war will continue until the time we don’t see any “centralised regulations over them”. Techniques like KYC verification of these ICO itself would be great help, and it doesn’t matter if it makes the particular token a centralised one as long as it’s legal. !

Yeah, I believe it is good point, think in the same way. Everything should be balanced!

There is actually a need to regulate ICOs. Most of them just see the crypto market as a place to gather easy funds. However, it would be hard to regulate ICO's because trying to regulate ICOs is synonymous with regulating cryptocurrencies as a whole which is against the goal and purpose of cryptos.

well now it is time to prove that ICO is not all bad, only part of the person only but let me be safe now it may be in need of a good requirement for the ICO that run is really good and quality in the future, not just for a moment

yes you are very right about that, but i have another opinion I think ico is the best way to make our money even though there are a lot of icos / altcoin that come and die, it is an investment risk
the most useful solution is to get to know the ico we will join in, the team working behind the ico is very influential in the success of an icos, roadmap and whitepaper we also have to read to know the purpose of making icos so even though there are many icos we can still judge first ico that we will participate in order not to make us lose our money

I trust that cutting edge ICO controls are unquestionably not sufficiently extreme, there ought to be no less than a working module of an item before you can begin requesting any speculations. Numerous financial specialists including myself will put resources into them however there are just an excessive number of tricks, so we are extremely mindful. In the event that we can expel the tricks then the ICO biological community will endeavor.

I do not like the whole concept of ICO.
There may be some that actually have a concept that might work. But the large majority are just there to collect money.
In the end the small investors will pay the bill and lose their money.
One could say it's their own fault if they invest into something they do not understand.
But I do not think it should be made so easy to exploit the naivity of other people.

I wonder, if a company is really serious on getting their product known, why stick to the good 'ol ICO if there are many other ways to get the brand out? I understand that it's one of the easiest form of advertisement but why would you pursue something that is illegal in most countries, let alone offers your investors little to no security once the crowdsale started? Most of these ICOs popping out are just there to collect gullible people's money and that's it. No matter how legit or how good a project is, if it's done through ICO, then I wouldn't trust it one bit.

Freedom of decentralization endeavours ICOs. Even stupid people aka a few of so called investors are the reasons why the scammy ICOs get money in the first place.So unless and until people wish to act smart,such ICOs will continue to exist. Regulation would help,but a lot of investors are interested in crypto because of anonymity factor,what would be the use if that also gets violated? So this may neglect away a lot of potential investors.

I think not of all these new altcoins or ICOs are that bad since there are some projects that are really aiming for something that can help. There are also a lot of projects that are just aiming to scam people but if we are responsible for our investment actions, we can tell what is a scam from a real one. If you are a newbie or an amateur investor, you can just ask someone that has an experience in that field.

You cannot blame the people as you can barely separate what is legit from a scam as all of them will show the same features from a good website design to some start up events in which they show themselves to the public making them trust you even more. Investing in ICOs are really a risk except if you are putting your money to well known people and also legit projects. But there is still a shed of light for any upcoming ICOs as the cryptocurrency market is still growing many people might be interested in investing some of their money to ICO. But before they must dive into it they must know that researching and gathering data is one of the ways on how to avoid bad or fake ICOs.

In every field there will always be scammers and people rewin the party for everyone, and the iCO field is no different, up until now i still haven't heard of any ICO scams, but i am sure that they will start coming up in the near future as it is a way of getting a lot of moeny, that is hwy people should never trust blindly what they see and always check and keep an eye for anything wierd about them, like unrealistic goals or a team of random people, and most importantly the whitepaper.

I am pretty sure that there is no good relationship of regulatory bodies and the crytpo currency itself. Have you guys ever imagined how official around the world are craking the fire around about how they willing to regulate the crypto or want to ban it completely. Nonetheless we do realise that they will be regulated one day and then we might just see some good days coming for the ICO otherwise whole thing going down surely.

And yes I do think that it affects the economy of crypto adversely and if needed we might just need to get out of it ourselves. ;-)

Interesting point of view, didn't thing so much about complexity of realizing any regulations in this field and how it will affect currencies. Thx, mates. You all broaden my understanding of the process :P

Good ICO can defend itself - people will be able to differentiate between scammers and really good concept backed by the reliable team.
But I don't think that we need the total freedom for ICO - I am convinced that we need some agency, or bureau which will evaluate every new ICO.
This will be more beneficial for both good ICO and for investors. Some kind of basic evaluation would be the best possible way to tell whether the ICO is reliable or not.

There are hundreds of ICO's exist today that are scam! They are just collecting the money of the investors and sadly to say that it can be the reason why some of us are fear of investing in ICO. It will lead to totally loss of investors in ICO.  I think it is better to have regulation which can be the proof that the ICOs are valid and needs to support. It is more interesting when scammed ICOs will be kicked off.

Providing a good reason why the project should be trusted is one thing ICO's should consider to get the interest of many investors especially these days that people are getting more careful because of too many scam ICo's, developers need to exert effort in making their projects appeared interesting but also those investors must be careful in choosing ICO and make their most wiser decision.

It is indeed true, many ICOs are scammers now, but I don't think that there are a lot of cases when this is an issue. Good and proficient investor will distinguish scamming from trustworthy ICOs, while novice might not see anything suspicious about obvious scammers. Some sort of regulation might be helpful though, but again, how can you trust that?

Although I cannot imagine the situation when cryptocurrency is regulated, these ICO project must be controlled. Too many people have already lost millions of dollars as they invested into scam projects.

There are many people who think in the same way. Our problem is that it is hard to create methods to regelate ICOs but no currencies. Do you have any ideas, mates? What are the possible decisions?

The whole idea of ICOs and Cryptos is FREEDOM! And know you are asking about regulations? You are like those people who never can choose their side. If it will be regulated, what is the difference between ICO and IPO then? I know that there are many scammers but it did not prevent me from doing research on your KickCity and participating in their Airdrop. No regulations!

No I totally disagree, investment risk is personal.   If an ICO expects to be successful then a long term reputation is reasonable and various assurances by third party bodies also operating longer term would be the normal way to proceed with business.

Just because the technology is new its doesnt mean every aspect of fund raising and starting a new business is unprecedented and new in its layout.   They can just follow tried and tested ways to accumulate guarantees for investors.  

It is more expensive to introduce ideas like escrow or bring on partners to launch ideas and companies but that is the normal cost of operating business.     Thats not really regulation, its upto to the investors and those risking time and effort to see that a company proceeds correctly not unilaterally without proper accounting.   Not all risk is reliant on government for assurance, I see that as a backwards step for crypto capitalism.    Crypto is a decentralised system not leaning on public authoritys for security.


Government is biased to debt, its own prospects and politics.    It has become a negative for business, its not a good idea to go back to a failing system.   True capitalism is distributed by the market not a central body.

As I can see, 80-90% good ICOs are reaching at least their softcup.  I don`t see any problem here.

If only it were that simple. Mass scamming of the last year have made people reluctant to invest even in promising and seemingly legit ICO's. As a result, they don't get enough financing and thus have to return the funds to their investors. Within a week I saw a couple of projects failing to raise the required amount. And it looks like a vicious circle of sorts. ICO's fail to reach their soft cap while investors are further discouraged from investing in them. It is the same as it was with altcoins. At first, there was a lot of hype and plenty of money lost in scamcoins, then truly original and worthy coins had difficulty making it through.

Wow, that's frustrating. But still, isn't there any kind of clue you could use to determine scammers, like lack of project development and technology details, or unknown covert team? I know that qualified scammers can falsify everything, but is there really that much of them?

Yep, that's why we also need to create a safer way to promote ICO's by using the blockchain. Saw this kind of program from Acorn Collective. In this idea they would get every detail needed and if the proposing ICO meet the standards then Acorn would help them to crowdfund. I have no other idea to solve the problem and I just see Acorn to solve this all in the future.

Disclaimer: Im not promoting Acorn Collective, it just fits to this kind of topic.

In as much as many projects developers used ico to raise fund and many of them are scams, we should not rule out the beauty of some of them. I promote many of them and some of them have done well and many of them remain the best projects in 2017 . I have not come across the one that you have listed and I will try to study them before investing.

I see no mechanism which can stop fraud on the market ICO. Who will determine the reliability of the company? You propose it should do the officials? I don't believe them. The cause of ICO is associated with the fact that people do not see the possibility to provide their projects with funding. There are now investment funds but they do not satisfy the requirements of the time.

I highly agree with you.
It became like a mother cow where they will milk it until it is all dried out.
Then say goodbye to the project in which they all have worked hard for.

It is sad but that is reality. It is not really support that they have given but just money to double it after the ICO.
I hope they can at least wait until that project is secured then they can withdraw if they want.

People should take responsibility for their own actions IMO.
ICOs provide a unique way to raise funds, if you are only investing for monetary gain then its at your own risk like any other investment.

Unless there is compelling evidence to suggest it's a benefit to everyone I would never support restrictions.

There's no regulation in making an ICO's so that's the freedom on the developer to create on there own. But as a investor we have the right to choose where we want to invest. If only if all people who wants to invest in any ICO's will do there research about the project, read the whitepaper or the road map, know who are in the core team, and be responsible then we can minimize these developer who only wants to scam us. As i observe, most people will invest directly without knowledge about the project. So sad they are prone to be scam.

I think no one can control the creation of ICOs,anyone create their own tokens or coins if they want.But the investors have to be aware of the scam projects so these kind of projects will fade away soon if people know how to find the scam and legitimate ICOs.

So what are we all going to do? It’s not our fault that we invest in wrong ICOs that turns out to be scam at the end, and you can never tell which is scam, you can’t tell cause it’s hard to do that. You can’t label every new ICO a scam just because most of them turns out to be scam at the end.

Even these old ICOs with reputation today, they were once on the list of new and untrusted ICOs, but still made it to the list of the best. Maybe the best solution to this is just for us all to be investing little money in ICOs and not invest too much. That’s what I have to say and I will say it again– INVEST WHAT YOU CAN AFFORD TO LOSE !!!.

it's actually quite difficult to determine where Afera is And where a good legal ico. The fact is that if a person decides to make money by making a fraudulent project and that his company collects money from investors, he will do very precise work and qualitatively enough so that no one can determine their intentions. I, in turn, determine only intuitively, although I certainly study all the information about the company's ico.

ICOs are securities and should be registered as such or properly filed as exempt. Unregistered ICOs are currently being used to skirt securities laws, and anyone doing that should be viewed with the maximum amount of suspicion. It may be unfair to label all ICOs scammers on account of a few, but it certainly is not unfair to regard anyone issuing an unregistered ICO as someone attempting to avert regulation, and therefore suspect them of not acting honestly. There is essentially no difference between an ICO offering and a securities offering, except the ICO doesn't grant ownership rights to the business raising the funds, and so ICOs (in my view) are generally bought into by people who aren't sophisticated enough not to be taken advantage of.

I believe regulators should be aware of some things considering the whole society interests, but ICOs in general could be subject to more self-regulation than government regulation.

It cant really be avoided that scammers would really take this opportunity on making money which would generally affect those who do have potential or do have already some working products but well its not really a major effect since company can able to represent regarding on their status which investors would really get some assurance that it is a legit and do have a potential.

No, a big marketing campaign means nothing, that only means the people behind the project have more money to spare in marketing, just look at bitcoin, bitcoin did not had an ico and it did not had marketing campaigns and still is the most successful coin ever to be created, so as you can see a big budget for marketing is not a must, many projects have started without too much publicity and have become good projects over the years.

The securities industry has a self-regulatory body; FINRA is an industry group that regulates broker-dealers, but also does so under the supervision of the SEC. Perhaps this would be a better solution than outright government supervision, but I'm firmly of the belief that the cryptocurrency industry hasn't the will nor the expertise to regulate itself. It's propagated by far too many bad actors thriving in the lack of regulation. And as long as ICOs are securities, which they are, they are under the jurisdiction of the SEC already.

Want airdrops? Here I have one with a very credible and easy to make payment potential. They have to enter through the link that leaves them. Arcorn colletive has an airdrop of OKA tokens¸ 5 in total with a value of 7 USD, they have to have a wallet ERC-20 nothing of Exchanges, myetherwaller is one. Now when they enter they fill the entire form and they have to wait until June to make the payment. When you receive your confirmation email there will also be your referral code, this is just registration and waiting for your tokens, you do not lose anything for doing that quickie plus they have a lot of followers and in the previous airdrop they did it was a success, I do not see why that this is scam have 100K on twitter then.

link https://airdropalert.com/join/Acorn/538d0c3e-b9b8-31fc-b2ec-3944ca4b35be

have nice day!!!  8) 8) 8) 8) 8) 8) ;D ;D ;D ;D

Acorn is not a scam from my own little research on them but we have several of those icos that are scam. Some guys has just been arrested in my country because of this and hope those bad eggs among icos be face out in no time. I have lose money through icos investments and I have makes up my mind to only promote those projects that I have researched on.

I think you can easily buy a used and damaged car and you lose your money, this will always be a factor of demand and then price across the whole market, as with a car you can do due diligence in advance and reduce the chances of becoming a loser because they make a bad investment.
This is the way every market operates, it's the same for many things and you can find a lot of studies about it, the common one is looking at the used car market and what's known as 'lemon'.

I think it would be better if ICO will undergo the rules because in fact there are a large number of ICOs who are present to just scam and take people money without their knowledge.

Yes, you're right. many people are not responsible for profit by being a scammer. this has an impact on other ICOs and deprives investor confidence in ICO

They die because their developers failed to promote their own coins on different social media and because of that, their coins are failing to grow even more because of the bad production of platform.

Because most people do not know what it is. That an ICO is just a kind of a shares offer from a startup, but without all the controls that a usual share offer has.

In the near future, states will begin to massively regulate the ICO process in order to reduce the number of frauds among such campaigns. Very strict regulation of ICO projects is planned in Russia, where the proceeds from the sale of tokens will be credited to a bank account and the targeted use of this money will be controlled. Fraud in this case will be almost impossible.
If the process of regulation ICO will be extended to other states, then the popularity of ICO will greatly increase.

Since nowadays a lot of ICO are coming in the market so government must have a strict implementation with this and would put a regulation and announced it to the public if they allowed this kind of ICO or not so that people will become aware of it and would not waste their hard earned money.