Bitcoin Forum

Just sharing.

In 2018 there was an ICOs hype of enormous proportions. I sat down with a friend of mine who is well invested in BTC to select a number of ICOs to invest in. We went to far extent to short-list companies we will invest in. The idea was: we wanted to know how to buy into an ICO after all the pre-launch marketing hypes and discounts were happening, wee wanted to both: know how to and go though the process of investing, but at the same time he wanted to be sure he is not throwing money away, and that the companies he will invest in are solid.

As we were about to click Buy, I told him hang on. Let's assume we bought into a good company; this means that in 3 months time the company will still be here right? And after those 3 months, the company would still be here, and again even after 1 year, right? My friend agreed and this was an important validation I was after for the process. So if we don't buy in now, i said, we only miss the opportunity of a large % in capital, but if it is a big company indeed, then capital will always increase. So let's just pretend that we bought now and let's check in in 3 months and see how the company is doing. If it tanked, then we would have saved ourselves. If it did not tank then we would have missed out on some (or a lot) of capital gain, but we can still buy in and we will recover the % just it will take more time. He is a very cautious person and he agreed. We never checked after 3 months as the news already came out, but we were just checking recently and found that:

1. Each and every one had lost huge %
2. Majority are practically dead, only 2 remain. One is EOS, which was promising and wasn't a big Risk for tanking, but the other that survied (in numbers) was shortlisted but was not going to be considered: a chocker if you want: ChainLink

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/iconomi/ (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/iconomi/)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/komodo/ (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/komodo/)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/triggers/ (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/triggers/)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/loopring/ (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/loopring/)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ark/ (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ark/)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/vertcoin/ (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/vertcoin/)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/chainlink/ (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/chainlink/)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/pivx/ (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/pivx/)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/eos/ (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/eos/)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/iota/ (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/iota/)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/sonm/ (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/sonm/)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/lisk/ (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/lisk/)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum-blue/ (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum-blue/)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/quantstamp/ (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/quantstamp/)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/cardano/ (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/cardano/)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/electroneum/ (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/electroneum/)

In the above list:
1. Electroneum was being hyped as religion on Youtube
2. Cardano was being discussed that in March or sometime they will launch staking or what have you
3. Iota was making deals with Aliens from other galaxies
4. Iconomi was like the next evolution in online trading
5. I did end up investing separately in a coin called ParkGene (to the counter advice of my friends who told me the idea was not original). That one tanked spectacularly! I did not Totally save myself after all

This is the big reality that pervades the cryptocurrency market since I started supporting many projects way back in 2017...almost no one can show real value and without exemption they immensely lost value in terms of price over time. This is actually the sad state of the altcoins universe as most of the projects actually do not have real market and if they do they can not compete well -- not even the word and emphasis on the blockchain can save them from withering under the light of the sun. Therefore, investing here is akin to throwing money to the turbulent sea and hoping that something will come out of it.

It was a good experience in my opinion and can be used as a reference in buying coins. The thing that I think is good, you try to use the concept of trial and error. When buying only as a trial to test the company that you will invest in three months, it is very appropriate.

Thats the risk associated with cryptocurrency investments and we should know it before we ventured into the crypto-space. I was experienced that feeling last 2018 my crypto holdings was reduce almost a half of its value thats why i have no choice if i continue to hold it it will dip more further, which my instinct was correct Im gladly i was able to sell it at those time and slowly recovering my losses until these days. Im moving on and further saving myself out of stress. 

Interesting logic. You saved yourself by not investing in the cryptocurrency of your choice at one time. However, others during this time became millionaires because they did the opposite. Well, success or failure depends on the choice of the investment object and the time when you do it. This is practically the basis of any such business.

It looks like majority of coins that you have mentioned in your list were my portfolios in the past but i have sold them all when they have reached the peak price. And this is the reality how the speculation market is going on.
Pump and dump scheme just a usual scheme that some may think it's a scam pyramid and there are some people too that think if that was a good thing.
Basically, the early adopters will always become a winner after all and this is the point investing in the altcoin. At least to create comparison with ROI since the ico price will be very interesting thing to see.

You should know that if you invest in some coins, you will also get the risk. If you can accept whatever the risk will happen in the future, then you can continue to hold. Many of us don't realize that the risk always followed behind the coins and if somehow, we are getting lost, we will be regret without thinking that is a part of losing because we invest in the coin.

But I have some coins in your list, and like many others, I want to see those coins can increase together in the future so it will give me a chance to make a lot of money. I hope that soon, all of the coins that we have can bring the highest price for us so we can recover our losses in the past.

If every investor did what you did - just sat down and analyzed ICO's as if they were traditional companies, then there would be no ICO bubble at all. The bubble happened because people fooled themselves by thinking that tokens and altcoins is some brand new asset class that will behave radically different from stocks. No one bothered to study the technology, any concerns from cryptographers were dismissed as FUD, Bitcoin was mocked as "outdated", and all this was done by retail investors with little experience in both trading and applied cryptography.

We have learned an expensive lessons and we really need to accept the reality and move forward. Only thing is we should not repeat our mistakes. Instead of investing during the ICO time, we can get it for our portfolio once project team show good progress on their promised project.

Unfortunately, this is reality, buddy. I think that over the past 2 years the number of good projects has greatly decreased, and successful projects have almost disappeared. I still believe that a revolution in the ICO will happen and we will again see many successful projects.

That's smart of you to do that. Most of the time, newbies just don't know what they are doing and invest in a project just because of a promise profit. Even at this current year, ICO is still nothing and you've made the right choice not to invest in them.

Instead of going to ICO, why not invest in a reputable project already? Like Monero and Dash.

This is a useful thread, thanks for starting it. We all know that a lot of new coins are heavily hyped, and that they also often tank in price - more so since the crash at the start of 2018.
But it is instructive and informative to have a specific example from a specific point in time. I think it will benefit the community a lot to gain this sort of perspective from a specific example of someone who wass thinking of buying in.

This is a good outcome of a great research, thats why the most projects of your list were successful. This proves one more time, that to take part in profitable projects, you need to invest a lot of time in researching projects.

Although it's a good image of the ICO "season", I'll be the devil's advocate and tell that the results you are posting are not fair.
Some 16 of the last 20 months were from bad to worse for Bitcoin and even worse for altcoins and tokens. Of course that everything crumbled to dust although normally, since you didn't invest 100% blindly, the outcome should have been much better.
The biggest problem was the moment of the investment - not a good one by far - not (only) the underperforming ICOs.

Some of the project are ok but were actually overhyped. Ofcourse I remember electroneum and how they claimed making deals with top personalities and traditional companies. Whether this claims are true or not, I don't know. Besides, the project and others are currently not doing well due to the situation in altcoin market.

 Hope altcoin developers have learned their lessons. They had access to lots of money but paid too much salaries and regularly attended conferences. Wonder if some even considered locking up the easy money for future development and research . They probably never thought the bearish market would last this long. Most were too focused on price instead of building things that are hard to manipulated, controlled or attacked through centralized platforms or other means.

Before building something in this space, first of all considered everything that could possibly go wrong then build solid defenses against them. Once your project is developed and you discover other ways it could be attacked, make sure you patch it up and create more defenses. Possible point of failures are being discovered & discussed in Crypto world but no one seems care.


There are lots of ways to incentivize/ reward volunteers besides paying huge salaries. Going to conferences is quite expensive. Very cheap and quality alternatives should be used more today. Incentives don't necessarily need to be monetary. Quality volunteers could be funded through ad campaigns like Sig campaigns, sponsorship by companies etc...

Those were just the coins I was interested in. But I couldn't save myself as I went to buy some other coin which I believed was sure to succeed. Collected all my funds and spent on it. But it went negative just after I bought it. Similar is my case for many coins. I again reinvested them on several coins. Most of them still negative but bitcoin made some profit for me. Now I've again chose a well know coin (top 10 in CMC) and spent all my holdings to buy it. I hope, I'll have good news to share after few months.

Investment in the field of crypto is a gamble no matter what you do in the end you may win or lose, i had lost a lot in the investment of ICOs and now turn to invest in IEO,  hope recover my loss.

You still massively saved yourself from complete loss and depletion of your precious btc. The 2017 ico hype period was such that even i was lured ro invest in dozens of icos from 0.01 to 0.1 btc each but in the end i have mostly sold in 90% loss or more and in fact my precious bitcoins, lesson learnt the hard way, i think it is better to stay in and accumulate more and more btc and eth only for now and if some other coin grows huge like them in couple of years only then we can consider that as well.

But crypto gives a simple opportunity to get an initial capital for starting a new project. This help to many creative people realizes their ideas very fast. Some of such ideas are very useful and the necessary to society.

Thank OP, it was a good idea to think of having such with the forum. Well, was also a victim to so many scam coins. For instance, I bought Hawala at its ATH, but today, where is it. The same Electroneum you mentioned, I also bought. Well, I sold it sometimes ago, but I was at loss. This happened to lots of other coins that I cannot keep mentioning, even the ones that are not popular. Well, I see it be one of those things, one of the lessons we need to learn.
Thanks once again for the reminder.

even though we have hard times on this kind of business don't just easily give up. Wherein think positive and lesson learned.  Because we can't turn it back to fix our mistakes so we need to accept the fact and to build new strategy instead to avoid such issues again. Actually making search is always the best way to solve our problems and OP is brilliant indeed.

This reminds me of how i saw IOTA then and met an old man at the bank and after one or two conversations he planely told me to cash out sicnce any coin that rises always falls to regroup, tjis has been working for me till now

u still lucky my friend , i got -85% in my blockfolio on dec 2018.
that a worse thing i do on my life.
i mean,buying random ICO by at the beginning of year ,and then no backup fund by USDT and buy some cheap token or shit token.
even the project i joined succesfully , the project become a next shit token.
i am totaly depressed after christmast.
the one thing make still stand is what happening recently is happened to almost people i knew.

The way the space is now, most of the pre-2018 ICOs would die, some selected few will make it, no doubt about it, so do not over commit to any project because as we can see now, it is very difficult to know which of them would survive, because the survival rate would likely be 1:10. The reason that would accelerate this is lack of funds most of them have high burn rate and have no other source of revenue than to start dumping their developers funds on the market the way some of them are currently doing which will get people to lose trust in the project

Sometimes I sit back and ask myself that why are new projects being launched into the crypto market every now and then but almost all of them come and die off. So are they just coming to show off and go back to sleep?. They all come on board with big big promises  and convincing white papers but in the end, there is nothing to write home about.

Behind all of this projects greedy people, they want attract more attention to their projects and sell all their coins, after this gone and create new project.

Actually the ICOs on your list was already over-hyped back in 2017, most bought in, thinking the project development would be quick. Let me remind you that as of now, there is still no mainstream adoption of any coin. Everything is still speculative. The attention span of investors are very short sighted, and that caused every coin to tank very hard. Anyway, that's what markets do.

You have a very interesting history in the market. the most important thing is that you still stay alive and work here. I am sure that everyone who holds on and in spite of some failures - will be very rich in the future

It should be like that, always be careful and consider the worst. The analysis must be carried out to the maximum. If you are only interested because of hype, market hysteria that is happening, then the investor will only end up as a donor. Stick to the principle, nothing is really safe and promising, only invest what you can afford to lose.

Agree, basically investing in the cryptocurrency market is like speculating. Using money that we can afford to lose is the best choice so that we don't panic when our investment goes down in value and in my opinion, we should always prepare an exit strategy when our investment doesn't go as we expect

You saved yourself from huge loss because your intentions were to invest for long term, which would had cost you big time although if you had the intention of short term profit then you missed on, an opportunity to get some quick profit. On a general note, i don't encourage investing in shitcoins just for the hype but if you have my type of mindset then taking advantage of certain hype period to get enough fund by investing in some projects (short term), take your profits and accumulate more bitcoin and some specific altcoins isn't that bad especially if you're smart enough to know when to sell.

The ICO and now IEO era all came with their sweet and bitter experience. Investing in altcoins in my opinion should always be for short term unless they're very special altcoins that can stand the test of time. We'll always have new and improved altcoins therefore knowing when to join the train and when to leave is very vital. Most of those coins you highlighted gave decent ROI in short term so from a traders or short term investor's point of view, they weren't that bad.

It is amazing how many people are in the same boat! I am sorry for those who made some losses. I am summarizing some your points and adding my own feedback.

#1: Never invest more than you can afford to lose
I think we all agree on this one.

Early investors reap the benefits
This may be true for many ICOs but this is not a general rule. For example, the ParkGene which I ended up investing in tanked from day 1.

Why do projects tank quickly
I think @art3dsm gave the best answerto the first half of the question: that this is more science fiction writing and we are gullible.
The second part raised by @Christinebeauty essentially regarding the difference between ICO and IPO: most often in ICO the only asset is the white paper, whereas in IPO the company is already established and only seeking additional funding. So investing in the stock market is less risky for this reason.

Money does not disappear
Money does not vanish, it only exchanges hands. The only virtual money is the market cap: number of shares x present price of share: this is ridiculous and plain stupid as it does not take into consideration market depth.

All the money went into stakeholders and became salaries: this is a lot of money. ParkGene took $25 million (or so) in the 1-2 months ICO period, then it tanked miserably. Where did the money go? $25 Mil is enough to operate the company successfully, so if the token tanked, no problem: it can still pay dividend, and therefore will re-appreciate over time. It is money theft plain and simple. lawyers should dig in on this. It'd rather lawyers sue the thieves and them get the money rather than the thieves keep it. I'm sure there should be many supports in contract law and in equity for this to happen.

The future of ICOs
There is no doubt that everything will eventually go block chain. Just when this happens is a matter of time, but not anything near future. But this is the extent it will go to: only a change of technology from registry to block chain. The fundamentals being traded will remain the same for a long time. The Artificial Intelligence bots will kick in. They will identify who is trading and will learn their trading method and will bankrupt them. This cannot happen as long as there is some anonymity, but the first point of exposure remains the actual exchanges themselves shorting their users.

Good old BTC
In my mind the following risks remain clear and present:
1. There is nothing preventing miners from sitting at one table and decide that tomorrow we are all going to mine another coin. Of course this is akin to shooting themselves in the foot but say maybe a major outlaw event happens using BTC and regulators decide to criminalize anyone who deals with it. It can happen with fiat but the regulators would be happier if they have an excuse.

2. Although hash power is computationally very strong, it remains more hash power over the same algorithm. There have been many Urgent patches to the BTC wallet (at least there are patches which is good), but what prevents a whiz from creating tomorrow a virus that locks people's wallets, steals from them etc. We will get to a point where to fork or not to fork and split again.

3. The claim that there are no atoms in the universe to crack the code is based on traditional computing. Quantum computing is promising to make this ancient history. What will happen then?
 
I think crypto assets have a lot to prove, adoption to become more main stream, and education at all levels to become more accessible. BTC code is beyond the reach of many. You need a special Math library to avoid ETH contracts from failing math 101. This space is still in inception, give it 10 more years.

a good topic.
i just want to add that in my opinion this is the biggest problem in this market. there is no company! unlike in real world where people actually start a real company with long term plans and a product or service, here in ICO scam world what we call "company" is just a group of people (sometimes even one person) who is copying some code, changing some variables and creates a 100% useless token and sells that to the gullible public!
there is no goal.
there is no product.
there is no service.
there is no revenue.
there is no future.
that is why they all fail after a while. the only reason why they remained relevant for a short time was the fact that people were hyped up and wanted to gamble with their money so they invested in ICOs.

But still, you and your friends still made good decisions
if only you guys go for that investment you might lose a big amount.
Thankfully you post this and let everyone know that riding on hype is
not a good thing to do. we need to make up our mind when it comes to
investing because we might not get another chance again and
the money we lost might be our last money to spend on Altcoins.