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What would happen if people didn't follow greed and projects didn't promise crazy gains? If this was not main theme of ICO craze, but instead - true and honest support?

If you support someone for example through Patreon - you give him money and you don't really think much what will happen with this money - it's lost for you anyway and you feel good for supporting someone you like.

If all ICOs went that route, sure, we wouldn't see such crazy gains but we wouldn't also see such falls. People supporting projects that would fail would probably don't scream "scam scam!" all the time.

If you give a dollar on a street to someone begging, you usually don't follow him later and check what he bought in a store - liquor or food. Yeah, you are dissapointed probably if you see him drunk next day but you simply don't give him more money.

If ICOs was organized more like that, I think it would be much more healthy environment.

The problem with that mindset is it'd require an imaginary world, where investors wouldn't expect a return of any sort. It'd be like saying stock ICOs would work better if folks considered it a donation to the company, not expecting any profit (or even their investment) back. That's nonsensical.

We can't equate giving money to a homeless person to investing either. It's not like ICOs are charitable endeavors. ICOs work on greed, pure and simple.

And the reason they are failing (besides the whole SEC issue) is that so many projects are scams or are simply bad projects. It also doesn't help much that alts are generally in a bear market.

So you are suggesting to make millions from million people for free of cost than investing money to find investors?

It will be still scam if that projects didn't go in the way as promised,better don't listen to them  so no one will lose money and no more scam projects.

There are many crowdfunding websites on internet. You can check them out for yourself. None of them raise good amount of money for a project or for an innovative idea. People really don't spend money on something if they didn't get much return. Health/Disease treatment related gigs will raise good amount of money. This is the only exception.

I have never come across any ico that promise any crazy gains openly to investors, I don't know where you get that notion from, this grazy ideas was born from the experience of 2017,

ico's where successful because people invested in them willingly without being on any pressure, I bet most project owners back then where not expecting to see such financial support, some couldn't handle it and got greedy, others try to make meaning out of their's,  

Majority of projects turned out to be unsuccessful because there are no genuineness behind them, the teams saw unexpected money that they have no clue what to do with it, well except to squander  ;D

The truth is everybody wants to give and get something in return, nobody will be give away money for what they won't get any back, if people are fed up with ico's because of lack of grazy gains - in your words - what makes you think they will be interested in given away money without caring what they do with it, you are still enriching the project owners nevertheless.

Nothing is preventing people tying to do their crowdfunding through Patreon instead of ico, but i can't see it working on this scene. What's wrong with the ico model that's actually giving people back something? Or at least having a change to get something back.

The picture painted to the general public is that the industry is an investment platform so the charity or donation suggestion won't had succeeded as it did with the investment mindset. It was the motivation of recieving huge future return that drove Investors to patronize ICOs although none of this ICOs promise huge returns except obvious scams ICOs still Investors had the believe they could benefit from the future price gain as the market was looking very promising back then.

Same fate can be said about IEO, immediately the first batches of IEO recorded success immediately others jump on the trend hoping to benefit. In this space everything is connected, it's like a chain reaction. Without the ICO success, 2017 won't had been a great year for the altcoins. If your suggestion  was the strategy employed, for the first few projects it would had worked perfectly but immediately others see they can profit from the initiative, it would had been hijacked with the mindset of benefiting from future gains just as the ICOs were viewed.

Here you got the point. Unfortunately most people are looking for what ROI they may get rather than supporting some innovative ideas to be turning as big project to ease human efforts nor empowering humans to next levels. It is selfish world, people may contribute only on what returns they get in quick time and definitely not based on what project they are going to invest. This is the reasons fake devs promising big returns to accomplish their target money.

I may not do that frequently or month once or if with some reasonably big money means yearly once. This way good projects may not get enough funds to work with. They must need to talk about returns for investments to achieve some decent funds which may be sufficient for their project building.

That route is literally about donations. The real catch is how often and how big that every common man will be ready to donate.

They wouldn't have to get completely nothing in return. They could get lots of things for free, like special account on their platform, some "free" preloaded credits to use their services or something like that. They would get something, just not promise of crazy gains. I can bet most "investors" were thinking they are investing in next bitcoin. They read that it went up from 1 cent to 20 000 USD and they calculated that if they invest 500 usd or 1000 or 5000usd, they will get millions in same way. Even if it was not officially mentioned on most ICO pages, I'm pretty sure most ICO and altcoin investors considered such scenario as realistic, since bitcoin already paved such way. Which was of course naive.

Anyway - If they were donating to a company and company could give them back something in return (maybe exclusive materials same like on on different crowdfunding platforms), they would actually donate less and there would be less "scam" accusations, less dissapointment and maybe truly valuable projects wouldn't have such problems to gather *any* money as they have now.

Even if it was not openly mentioned, it was surely a background of 2017/2018 - crazy bitcoin gains, crazy altcoin gains. You want  to tell me it was not a factor when people invested?
no pressure? what about FOMO? you get one time life chance to get rich - is that not a pressure? From whole society, sometimes even family that expects you to succeed no matter what? That's enormous pressure right there, and you get a chance to be rich by investing in next bitcoin early. No pressure?? Huge pressure.

Yes, not North Korea type of pressure with gun pointed at your hand and someone telling you to invest, but also very very strong pressure.


Probably there has to be some kind of reward promised, but not as high as it was. Even if it was not promised directly, I'm pretty sure 90%+ of investors hoped to get crazy rich.

I personally think that it would have never garnered as much attention as it did, especially during 2017 when all of the projects, good or bad, were consistently being hyped up and as a result pumped to heights that were extremely unsustainable.

If the model was shifted from a way to gain easy money to simply crowdfunding, then people won't see the point of it. It will just be another kickstarter, or gofundme even. People will view their money going towards actually supporting the project, which is good, but they'll be a lot more stingy and thus, less demand for ICOs.

It's a good hypothetical to think about, and I think it's the primary reason why ICOs have died down so much these days.

Not sure that's a good idea. You should look at it from the perspective of the investors. Who invests (crowdfunds) in something and doesn't expect a return? I don't know of others but I wouldn't. Crowdfunding in Patreon is more of a donation not investment. And again, what would stop startups from mismanaging the funds/donations received? Also, There's no "guarantee" of the project becoming successful as so much comesinto play from the funding and development phase down to production/deployment to the public.

PS : I'm opened to more people sharing their opinions on this.

Those who launch ICOs are most times greedy. Some of them will tell you that they will not stop the ICO until hardcap is reached. That is one of the  norm that killed a lot of them. They also set very high targets for their softcap, which sometimes is unrealistic. Till date ICOs are seen as scam.

It's last 18 months that has killed ICO projects and got the label as scam due to greediness of some developers but some really good projects are drowned by the investors themselves by dumping the tokens as soon as they receive it. We need to set some sort of protocols for ICOs or have a rules in this forum for advertising ICO projects by making them go through verification project to avoid scams but that's not practical as well as it will push us towards the centralization. There were ICO projects who achieved their softcaps in hours and completely sold out during the public sale but they ended up with a value just about zero due to poor choice of exchanges. Not all the ICOs are scam but there are various factors which leads to the failure of ICO.

This idea may never come back on hardcap, The loss was much from the ICOs and people had not really recovered, average of 95% from last 2017 ICOs is a big loss. We can rarely see project with product with use case, everyone is disappointed and bitcoin maximalist looks more intelligent, so more money goes to bitcoin now. The only encouragement is the altcoin's young days, we believe altcoin will recover before next cycle and will be healthier.

Even crowdfunding having its problem facing so many scam project I think that crowdfunding like those happened in another website like indiegogo or such is no better than ICO. There's already a better alternative called IEO that's a lot more legit basically using crowdfuding model is such a waste.
A project will succes if it's a good project it's not about the method of gathering funds even some project that got so much money when gathering funds could become a garbage project anyway and I've seen some crowdfunding that turns out as a garbage aswell.

OP, your thinking is why they created DAOs pretty much
what if people could just directly contribute somehow financially to things they support?
Smart contracts can make this possible, but they need to be secure ;)

I do somewhat agree with your post and the point you made, i will add and say that we perhaps lacked a central platform where all the projects would be first scrutinized, screened and filtered in all the aspects and only the projects that pass the minimum criteria would be allowed to raise funds, this way investors could be guarded against scams and poor quality projects and investor confidence would have also boosted.

That's it, this industry is chaotic and dynamic; it has no standards or regulation so many have ther own way to organize their things. ICOs are organized, but not united nor the people who invest on it. But I don't think that crowdfunding would be always successful to fund the project. Many projects are short lived so it will be ironic to ask for free money for something that will just pass through us. The main problem of ICOs is that there are too many of them, very few are legit and much less are unique. They're like copycats of what's already here in the market that's why not all investors are still interested with ICOs.

If there was a limit on how much people could give out just like on patreon it could be healthier but in a investors' view you can't avoid the mindset of making profit since that's the main reason most of us invest in the first place.Your idea made me remind of the term proof of burning there's an altcoin that makes use of it the way they distribute their coins is slightly similar to this but I haven't checked their current situation.

It's not about the greed of investors, but this is a speculation zone when everything is about profit. If you are saying like that and that's not correct at all. I ask you how you can feel if you give thousand dollars worth of money to the someone who you didn't know about and then that person is running away with your money? You like that person doesn't mean you are having all of the knowledge about that person.

It has no difference to give our money as a charity. It's not a problem when I can give that person a few pennies from my pocket, but that doesn't make sense to provide a few dollars as a charity.

You can't apply the crowdfunding mechanism in this case. If you are thinking that's better and why don't you just try to use gofundme or something else?

In this case, you are putting everyone on a significant risk by giving their money without getting any return. You should not expect to get a hundred or even a million dollars from there.

That's true , if they somehow approach that idea they would have had more success. My personal thinking is that in order to have success you need to invest money to make money so ICO's should learn to come with at least 50% of the the starting capital and maybe after they could attract further funds and investors.

It might actually work - people would need a completely different mindset towards ICOs and they can't just expect crazy profits and no issues with the project - they'd need to expect delays and expect long waits for them to get their money back.

It's nice to speculate what could happen with that, but unfortunately the ICOs had to advertise like instant profit opportunities and won't really get sales without advertising these profits.

There is no crowd of investors to support something like this one, if someone will not gain a profit then they will not bother themselves to be part of it.

That is why it cannot be converted to crowdfunding. Investment is a good option for the project starters to gain some fund from investors as they can promise a return of investors so the investors will trust their money to the project owner.

The problem is, most investors are investing their money on a project that would promise them income. They are not after the product, solution, service or the purpose of the project. It is all about money, that is why investors leave a project easily of they see no potential on it.

More than half of the ones which ended up successful would have all failed to even gain a single trust from someone like that. They need to convince in much more ways than what they actually did during their ICO. Most ICO investors would only look for a factor or two before they decide to invest. Most of the time, a CEO or a president that has experience with the likes of Google or Microsoft is enough reason for them to invest. In a crowdfunding, the game is different. For sure, only the best will gain the money.

Basically there are already many investors who do not believe in the way to raise funds, be it ICO or crowdfunding.
What do you want to do, greedy dev will always be there. One thing that is most trusted by investors today is PROFIT. They searched it all in any way. In IEO, it is the same. Most developers cannot guarantee their investors' profits, so I can say no matter what, if there is no definite profit, investors will think a thousand times to put money on you.

Agree, investing in new projects is in my opinion like speculation. All investors ultimately only want profit or value growth in their portfolios so sometimes investors don't need to look deeply about a project. A good team developer will always communicate with investors to provide development projects or products and this will maintain the confidence of investors who in the end will attract new investors

Seriously. If the ico page would promised crazy gains or gains of any sort it would just be a scam. This is all highly speculative investing. Only thing the project can promise on gains is the interest rate, but the interest rate is paid with the coins that might not have value at all.
On icos, we are just mostly funding protocols, companies or just services. There is no guarantee on anything and the sad thing is that most of them are either a scam or a failed attempt. If investing was easy and bitcoin-like profit was guaranteed everyone would do it. It doesn't mean it would have to stop all together.

Yes, we speak according to reality. In this unfavorable situation many people are careful about putting their money in. It's a lie if they are not looking for profit. Studying a project in depth with more time is sure to look for profit. You are right, this is like gambling or trading itself where we can only speculate alone without any clear certainty from the fundraising actors.

Donations like in charity just budget what ever they have to provide needy and sometimes unable to give what they really plan due to short of budget. If it will be like a donation, how can a project plan and execute their project? They need  a budget to be able to start their project and that's why investors are needed. They will need a detailed timeline how they propose the project outcomes. It will be more bothersome to investors since we can't react anytime since we just give and the favor is always in the developer as if they are capable to just do anything or do nothing at all.

Investments is not something you donate without worryig much in return. You have to monitor, do research about the project as much as possible 'cause the money you invest in it isn't as much as something you donate to someone begging. Yes, it would be healthy in a sense that there aren't much complaint about not having money in return, and fraud but the reason you invest in a certain project 'cause you wanna gain more than you invest. Besides, it would be a bad idea for investor not to complain 'cause it would turn out to be a thing that would drag them down financially.

that can no longer be called "ICO" because by definition it is called a donation. if you like any project then you can donate to the developers of that project to support them. but ICO is "coin" offering and you receive something in return. it is not even supposed to be used for fund raising, it should instead be used for offering actual coins in early stages to people who want to get in early on. the problem is not solvable either because the problem is with the projects being shitty and their tokens being useless and that won't change by changing how the developer gets his money.

It doesn't have to be pure donation, there could be promise of a reward like high rank account created on their platform or some other reward like preloaded credits to spent on their platform. Enough to keep it interesting but not enough to throw money in hope of getting huge returns.

This will really help eliminate greed and people will begin to support projects they're genuinely interested in. It'll also reduce the number of people investing in projects they are not knowledgeable in.

However, I do not think it is a good idea to invest and not "follow" the developers. People are more motivated to work and be honest when they know they are being watched.

The problem in ICO is not that way, investors will continue to come and invest in many ICO if and only if scammers are not in the community.
ICO died because of may projects that turned out to be a scam and run with the money of investors!
We are in cryptocurrency "CURRENCY" and if we will be here for just helping or what then we are not true on what we want.
We are here to gain and get more profit as long as we can and scammers ruin all of it.

It can help like having a premium account in a business, however there will still be a need for min or max amount to identify the rewards or credit an investor can received. And the project if still be called ICO should already have funds to start their project so they will still be able to attract investors to do it in a way that investors will gain credits and they get investors.

I do not believe that the problem of ICOs is in the lack of trust from investors. For sure, such a fundraising method would attract more investors, but the biggest issue is postponed releases and bad exchange listings.

the question is who would  be the one  responsible for this to happen?we knew aside from greediness of investors as you said,is the greed of the team that initiate each project?lets accept the fact that this is all about money and no one has the HONESTY to make everything in good as it
stop looking for the good side because ICO and every related in this are scammers and nothing will change even if this will be crowdfunding or what ever you call this

Yes it was a factor but you should know that this does not just apply to investment in crypto only, anything that carries a lot of attention and hype normally attract people, lots of people where attracted to investing because of what they saw, but no project promise to anyone any grazy gains after investing, people just assume about it.

FOMO is base on choice, if you let it be a pressure to you is entirely up to you, it is nothing similar to the other kind of pressure where you are not left with any choice, so tell me where is the pressure there? just human greed to make more profit can't exactly be regarded as pressure, Nobody will ever push you to invest what you can't afford, people taking high risk investment is their personal choice, no pressure from the project owners or from the crypto community whatsoever.

I don't agree. The biggest issues are certainly not postponed releases or bad exchange listings. Those two are not even within the ICO period anymore. The biggest issues when it comes to ICO are that most of them are scams, the others are copies only of existing projects, the others are not within quality level. And more than this, most of them failed or are gone after the ICO ends, some after the coins are listed to exchanges. There are no more active developers nor product improvements or releases.

Without greed and big gains we will lose a lot of people from the community. We certainly have the choice to invest in thinking as you say but the ambition of big profits is more dominant than other feelings. Actually, if everyone is forced into such system, we will lose a lot of people, but we will have a stronger crypto environment. And we are not the only ones who need to struggle in this regard, so developers should be forced to do something about it too.

Sure, but currency can be used for different things. You can use currency for donations and for investing. Also I think people would be dissapointed even if project their invested in didn't turn out to be scam but simply failed. Even though when we discuss it, it seems more fair, for a person who lost money, it probably doesn't matter much if he lost it because he was tricked or because he invested in totally failed idea (or badly executed one)

Not a good idea though. Leavin' the money you set to invest and not even worrying if there's a guarantee of return. And there will be no one supposed to be responsible when it came differently than expected because the investor are okay with that. It is more like sending tons of donations. Healthy surroundings of investors but the projects itself are more like a charity rather than so-called project. Even if it lessens the complaints it will just serve as a turn point for scam projects to lure around, and do their thing because the benefit is big.

in fact it is a very big risk because if the team fails to manage the funds obtained from the crowdfunding, it will actually have fatal consequences and even get to the legal channels.

Everything happens for a reason and it is already on the past which means we can't change it anymore. Greed and lack of knowledge can be considered as one of the main reason why many experience scams or frauds. The only thing we can do about it right now is hope that ICOs would end up being more organized, fair and realistic when it comes to their promised gains. As a bounty hunter also, it is our responsibility to make sure we analyze very carefully the project we are going to join in.

This makes much sense with a very cool real life scenario. Obviously if ICOs were organised like the form of crowdfunding you mentioned, people won't bother much if the coin price dumps or not. But definitely people who supported a project by donations will want to see what product they develop for instance, more eyes will be on development rather than price speculations.

This is exactly what I meant - less price focus and more actual product focus.

Why do you think donators would not be interested in this project? I Think interest will be even more genuine because they will want it to succeed not because of personal gain but because they believe in what this project represents.

If the project is really good and worth to invest then people won't find the exchange bad. Even though a good project won't get listed on a shit exchange. After certain amount of volume the coin/token might also get listed on other exchanges.

If this is the case then developers will not have a hard time asking for money since nobody will complain that he's been scammed, this is our hard-earned money, it is just right that what we put will yield profit, there's no such thing as free money, the developers owed to their investors to give something in return, crowdfunding and investing for me is the same, there should be return on what you give, it's a give and take and not the other way around.

Right, that's *one* reason why a crowdfunding approach wouldn't work.  The other, more important reason is that these days ico devs don't have any truly original ideas and they're only creating tokens so they can make a profit from them.  The project details no doubt require some creativity to write, but honestly...what was the last project you saw that really had some kind of success because of what it was? 

If ico's were crowdfunded, you can bet that the whole ico space would quickly be ruled by Darwin, and the ridiculously stupid projects would never get a dime of funding.  It isn't a bad idea, but it just won't work.

Do we really though? I mean who are we really losing? Those people after big gains are throwing their money at scams which makes things worse, not better. They are foolish people and none of that crypto goes to the community. It all just gets dumped on the market by the scammers. Hopefully, people will wake up soon and start considering other options instead of just the first few they see that sound cool or look cool and just have good advertising.

it feels like solving problem with an ineffective solution I mean people are screaming or shouting "scam" because they usually the one who get harmed and this could be considered as a social punishment so that no one will get lured into the scam project. crowdfunding is simply ridiculous are you really expecting to throw away your money for "support" to a stranger, there will always some people who don't give batshit about other people's wellbeing and if not for the regulation and law they'd have done crazy shit. this supporting thing is just ridiculous and stupid.

Yes, people using crypto currency and investing on them because of the freedom and the anonymousity of crypto.
If the people feel forced or something that restrict their freedom, i'm sure people will leave and crypto will have a really hard time

Well, firstly, IMO crowdfunding is not well organized if we speak about Kickstarter or other similar platforms, there are a lot of bad products/brands there which fund millions and then do not deliver the quality that they promise. Patreon is a bit different platform. It is created for supporting artists and creators that you like; it's not about getting something from them.

ICO's are like crowdfunding, you promise and later deliver, and a lot of projects deliver less than expected or do not deliver at all.

I think that a well organized ICO's with real teams and good ideas will always get funded. Sometimes good crypto projects even don't go to public sale and get private investors. So I think that at the moment what needs to be done is to educate people on how to spot the right investment and how to spot a SCAM, because there are a lot of them out there.

I don't think ICO projects are totally dead so we need this crowdfunding system. Rather ICO projects are not dead, if you look at the reputed ICO projects of this year then you might see Haratoken, BCNEX, Ferrum and some other ICO hit their cap very easily. Haratoken reached the hard cap within 36 hours, Ferrum reached their cap for less than 5 hours. Because these projects had something unique and real, so, people invested in a hurry! So, if you offer good ICO projects, you will be able to reach the sale cap!

helping others is ridiculous and stupid? well, patreon processed over 1 billion USD this year, so I think lots of people would disagree, besides like I said - yes you can get something in return, like higher rank account or some preloaded credits on platform you support

and I strongly disagree with view that helping others is stupid and ridiculous.

I think there is something fundamentally wrong with this idea, the fact remains that most people invest in projects for the profit so if it was done in a crowdfunding method, there would definitely be no investors, that defeats the purpose of the fundraising.

then people who join are more accurately called donors than investors, right?  one of the goals of joining the project is to invest to support the project which is expected to provide positive feedback on investment development.

the simple answer about it , its humans attitude.
according to Lucifer movie, Human have free will/desire of a thing and that is absolute , and also crypto world have a free will too, wich can move to everyside. market can be fall , can be raising like a star it all depends on the player in it, i mean crypto market is absolute free. can u see it ? its not strong like forex market.
with such properties, making something like you mentioned is something that is impossible to do, its just a wishfull think bro.

There is absolute difference between raising fund for support which we usually call go fund me and fund that I tagged for investment, most of the projects that you see today came from the angle of funding for investment because they are the ones promising to make whatever money that an investors drops to multiply after some certain years of support with their money, so with this mindset that you have here, it is better that you advise project developers to also come from the aspect of begging and we will see if they will get anyone to support them.

My man, you have to really shine those eyes of yours very well because the world has become so crazy that they will never give you anything except you promise them something in return, which is why it might be a little but hard to actually get any support for ordinary funding without having something attached to it to give such investor a return.