In response to several comments:

Change-Bank is way too late to the party. Monaco, TenX and Centra are doing debit cards as well.  Also, the majority of coin holders will not give their coins to any centralized place, in fear of a hacker or employee stealing them.

Swarm Fund is lying. They say that you need large amounts of money to buy real estate and your money is tied down for an indefinite amount of time. This is false. You can buy one share of a REIT, and there are thousands of REITs to choose from, and you can sell it one minute later.  If they start off their pitch with a lie, what else are they lying about?

There is another flaw with Swarm, which is similar to the flaw with CombiCoin. You will have to trust that the coin is backed up LEGALLY by the land title of the real estate. Who is the owner of the real estate? John Doe? Who is to say John Doe will uphold any agreement that the real estate, that has his name in the municipal records as the owner, will ascribe it to the coin holders?

DomRaider is all marketing and no meat.  They are probably liars as well.  Their industry, dropcatching, is tiny.  If it was as big as DomRaider claims, then Godaddy would be making billions from it.  But none of Godaddy’s revenue is attributed to dropcatching on their Income Statement.  Godaddy never even mentions dropcatching anywhere in their annual filing to the SEC.  Read it.

After reading the first sentence in Earth Token’s announcement, I stopped.  “environmentally sustainability software”?  WTF?  Is this another example of somebody trying to put the kitchen sink onto the blockchain?

I see nothing new with Electroneum. Mobile? Lots of altcoins can be on the phone. Privacy? Monero, PIVX and Zcash already can do that. Offline wallet? This is when Electroneum starts misleading. They state:


Are they trying to make you think that there are no offline wallets for Bitcoin and Ethereum? There are LOTS of them.

Atlant and HomeToken have the same problems as Swarm.  In addition to that, they both have the same problem as coin banks, exchanges and investment funds.  The money is centralized into a honey pot, which makes it attractive to hackers and employees to steal.

Looking at all these recommendations, it’s amazing how low the bar has gone for startups.

There are many ICOs that are trying to put anything and everything on a blockchain. Many of these don’t make sense. Pally is trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole. Maybe locals want to meet strangers. I don’t know. But there’s no need to go through the extra hassle of converting money into Pally tokens to do this. Let’s say you take a trip to Thailand. Are you going to convert your money to Pally, just so you can exchange with 1 or 2 locals? Then what are you going to do with your remaining Pally tokens after that trip? Let it sit there and collect dust for 6-12 months until your next trip to Spain and hope that some locals there will accept Pally tokens?

Pally sounds like a joke.

Andreas Antonopoulos said that 99% of the ICOs are shit or scams.

The easiest way to filter out most of the shit or scams is with one simple criteria:

HAS THE PROJECT BUILT ANYTHING THAT THEY CAN SHOW NOW?

If not, ignore.

Building a product or prototype takes way more skill, work, time and money than a one-page website or video.

Several projects, with big teams, fancy titles, cool videos, etc., have raised millions of dollars and still have not produced anything to show.

Read my comment above about AirToken. A good pre-ICO means nothing. Search for an ICO that has already built something to show you.

Did you push out that comment in order to show your signature?

Are you saying that because they have a bounty, then that means that they are not a scam?

Are you saying that because they have a bounty, then that means it makes sense to require users to run MASSIVE blockchains, potentially hundreds of Terabytes in size?

If anyone understands blockchains, they would know that ARToken is blowing smoke.

Bitcoin is already having scaling issues with its 120+GB blockchain and it’s only storing small numbers for each transaction. Ethereum’s blockchain shot past Bitcoin’s and is approx. 200GB. Scaling is Ethereum’s biggest issue. It stores only smart contracts.

ARToken wants to store 3D data on a blockchain. Good luck with that. Its blockchain will need to be hundreds of Terabytes. Who is going to run its full node? You?

I’m sure there are ICO scams. I don’t know how many there are. It’s possible that a lot of these projects are started by incompetent people, who don’t understand technology or the blockchain. There was a project started by a medical doctor. He was launching his ICO part-time while still working full-time as a doctor. After raising millions of dollars, there is still no product from his project.

The biggest risk is investing in ICOs which cannot prove that they can build anything. Several projects have raised millions of dollars and still have not produced anything. Let me know if you want examples. Reduce your risk by searching for ICOs that have already built something to show you.

In response to several comments:

CarTaxi got a 2.9 out of 10 rating:  https://hacked.com/ico-analysis-cartaxi/  I’m scratching my head trying to figure out why a blockchain is needed to tow cars.

Don’t buy anything that Paris Hilton or Floyd Mayweather tell you to buy…unless they can explain the difference between POW, POS, POI, Raiden, Lightning and Segwit.

Besides, Centra is way too late to the party. Monaco, TenX and Change-Bank are doing debit cards.

Stox is way too late to the party as well. Gnosis, Augur and PeerGuess are trying to do prediction markets already, although they haven't produced anything or much. Stockbet already has software that lets you bet on stocks & cryptocoins.

The Swiss has been helping evade tax and security laws. That doesn’t mean that they are a technology hub.

Combicoin wants to diversify for you. But you have to trust them that they won’t run off with your money or that they won’t get hacked.

Minerva gives tokens to platforms that accept Minerva’s OWL token. But they never explain where the money comes from? How will Minerva continue giving their token away forever? Business model makes no sense.

Spectiv is another project that has a lame business model, which is only one sentence:


How are they going to compete against Youtube, which already provides 4k videos? What’s to stop Youtube from providing virtual reality videos? How many viewers are going to go through the hassle of buying Spec tokens just to tip video producers, when they don’t have to do that now on Youtube?

Airtoken is lying or sounds like a pipe dream. In order to pay the users for advertising, Airtoken will need to get advertisers and earn advertising revenue. Then it needs complicated processes to show the ads where the advertisers want, to charge properly and to share the revenue with users. This incurs significant costs and is a huge undertaking, which requires much more than just creating an Ethereum token. They need to show how they will be able to do these numerous processes much more cheaply than the existing companies, in order to be able to share some of the advertising revenue with users. Have they ever done anything similar to this before? Probably not. They have 6 reviews of their AirFox Browser on Google Play, probably by people who saw their ICO.

Airtoken’s website states: “Publishers will have higher monetization, new user reach, and a better user experience.” But its white paper does not explain how. Is this blowing smoke?

There is another major problem with Airtoken: Micro-loans, which is a complicated, costly and money-losing business. Google “micro loan failure” and you’ll see articles like:


Micro loans was concocted by emotional socialists who think with their hearts instead of their brains, which always makes a country poorer.

The Airtoken team only needs to do 5 minutes of research on micro-loans and would have found the above. This means that they are dishonest. If they did not do the research, then they are incompetent.

I see nothing new with Electroneum. Mobile? Lots of altcoins can be on the phone. Privacy? Monero, PIVX and Zcash already can do that. Offline wallet? This is when Electroneum starts misleading. They state:


Are they trying to make you think that there are no offline wallets for Bitcoin and Ethereum? There are LOTS of them.

As requested, here are examples:

EOS raised $230 million and said that they were going to release something by end of summer.  Nothing yet. With $230 million, EOS should have solved world hunger by now.

Gnosis raised $12.5 million and their website says that they are releasing their game by first half of 2017. Nothing yet.

Qtum raised $15.6 million. I don't see anything produced on Qtum's website.

After raising $50 million, Cosmos's website is still pitching its white paper. Come on. What have they produced with that $50 million?

MobileGo raised $53 million. Here's the roadmap from their white paper:


However, I don't see any of that on their website. They're mainly bragging about how their token is on exchanges. What are they doing? Day-trading their own token?

NOTHING MATTERS MORE than proof that they can develop software.  EVERYTHING ELSE IS USELESS, including team, fancy pretentious titles, references, roadmap, video, fancy animations, escrow, blogs, Slack, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and white paper.

Andreas Antonopoulos said that 99% of the ICOs are shit or scams. There are some projects who have already built software, albeit a small percentage. A good way to filter out most of the risky projects and reduce your risk is to ignore the projects who have not developed anything yet.

Yes, of course there are going to be some scams from the U.S. and legitimate projects from Russia. But the average is the contrary. If there are an equal number of scams from the U.S. as from Russia, then there would be MANY more successful companies in Russia. But there aren't. Russia has almost twice the population of Germany and has only slightly more than half of Germany's GDP. There is a reason for that. Eastern Europe has pumping out phishing scams to consumers for over a decade now. You can ignore this statistic if you want. But you just need to be cognizant of the risk you're taking.

Putin hosted Vitalik Buterin in Moscow. He wants to grow the crypto industry. He has killed journalists and opponents who criticized him. Facebook just said that they sold $100k of ads to fake accounts from Russia. Don't you think Putin will fund ICO projects through the back door? Don't you think he will fund ICO listing sites and ICO ratings sites to favor Russian projects? One would be naive to think otherwise. The site doesn't even have to be staffed by Russians. If not, all the better to deceive you. They just need to be bought or bribe-able.

TokenStars has no explanation of why the current currency (EUR, GBP, etc.) needs to be replaced by a token. Their site says "you support a promising 14-16 year old player - player spends money".  This means the player will sell the token to get EUR to pay for rent and food. What good is the token? Also, who is to say that the player or anyone else will honor any agreement to repay the supporters 2-6 years later? If you're a token holder, are you going to wait that long, only to hope that the player repay token holders?

Also, most people (not all) who give recommendations on Bitcointalk, are doing so because they are getting paid via their signature. Ignore these, especially those comments that sound like they are pushing themselves out to write something.

There are SERIOUS problems with some of the ICO listing sites.

• Some charge money to elevate the visibility of the ICO. When you see this, you think that the ICO is of higher quality, but it is not.
  
• Some ICO listing sites are staffed with mainly people from one country or region, such as Russia. Are they giving preference to ICOs from their country? Russia is one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

“LEGITIMATE advisers” are useless. Augur had Vitalik Buterin as an adviser.  Vitalik is the most LEGITIMATE adviser you can get. After raising millions and after two and a half years, all they’ve released is a simple beta that is barely usable. There are a number of ICOs, that haven’t raised anything yet and they already have more software built. Enjin, Funfair and Stockbet already have much more than Augur’s beta.

Even the white paper can be useless. The only thing that matters is whether they can deliver software.

EOS raised $230 million and said that they were going to release something by end of summer.  Nothing yet. With $230 million, EOS should have solved world hunger by now.

Gnosis raised $12.5 million and their website says that they are releasing their game by first half of 2017. Nothing yet.

Qtum raised $15.6 million. I don't see anything produced on Qtum's website.

After raising $50 million, Cosmos's website is still pitching its white paper. Come on. What have they produced with that $50 million?

MobileGo raised $53 million. Here's the roadmap from their white paper:


However, I don't see any of that on their website. They're mainly bragging about how their token is on exchanges. What are they doing? Day-trading their own token?


Essentially, your fifth point negated your first four points. Who cares about those if all you care about is a pump and dump?

The easiest way to reduce your risk of scams is to use 2 simple filters:

1)  HAS THE PROJECT BUILT ANYTHING THAT YOU CAN USE TODAY? If no, move on. EVERYTHING ELSE IS USELESS:  Team, fancy (pretentious) titles, references, roadmap, video, fancy animations, escrow, blogs, Slack, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook and white paper.

Many projects have these and they cannot prove that they can build anything. Writing software needs much more skill, work and time than anything else in their project. Several projects had great profiles, raised multiple millions and still haven't delivered any software.

EOS raised $230 million and said that they were going to release something by end of summer.  Nothing yet. With $230 million, EOS should have solved world hunger by now.

Gnosis raised $12.5 million and their website says that they are releasing their game by first half of 2017. Nothing yet.

Qtum raised $15.6 million. I don't see anything produced on Qtum's website.

After raising $50 million, Cosmos's website is still pitching its white paper. Come on. What have they produced with that $50 million?

MobileGo raised $53 million. Here's the roadmap from their white paper:


However, I don't see any of that on their website. They're mainly bragging about how their token is on exchanges. What are they doing? Day-trading their own token?

2)  IS THE TEAM FROM A CORRUPT COUNTRY? If yes, move on. In corrupt countries, ethics and honesty are more lax, which means that they will have a higher tendency to exaggerate or lie.

https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016

There are ICOs coming from countries that sent out thousands of phishing scams in past years.  Why would you take the risk of investing in ICOs from those countries?

Also, avoid any ICO endorsed by Paris Hilton or Floyd Mayweather...unless they can explain what Raiden, Lightning Network, POW/POS/POI and Segwit are.

I don't think there is a strong correlation.

There could be some ICO project started by 25 year old geeks, laden with debt, that won't be on that site. But they're brilliant developers.

There was an ICO project started by a doctor earlier this year, who knew little about software or technology, but he would've been able to afford to pay $1000 per week. Now, there are people such as Paris Hilton and Floyd Mayweather (a boxer) getting involved, who can pay to get on that site. But does Paris Hilton or Mayweather know how to pick the best crypto/blockchain project? Do they know the difference between POW, POS or POI? Do they know what Raiden, Lightning Network or Segwit mean?

Icocountdown charges $1000 per week. I think a lot of ICOs will not be listed there.

You can easily eliminate 95% of the ICOs with 2 simple filters:

1)  HAS THE PROJECT BUILT ANYTHING THAT YOU CAN USE TODAY? If no, move on. EVERYTHING ELSE IS USELESS:  Team, references, roadmap, video, fancy animations, escrow, blogs, Slack, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook and white paper.

Many projects have these and they cannot prove that they can build anything. Writing software needs much more skill, work and time than anything else in their project. Several projects had great profiles, raised multiple millions and still haven't delivered any software.

EOS raised $230 million and said that they were going to release something by end of summer.  Nothing yet. With $230 million, EOS should have solved world hunger by now.

Gnosis raised $12.5 million and their website says that they are releasing their game by first half of 2017. Nothing yet.

Qtum raised $15.6 million. I don't see anything produced on Qtum's website.

After raising $50 million, Cosmos's website is still pitching its white paper. Come on. What have they produced with that $50 million?

MobileGo raised $53 million. Here's the roadmap from their white paper:


However, I don't see any of that on their website. They're mainly bragging about how their token is on exchanges. What are they doing? Day-trading their own token?

2)  IS THE TEAM FROM A CORRUPT COUNTRY? If yes, move on. In corrupt countries, ethics and honesty are more lax, which means that they will have a higher tendency to exaggerate or lie.

https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016

There are ICOs coming from countries that sent out thousands of phishing scams in past years.  Why would you take the risk of investing in ICOs from those countries?

The BEST WAY TO DETERMINE THAT IS IF THEY ALREADY HAVE SOFTWARE THAT YOU CAN USE. Everything else is vapor-ware.

The roadmaps and references are useless. They give you a false sense of security.

There have been several projects with large teams, reliable references and roadmaps. After raising multiple millions, they still haven't released any software.

EOS bragged that they have 50 developers. Who knows if that is true. They raised $230 million and said that they were going to release something by end of summer. Nothing yet. With $230 million, they should've solved world hunger by now.

Gnosis raised $12.5 million and their website says that they are releasing their game by first half of 2017. Nothing yet.

Qtum raised $15.6 million. I don't see anything produced on Qtum's website.

After raising $50 million, Cosmos's website is still pitching its white paper. Come on. What have they produced with that $50 million?

MobileGo raised $53 million. Here's the roadmap from their white paper:


However, I don't see any of that on their website. They're mainly bragging about how their token is on exchanges. What are they doing? Day-trading their own token? Roadmap is useless.

There's no need to do all of that with every ICO.

You can make your search far easier if you filter out the majority of coins.  It's easy to do this with 2 simple filters:

1)  Does the project have anything built? No? Move on. Forget about their big teams and fancy titles. Most projects have these and they cannot prove that they can build anything. Writing software is much more difficult than creating a one-page website or video. Several projects raised multiple millions and still haven't delivered any software. Let me know if you want examples.

2)  Is the team from a corrupt country? Yes? Move on. In corrupt countries, ethics and honesty are more lax, which means that they will have a higher propensity to exaggerate or lie.

https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016

The third filter is harder to implement. You need to be able to do critical thinking. Does the application make sense? Jesus coin is an extreme example of something that doesn't make sense, but most are leaning towards this. Crypto currency is good for some applications (transfer or store of value, save fees, save time, gambling) but not all applications.

Most projects are trying to squeeze square pegs into round holes. There's a project that wants to connect locals with travelers to enhance the travel experience. You have to do mental gymnastics to figure out why an altcoin is needed here.

You have "Tokenizing Rising Tennis Stars: tokenstars.com/ace" in your signature.  That sounds like somebody is trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole.  Why the hell would you have that in your signature?  It's getting close to the Jesus coin.

Then why are you part of a signature campaign?  Are you phishing for views?

You can make your search far easier if you filter out the majority of coins.  It's easy to do this with 2 simple filters:

1)  Does the project have anything built? No? Move on. Forget about their big teams and fancy titles. Most projects have these and they cannot prove that they can build anything. Writing software is much more difficult than creating a one-page website or video. Several projects raised multiple millions and still haven't delivered any software.

EOS raised $200 million and said that they were going to release something by end of summer.  Nothing yet.

Gnosis raised $12.5 million and their website says that they are releasing their game by first half of 2017. Nothing yet.

Qtum raised $15.6 million. I don't see anything produced on Qtum's website.

After raising $50 million, Cosmos's website is still pitching its white paper. Come on. What have they produced with that $50 million?

MobileGo raised $53 million. Here's the roadmap from their white paper:


However, I don't see any of that on their website. They're mainly bragging about how their token is on exchanges. What are they doing? Day-trading their own token?

2)  Is the team from a corrupt country? Yes? Move on. In corrupt countries, ethics and honesty are more lax, which means that they will have a higher tendency to exaggerate or lie.

https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016

The third filter is harder to implement. You need to be able to do critical thinking. Does the application make sense? Jesus coin is an extreme example of something that doesn't make sense, but most are leaning towards this. Crypto currency is good for some applications (transfer or store of value, save fees, save time, gambling) but not all applications.

Most projects are trying to squeeze square pegs into round holes. There's a project that wants to connect locals with travelers to enhance the travel experience. You have to do mental gymnastics to figure out why an altcoin is needed here.

It's easy to filter out most of the ICOs with 2 simple filters:

1)  Do they have anything built? No? Move on. Forget about their big teams and fancy titles. Most projects have these and they cannot prove that they can build anything. Writing software is much more difficult than creating a one-page website or video. Several projects raised multiple millions and still haven't delivered any software.

2)  Is the team from a corrupt country? Yes? Move on. In corrupt countries, ethics and honesty are more lax, which means that they will have a higher tendency to exaggerate or lie.

https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016

CARTAXI looks like a solution in search of a problem or pain-points.  They are trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole.

Peerguess is TOO LITTLE and TOO LATE.

TOO LITTLE and TOO LATE:  Stockbet already has built software that lets people bet on Bitcoin.  Peerguess has a sales pitch.

TOO LATE:  Peerguess sounds very similar to prediction models, which Gnosis and Augur are already doing.

Did you ever research CHANGE-BANK?

Their "Blockchain Expert" was an Inside Sales person in his last job that was totally unrelated to technology.  An Inside Sales person is someone who is not good enough to be a customer-facing Sales person.

Their "Blockchain Developer" never developed a blockchain before.

Banking and insurance are very complicated businesses.  The CEO and his (part-time?) partners do not have any banking or insurance experience.

TenX and Monaco are already building crypto debit cards.  Other than this, what is Change-Bank's compelling value proposition?

Why would we put our cryptos in a bank?  The advantage of cryptos is to NOT keep our money in untrustworthy banks or any centralized place where it can get stolen by hackers or rogue employees.