HumanIQ has a technically flawed design?

Please check my analysis. Did I misunderstand something in their design or in my quick research below?

No, Crypto is evolving and no one can control it. How good is that?

http://heatledger.ghost.io/2016-year-end-crypto-roundup/

This thread should be about scoring every ICO and project based on Coinbase's Securities Law Framework.

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The Common Enterprise items are determining whether the token holder has the ability to effect his own destiny without depending on actions of some group that received the Investment of Money.

The Expectation of Profits are if the token holders are expecting to receive collectivized profits from the ongoing operation of the enterprise or system. However the Howey test also refers to expectation of gains, so that would also include investment gains. So IMO the expectation of profits is tied into whether the token holders' potential investment gains depend on some group that received the Investment of Money. If so, then I am going to give at least 100 points for that category.

Note if your project and token is truly decentralized, you will receive a 0 scoring on every category. So please don't tell me this regulation is interring with our ability to have decentralized systems. The law exists for a very good reason. The authorities are standing back and allowing us to reap what we sow, before they are forced to regulate eventually if we don't build truly decentralized systems.

Crowdsales that sell some product that will be produced by the funding raise (was Kickstarter's original model) are not investments with an expectation of profit. The only expectation is to receive the goods purchased. Selling tokens can be considered a s/w product, if there is no expectation of profit and/or dependency on the group that received the money invested. Crowd equity sites already exist on the Internet for companies that want to raise equity funding.

Neither WeTrust nor Edgeless need their own token. Someone will create copies of their smart contracts which operate with ETH or BTC or which ever is the most liquid and popular token.

Users are not going to adopt a different colored coin for every service they want to use, nor go buy colored coins for every WeTrust fee they need to pay.

These companies need to develop business models that don't depend on them each creating their own unit-of-exchange, because monetary theory informs us that will never happen!

The ICO craze is for taking money from stupid people. Simple as that.

All of you who are buying these tokens are going to lose.

I feel sorry for that guy that bought Zcash coins at over 3 grand each coin.
That boy fat-fingered it hard LOL

I know Barry Silbert been in trouble with the SEC. Vitalik going to prison is a good april fools joke.

Resisting the ICO gold rush
Or: Why you should take the noodles

I’m here today to make the hard sell. I’m telling you to take the noodles. The ICO, or “initial coin offering”, is way more glamorous. It tastes way better. But there’s a catch. Until investment laws change, the ICO route is just too risky.



Founders beware

Until the legal framework is in place, giving in to the seduction of ICOs puts you and your company at risk of a regulatory crackdown. Founders and non-ICO investors could lose everything to a big penalty.
And that risk doesn’t stop at the company level. Founders and directors could be personally responsible to investors, or even face criminal charges.

So far regulators have taken a light touch, but since The DAO debacle we know the SEC is paying attention to the crypto-equity world, and it’s safe to assume that someone, somewhere is going to get hit with the regulatory hammer. Don’t let it be you.

However, there’s already indications that at least the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which is responsible for overseeing the nation's securities laws, is paying attention.

Consensus amidst crisis

Last month, the deputy director of the SEC’s trading and markets division, Gary Goldsholle, pointed to the hack as illustrative of his concerns over consumer protection in similar instances in the future, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

To minimize the negative impact the hack might have on those consumers, Jentzsch said a series of measures have been organized within the community.

Watch Out, the ICOs Are Coming

Companies behind these ICOs are promising the moon and the stars, putting out polished websites, white papers, advisory boards, Slack channels, GitHubs, peppering with some legalese language, and topping it with the full dressing support enchilada they can think of; in order to appear as legitimate, as hard-working, as smart and as credible as possible.

Startup diligence is pretty light

Diligence is tilted towards appearances, parabolic claims, white papers, a minimum of legal and lots of online dressing-up. There is relatively little involvement from traditional venture capitalists who typically dispense startup investment. VCs aren’t always right, and granted their model is being disrupted by the ICOs, but they generally have a sense about startups anatomies.

Previously, you were funded because your ideas, teams and initial product progress were worthy of it, at least someone thought so. Now, companies publish a paper making the case for their idea, open some docs for reviews, and ask for money in return for a promise to deliver something maybe in one or two years, that may or may not be accepted by the market.

Along the way, they drag a crowd of investors who buy into it, without necessarily being well informed, nor having used the product. During that process, there isn’t much talk about execution abilities, operational experience, or the rest of the team that will end-up being hired. Much of the analysis is on the surface, often tough to prove or disprove, in part due to a rushing and artificial urgency.

The 3 typical characteristics, team, product and market seem to have taken a secondary position to the 3 new magical words: tokens, blockchain and decentralization.

Token utility linkage is not always there

The assumption that everything with a potential network effect is going to work with a decentralization starting point is not entirely true. The blockchain is not for everything.

The solution or product being developed needs to have a solid business model linkage that has a particular value when decentralization and/or tokenization of actions take place. The promise of a new model needs to be very compelling.

In the name of decentralization, the promises are big. You can’t just slap a token to anything, and expect magic to happen.

The token is not the business model. The value proposition or utility that is enabled by the token is the business model, and that linkage needs to be there early on. If the direction is not right, the chosen path will not lead to a good place.

The marketing hype is frightening

Some ICOs are being marketed like a rocket ship, but in reality, no startup is a rocket ship. A lot of the communication is biased towards the most optimistic assumptions, but nothing goes up in a straight line.

With an ICO, 3 asynchronous periods seem to have blurred and collapsed into one: early stage, go-to market, product-to-market fit. Just because it makes sense in theory doesn’t mean that it will make sense when the market realities enter the picture.

True that some level of speculatory fever can help to fund projects and give them a longer runway life, but if the expectations get far ahead of reality, the gaps may be harder to bridge, resulting in a downward spiral snap.

For good or bad reasons, raising lots of money can hide a lot of mistakes along the way, and there is some of that going on.

Financial engineering has its traps

A rule of thumb for many ICOs has been to allocate 85% of the tokens to the market, and keep 15% for developers and company, but this is a risky ratio. It is equivalent to raising all your funding at once. In the best cases, companies assume that the token will go up in price, which would enable the company (or protocol operator) to never need to raise money again. But not every company is like Bitcoin or Ethereum, just as not every startup is like Facebook or Twitter.

Of course, a smart company would not release more funding to itself until milestones are reached, but few will exercise that type of discipline. Fewer ICOs make a provision for subsequent funding events beyond the ICO.

All and all, funding a startup is not a one shot deal. Too much financial engineering is just that. I would urge anyone planning an ICO to re-read the excellent Security Laws Framework for Blockchain Tokens paper, especially the Appendix.

The legal grounds are still shaky

Despite appearances of success in circumventing legal or regulatory hurdles, some practices just don’t make sense.

Why are tokens allowed to trade before the protocol or product is even out in the marketplace? Heightening expectations with the hope that token prices rise months and years ahead of going to market can go so far before the regulators start raising their eyebrows on that practice. Not all companies can survive the price fluctuations, volatility and speculative waves that will be expected when there is nothing but speculation and trading that drives your token price. Look at the volatility of BTC, ETH and STEEM, and these are examples with actual products that work and have thousands of users.

Crashing the party or priming a launch

Yes, I want the ICO party to continue, but I’m seeing participants that are just there for the ride. I’m seeing companies and ideas getting ICO-funded on a wing and prayer chance of being successful. Some others who have even previously failed to raise in private circles, are now opting for the ICO route. As I said earlier, here comes everybody. When the party gets overcrowded and unwanted visitors want it louder and bigger, events can turn to the unpredictable.

In technology, nothing great is often achieved without irrational exuberance, but when the pendulum swings too far, there will some damage. In the long term, we hope that benefits far outweigh the pitfalls that are encountered along the way, and maybe that is the only way that good things happen.

ICOs are supposed to be like an IPO with a cryptocurrency, but in reality, these are early-stage funding bets. Most of these companies won’t stand the scrutiny of public markets (which they entered, whether they like it or not), while they wished they had the private lives of early stage startups.

An ICO is the beginning and the means to an end, not the end itself. The ICO is not the great enabler of business models and incredible innovation. The blockchain is. An ICO is an alternative funding, operational and ownership model. You still need to bolt a sound business to it. You don’t get a pass there, and you need to get a few things right.
Take everything with a grain of salt, two pinches of hype, and three sprinklings of wishful thinking.

The psychology behind ICO funding
ICONOMI ICO fundamentals — 3 of 4

Rationality and the economics of interest

To address the “irrational” part, we need to talk about crowd mentality and group psychology (suggested reading: a very good paper on the investor psychology).

If a team has built up a lot of hype about a project, it will create a sense of FOMO — fear of missing out. From this point, the project can continue on one of two trajectories. A quality project combined with a lot of initial interest and a high, yet reasonable cap on the fundraise will quickly drive the crowd to fill the ICO. In a nutshell — everybody loves a winner!

Fuck you cocksuckers

WeTrust has a very good team and good backers (including Bo Shen and Vitalik). I will trust them.

I personally see both a very good project and will develop in the future, so I think there is no problem if you want to invest in this project because they both had to look great, they are working hard with the team and run the projects themselves very seriously.

This guy thinks Vitalik will go to jail.

However, given Vitalik's rich father's political connections, I would doubt he will go to jail. We live a corrupt world.

...

Who knows. My popcorn is ready.

Haha you are a funny man. You think all the lawyers they have fired are just sitting on their hands doing nothing? You think Fortune 500 companies would feel safe working with Ethereum if Vitalik is going to go to jail? Accenture, BP, BNY Mellon, CME Group, Credit Suisse among others. You clearly do not know what you are talking about.

You are DELUSIONAL

you can going to miss the BLACK SWANS

Well, this is an interesting subject.  Two-wheeled chariots were invented by a "distributed" people, the Andronovo culture in Siberia, about 2000 BC.  One of the oldest roads on earth was build in England at about 3800 BC (the Sweet Track) where it is hard to imagine that it was an empire-induced road building operation.

Exactly. And even when a central violent monopolist does do things well (e.g. the height of rome), they don't actually need all that much power. For example look at the tax rate in the Roman empire before sh*t hit the fan. It was 2% but they had a huge empire connected with the best roads, agricultural systems and water distribution systems that weren't reached again till the modern era (and with like 30% tax rates). The problem is that central control brings in corruption and waste, somehow the Romans were able to avoid that (for a while).

I also think that if you are dreaming of a "new economy" (the dematerialized economy you're talking about) before hoping that a distributed society like it was before agriculture, is possible again,

...you will have to wait for eternity.

If you are convinced that one needs a king in order to make food, then we will always need a king (in more modern forms of presidents, parliaments, or whatever aristocratic structure).   Because we will never be free of material needs and always be prone to physical violence.