Hey jlp, what do you think about Mobius Network? More importantly, what's your take on Mercury Protocol ICO, project in which Mark Cuban has invested as well?
If I have time, I’ll take a look at those. In the meantime, I'll comment on Mark Cuban. I think he’s completely overrated. He became rich because he sold his company, Broadcast.com, near the peak of the Dot Com bubble in 1999 to Yahoo for $5.7 billion, netting $1 billion for Cuban. But the company was TINY and LOSING MONEY. It was so worthless and burning so much money that Yahoo shut it down 3 years later. https://www.gurufocus.com/news/138012/mark-cuban-and-broadcastcom-the-multibillion-dollar-coup“When Broadcast.com was taken public it had fewer than $7 million in revenues, $28 million in equity, and an accumulated deficit of of nearly $10 million dollars in its brief history. In reality, the company had little or no chance of achieving profitability in the foreseeable future.” Here is a micro cap stock that you’ve probably never heard of: Castle Brands https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSEAMERICAN%3AROX&fstype=ii&ei=dejwWcmaGcaWjAG2sYiAAwIt does $77 million of revenue and has a market cap of $184 million. Broadcast had one eleventh the revenue. Essentially, Broadcast was a micro micro micro cap. But, it sold for 31 times more than Castle Brands. Yahoo overpaid by 341 times. Can you imagine paying $13,630,000 for a car that is worth $40,000? Fortune Magazine listed Broadcast.com as one of the 5 worst internet acquisitions of all time: http://fortune.com/2013/05/21/5-worst-internet-acquisitions-of-all-time/Yahoo executives, who were responsible for buying Broadcast.com, were canned. Essentially, Cuban owes most of his wealth to winning a lottery. I’m not saying that Cuban is a lousy businessman. He was a small businessman. You probably know businessmen or entrepreneurs who created bigger companies than Cuban did. Cuban never created any hugely successful operation like Google, Apple, Qualcomm, Foxconn, Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Oracle, eBay, PayPal, Facebook, Tesla, etc., etc., etc. Not even close. Yet the media treats him like he has more business acumen than the entrepreneurs or executives from many of those companies I listed. Cuban, the successful businessman and investor, is completely a creation of the media. It's hugely fake news. Therefore, ignore anything that Cuban says or does. |
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Don't you think that the problem of ongoing and upcoming ICOs is not the quality of projects (certainly there are scam projects, but there are also a great deal of really working projects backed with technology) but the problem is in the quality of investors who don't really make their research and mostly even don't care do read anything about the project they are going to invests in. They are in rush to buy any altcoins because it seems to be an easy way to make money for them.. What do you think?
Absolutely agree. Read: 3 kinds of ICOs - Protect Yourself https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2243157 |
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Hey, so I've been in involved in crypto and particularly in ICOs for almost a year now. I have invested in numerous ICOs over that period and one thing I noticed is that the most successful ICOs are the ones which had low ICO hard cap. It makes sense because its much easier for market cap to increase from 10 million to 30 million for example, rather than from 50 million to 100 million,right? For example IOTA – raised 1100 BTC in 2014, now their market cap is around $1,2B USD same goes for Ethereum and many other ICO’s who set low caps… Your thoughts on this?
You should never over-pay. That's Warren Buffet's number one rule. Investors over-paid for Tezos, EOS and Bancor. Now, they've all lost money. Read: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2243157.200 (page 11 of thread) |
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Interesting read and a similar thought process to the reply above. I also noticed that they actually responded to you though further in the thread, which to me shows that they have some validity. Could have been easier to just ignore it. Just going to have to see how they do on the 1st of November. Thank you. Did you read my response back to Crowdholding? If their idea is valid, then thousands of companies would be soliciting input from the shareholders for guidance to success, because it is far cheaper than doing market research. But they don't, because it's a bad idea. Crowdholding couldn't argue against this. |
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Great job man. Your attitudes are nicely logic. I can't count the number of useless services given by un-known persons that focuses all their attention to the token and the ICO when they should be spending time making prototypes/products. Would you kindly share your opinions about start-ups on the prediction market using hybrid intelligence into blockchain, i recently saw two projects starting with ICO; Cindicator and Trackr. Also the two famous ICO working on freelance market; Bitjob (freelance for students.ICO just finished) Blocklancer (platform for freelance jobs.ICO sheduled to winter 17/18).
Thanks in advance
Bitjob sounds like a project where the founders were trying to find something to throw on a blockchain in order to get money from an ICO. I’m not saying that a job site is not needed for students. I don’t know. Maybe they’ve identified a need. But they should show their market research as to why students need their site. The video says “Bitjob is a global job marketplace powered by the Ethereum blockchain technology”. What does that mean? How does a blockchain power a job site? It’s like saying Indeed.com is powered by PayPal technology. The main powering that a job site needs are: * Lots of coding for a feature-rich site or app * Lots of marketing It sounds like the team is trying to make to project sound like a blockchain project, when it is really a “build a job website” project. If Bitjob is planning to store all of the job information on the blockchain, especially Etheneum’s, they are naive. The blockchain cannot store that much data. If I was a student, I would need to spend most or all of my earnings on tuition, books, rent, food, transportation, beer and girls. So, I don’t know why I would want to be paid in Bitjob tokens, when I will need to convert it immediately. Bitjob provides PayPal as an option. I would opt for the PayPal option all the time. There are hundreds of job sites. Yet, their white paper does not show a comparison of Bitjob to their competitors. This means the founders are naive or trying to deceive the readers. It’s ridiculous to think that they do not have competition. They have 17 team members and 12 advisors. This is a joke. They’ve been at this since Nov 2016, which means they should have been able to build something much more sophisticated than their alpha. Every once in a while, their alpha will hang on me for about 10 seconds. Would you use this to find a job? They are a long ways away from having anything comparable to existing job sites, such as Monster or Upwork. Startups from Y Combinator with 2 founders build more than this after 6 months. Most of Bitjob's 28 people are useless. |
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It was an informative article, thank you. Can I ask what you think of Guts by taking advantage of your experience in this area? I appreciate your opinion, thank you
In regards to GUTS, this is not the first project that is putting tickets on a blockchain. I forgot the name of the other one(s). I think that ticketing is a good application for the blockchain. It’s not a great application such as currency, store of value or gaming/gambling, but still a good application. It also seems that it should be good to automate tickets, by putting them on a phone. It’s good to see that they have a demo/prototype. It's not impressive and probably doesn't require a lot of complicated code, but decent. I think it’s good that GUTS is going to eliminate scalpers. This is a sore point with most venue customers. However, is this what venue operators want? Scalpers provide an early source of revenue. With that early revenue, they can spend it on marketing to get more customers. This is why ICOs have pre-sales or 2 rounds of sales. Has GUTS done market research, from both venue customers and operators, to find out how much market demand there is to eliminate scalpers? Will customers be willing to go through the hassle of downloading, installing a wallet and buying GET tokens, just so they can attend a venue once every year? Some people attend venues once a month. Some attend once every 5 years. Some people may not have smart phones. Has GUTS done market research to answer these questions? One of GUTS’ value proposition is: “GUTS knows who is actually attending the event, regardless of how often a ticket is resold. The result is great userdata from the actual attendees, making future promotion a breeze.” I wouldn’t want to give my data to the venue operator because I wouldn’t want to be spammed. I can see the need to eliminate the counterfeit or fraudulent tickets. That is a legitimate business problem that GUTS can solve. But how big of a problem is this? I don't know. Did they say? I didn't catch it. It’s hard to know the full potential of GUTS unless they have done more market research. |
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3) “NEVER INVEST IN A BUSINESS THAT YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND”
I find this advice the most helpful, I invested in a few projects that I heard and there was buzzwords flying all around, but I didn't knew exactly why they will be useful. And of course they were just pump and dump coins. I guess I will try to learn from mistakes. It would be interesting to get a poll to find out the % of investors who have done this. You're honest enough to admit it, but the poll will not be accurate unless people can anonymously answer. |
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I think the OP and you are both genuinely misunderstanding the Swarm Fund model. Also the OP's initial quote of Swarm Fund is clearly being used out of context...
Perhaps you should reread their offering.... but in short....
Swarm Fund are providing a platform for existing funds, such as the existing US-based Real Estate fund they are launching with, to gain access to new sources of capital from the crypto markets. Property title deeds are not held by Swarm or the users of the platform, they are held by the third-party RE fund. The investors sourced via Swarm will be issued asset-backed tokens that represent the dollar-value that they invested into that fund initially. As the Real Estate fund gains in performance the asset-backed tokens increase in value and may be exchanged at any time via the Swarm Network exchange, providing instant liquidity in what is normally a less liquid market.
How is the initial quote of Swarm Fund used out of context? Swarm Fund cites this business problem: “You need large amounts of money to buy real estate and your money is tied down for an indefinite amount of time.” This is untrue. How is it out of context? By saying this, Swarm Fund is trying to make you believe that this is a business problem, when it is not. https://www.swarm.fund/how-swarm-works/ shows Alice. “She is a small-scale investor”. “Most of the attractive opportunities are outside of her financial means.” “She finds out about Swarm Fund”. This is misleading. There are thousands of REITs in 30 countries that Alice can choose from and she can buy one share for as little as $5. Please explain how Swarm’s “subfunds” will be able to compete against the variety and liquidity of REITs. Alice should do some reading about REITs: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcprosser/2017/07/19/data-proves-reits-are-better-than-buying-real-estate/2/#7c4b113f5cc3REITS vs real estate crowdfunding (author is from private equity real estate) https://seekingalpha.com/article/4051897-reits-vs-real-estate-crowdfundingSwarm Fund should be explaining how they are superior to REITs, not trying to make the reader think that he/she could never have invested in real estate before Swarm Fund came along. |
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Deed must list the wallet address, like a property description. That's the only way.
Really? Will municipalities accept a wallet address? Highly unlikely. Which countries does Swarm Fund plan to operate in? Can they prove that each of these countries will accept a crypto wallet address on a land title deed? Highly unlikely. Let's say that these municipalities will, which is a stretch, how does Swarm Fund prove that my ERC20 token owns a percentage of the assets that their wallet owns? |
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I have to disagree regarding Swarm fund. REITs definitely have their place as an investment to consider, but Swam takes this concept many levels deeper. Swarm is about much more than real estate, it is fully decentralized, members vote on the direction of the platform via a stake weighted liquid democracy system (already developed) with the first vote scheduled for a week after the ICO. It would be foolish to dismiss any ICO based on one aspect you disagree with or misunderstood. Not to mention that the whole idea of Swarm is to function as an agnostic platform where anyone can bring an investment opportunity to it and tokenize it. Just like Ethereum created an ecosystem for applications to be run on top of it, Swarm is doing the same but for any and every investment opportunity out there. I will definitely be investing on their ICO and using their platform, which by the way, already has a beta version out. Like any investment of course you have to do your due diligence but to call them liars is a bit of a stretch.
You didn’t disagree with what I wrote about Swarm Fund. I wrote that they lied when they said: “You need large amounts of money to buy real estate and your money is tied down for an indefinite amount of time.” I have the same questions about Swarm Fund, or any fund, as I do for Crypto20. See my posting above about Crypto20. How can they prove that the tokens legally own the real estate? Ownership of real estate is recorded by municipalities. They record the name of the owner. I assume that municipalities will record Swarm Fund as the owner? If so, then what are the legal documents that will prove that my ERC20 token entitles me to part ownership of the real estate that has Swarm Fund’s name recorded as owner? How do we confirm that Swarm Fund is going to take all of the ETH that I give them to buy real estate? How do we confirm that they won’t skim off 10%, 20% or 50% of the ETH and put it into their personal wallets? I’m not saying that investment funds (into any asset) does not have value. There have been many investment funds throughout history that have provided a lot of value. There have been many investment funds throughout history that have been scams. How do we confirm that Swarm fund will be the former and not the latter? |
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Why did you decide to stay away from ARToken? I think it's very promising and has low risk score according to ICOrating.com
Read the short comment about ARToken: 3 kinds of ICOs - Protect Yourself https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2243157.40 (page 3) |
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Hi jlp. You have a great insight on ICOs. I know i'm being bias since I'm part of the bounty but I think project related to e-sports such as Eloplay has a good shot in being successful in the future. What can you say about it  In regards to Eloplay, I think gaming and gambling are two excellent applications for cryptocurrency. After transfer of value (currency) and store of value applications, gaming and gambling are very good fits. Cryptocurrencies enable several things to be done that could not be done previously: For Gaming: - Win real value that can be withdrawn from the game or gaming ecosystem, instead of winning just digital goods that are locked in.
- Winning real value elevates the fun and excitement of the games and competitions.
- In essence, crypto currency enables gaming to provide gambling. Gaming (with crypto currency) is an euphemism for gambling. One will argue that gaming has skill whereas gambling does not. This is not true. Lotteries and slots do not involve skill, but many gambling games, such as Black Jack or Poker, involve skill. Financial betting involves skill.
For Gambling: - Governments around the world are the biggest operators of gambling. Most governments run big lotteries. Several run huge casinos. But, they block competition, such as online gambling, to maximize their own revenue. Many of them do not have specific laws that outlaw online gambling. If they do, they rarely enforce them because it’s difficult, as they themselves are gambling operators. To block online gambling, they ban credit card companies and banks from sending money to and from gambling sites. Cryptocurrencies can solve this business problem for gambling operators. Cryptocurrencies can unshackle and liberate gambling and let anyone to play from anywhere in the world.
- Gambling sites are known to cheat or steal from their customers. If the bets are handled by smart contracts, this business problem can be solved.
Therefore, Eloplay is in a great space. They have a product, which is great news, though I didn’t try it. That proves that they can build. However, they have lots of competition. There have been many eSports or Gaming ICOs, such as Firstblood, Unikoingold, GameCredits, etc. There are more, but I forgot their names. I’m not saying that this industry cannot support many competitors. I just don’t know how many. Elopay is from that large country east of Europe, which has no extradition agreements with much of the world. This increases the risk for you, because if they defraud you, your government cannot help you. Hey jlp, your input into ICO's and your insights regarding to the potential of gaming and gambling are great. I was wondering however, what do you think about Crypto 'hedge funds' ICO's such as Crypto20? Do you think there's any potential there? Apparently they have a tangible platform and tangible results, and overall they seem promising. What's your take on them? Thanks in advance. In regards to Crypto20, I think there is a need for an index fund of cryptocurrencies. However, the risk with crypto investment funds is that they centralize money and therefore create “honey pots” (term from Andreas Antonopoulos) for hackers and thieves. A thief stole $50 million from DAO. Hackers (and possibly employees) stole from many exchanges. The other risk with Crypto20 is that they are obviously and blatantly selling a security. If and when regulators come after ICOs for selling securities, they will go after the ones that were most obvious. If they do, then both the project team and token holders will suffer. How do we know that the Crypto20 tokens truly have ownership of the underlying assets (top 20 cryptocurrencies)? Is there a Crypto20 smart contract where we can call one of its GETTER functions to see the balances of the 20 cryptocurrencies that the smart contract is holding? I did not see this in the white paper. Even if we can verify that the smart contract is holding the 20 cryptocurrencies, how do we know that the Crypto20 tokens own the assets that the smart contract holds? But the smart contract does not hold the 20 cryptocurrencies. According to the white paper, these will be held in cold storage. If the majority of the Crypto20 token holders want to claim the assets (20 cryptocurrencies), can they? Can they go to a judge and prove that they legally own the assets in Crypto20’s cold storage? I could not find answers to these questions. Tether has the same principles. It is supposed to be backed by and track the US dollar. Each Tether is supposed to equal one US dollar in value. There are talks that they do not have enough US dollars and they have not been able to prove that they do. Let’s say there are 1 million Tether tokens, but they only have 100,000 US dollars to back it up. What do you if you are a token holder? Take a flight to the team’s country and try to hunt them down? When you give your ETH to Crypto20, they are supposed to take that and buy the equivalent amounts of Bitcoin, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum Classic, NEM, Dash, etc. How do you know that they have? You cannot have access to their cold storage. How do you know that they haven’t skimmed off 50% of the ETH and put it into their personal wallets? These are the risks of every type of crypto investment fund. There are many of them now. Some of them might be honest and legitimate. Some of them will not be. The risk is that it is hard to be sure that you are investing in the honest one, unless they provide all of the answers to questions like mine. If there is a way to know for sure that they cannot screw you, then these types of investment funds can provide a lot of value. |
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In regards to SuperNet’s BarterDex, I don't see any information about an ICO or their team. Are they running an ICO? I think there are severe problems with centralized exchanges: risk of funds getting stolen; extremely bogged down. It took many days before the exchange will confirm to me that it received my fiat wire transfer. During this long wait, I was wondering if they are stealing my money. There is a HUGE need for decentralized exchanges. I sincerely wish someone will create a good one. Whoever can, will be hugely successful. The question is: Who will be able to do this? There have been a number of ICO projects trying to do this, but unfortunately I forgot their names. Is BarterDex superior to the others? I don’t know because I cannot compare them. But SuperNet should have provided a comparison to its competitors, but they didn’t. Most ICOs do not, which implies that they are trying to hide the competition from you. They have a prototype/product, so that is impressive. However, I’m not sure I like the the Liquidity Multiplier. It only gives an illusion of liquidity, because if you enter 3 orders for the same funds and 2 are cancelled when one of them is filled, then is this fake liquidity. This means that I can put in a buy order of 1 BTC, a 2nd buy order of 1 BTC, a 3rd buy order of 1 BTC and never worry that my 2nd and 3rd orders will get filled. If these buy orders are visible to the other parties, then I can create the impression that there is a lot of demand for BTC, when there isn’t. Does this mean I can manipulate the market? They have a prototype, which is good news. However, according to their video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XovwcWnZ9vM), you need to install and run full daemons of Bitcoin and Komodo. The guy runs bitcoind with no pruning parameter, so I assume that he is running Bitcoin’s full node. There are problems with this: - It is a hassle to run a command line interface. The guy even says that you need advanced skills and “it’ll take quite a while” to learn from scratch.
- It takes multiple days to download Bitcoin’s full node. Also, most users will not have a spare 120 GB of disk space for the blockchain.
- It would be crazy to be running the full node of every coin that you want to convert. Ethereum’s blockchain is 200 GB. Who is going to run that?
Later on in the video, he confirms that you need to “sync”, which means download, the blockchain of any coin that you want to exchange with. I do not see how the average user will be able to do this. Even if you are experienced in running full nodes, it is a major hassle to do this and you likely will not have enough disk space to download Bitcoin’s blockchain, let alone blockchains from multiple coins. This video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf371VQRh0M) confirmed that you need to run the full nodes. But this ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb7An2CGBQw) says that it can work with Electrum servers to avoid the need to download the blockchain. As far as I know, Electrum only serves the Bitcoin blockchain, not others. Their white paper gets very technical and hard to understand. It would be good if they included more diagrams to help explain. I still do not understand how they can provide lots of liquidity. Let’s say you put in a buy order of 1 BTC. Let’s say there isn’t a single sell order of BTC. What will BarterDex do? Will BarterDex step in, like a market maker, and sell 1 BTC? Without understanding how their technology works, you will be taking a risk by assuming that it will work. Their documentations says: Adding a coin to the BarterDEX is as simple as writing one line of code if your coin is a Bitcoin compatible.
**Non-Bitcoin compatibles can be integrated to the BarterDex. However, the further away the coin is from a btc fork, the more developer work hours it will take to integrate.** This means that BarterDex will only work with a small number of coins. |
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