most of the projects are unforunatley exploiting the ICO scene right now and take advantage of the system. That's why people are advocating regulation, because it will put some logic in this entire thing. At the moment it's a fest of just splurging money right and left until you hit something, but that's not sustainable. It's a great way to gather funds but if everyone does it for products or services that offer to real value, then the investment itself becomes valueless, and you end up losing your invested capital.

Is it the Whitepaper?
Is it the Website design?
Is it the Project Team?
Is it the Product?

It's really all of the above, a good ICO shouldn't only have one of these qualities but all of them, after all you're putting your hard earned cash in play and you want to be sure it's in good hands. Try to be picky and find a team that has many positive things, instead of only one. For example, if a project has a good whitepaper (good product/service idea) but doesn't have a good team, then the idea is useless, because the team will not be able to implement it. If the team in the other hand is experienced but you believe the product and service doesn't offer any value to the market, then again it's irrelevant if the team is good because the idea won't have any demand from the market (since it doesn't offer any value to start with). Try to tick all the boxes when evaluating a new project or team, the more of the attributes they have the more likely the project will succeed and the more likely you'll have a descent return.

that really depends on the project. Some projects are trying to make a quick buck while other are more serious about their intentions. Have a look at the project's whitepaper and try to evaluate their product/service, does it make sense what they are trying to offer? Is there a market to serve that service/product? Has the team experience in building similar technologies, are they adequately financed? If you find answers to these questions then it's likely that the project will be legit, but you obviously can't know beforehand, what many projects are doing is offering escrow services, which are third parties that keep the funds "safe" and release them based on some conditions, if you are worried you might get dumped, try to look for projects that are offering such an escrow service, but unfortunately you might reduce your pool of options significantly.

It's awesome to read this two year old thread and see how people used to thing about anything other than BTC. Everyone is just defending Bitcoin as though it's the only coin out there. Ethereum has proved itself that it might surpass one day BTC in terms of market cap, and that day will most likely come. Nothing against BTC, but just considering that you can program anything and include cryptocurrencies while doing so, just shows the potential than ETH has. The entire crypto market just took off this years, and the road is way too long to determine from now how things will end up. I hope to be back in another two years and read whether I've been right or wrong about various predictions I'm making. What a great journey we're all heading to.

it's of course not the case that every ICO out there is a scam, but the majority of them don't provide any significant product or service and they're just looking to make a quick buck. There are a few projects out there however that do have a plan and acutally put the money they have raised in good use. That's the tricky part of ICO's.. they are not regulated and therefore anyone can join, literally anyone who has no experience about investing, so many end up getting rekt and losing their money. It's one of the reasons why China decided to ban ICO's alltogether, people were getting way too much scammed and it only made sense to stop further expansion of the problem. Regulation is not bad after all, as long as it gives innovation enough air to breath.

no it doesn't. That is something that investors get wrong, just because the price is low/high due to limited supply (high if supply is low, low when supply is high) doesn't mean that the coin can appreciate faster than others. The price per coin doesn't matter at all, if you have 100 coins trading at 10$ per coin, the total value of that coin is 1,000$ (100 x 10), if you have 10000 coins trading at 0.10$ (cents) each, the total value of that coin is still 1,000$ (10000 x 0.1) - so as you can see, the price doesn't matter. The total value in both cases is the same, whether the coins will appreciate in value depends on the demand the coin has, the supply is completely irrelevant.

ETH might struggle in the short term, even though it's one of the best long-term investments you can make. Most of interest is centered now in BTC which is about to launch in various renowned exchanges.. so instituional money will mainly flow into BTC, what I think people miss though is that after BTC has reached maturity, they'll all focus on the next big thing, which obviously is ETH. It might take a couple of years but your investment will definitely pay off, my recommendation is to stack up as much as you can and hold.

no matter which ICO you choose eventually, make sure not to listen to random strangers on forum about financial advises. You should make your own due diligence and make sure you understand the product and service offered. Usually the whitepaper indicates whether the project has potential, but you shouldn't rely just on that, make sure to join the various social media channels and come in direct contact with the founders and developers of the project, in that way you will be able to directly evaluate the potential by asking questions (which should make sense). Another thing, make sure to put up only what you are willing to lose. Assume whatever you invest won't be coming back to you at all, it's a good rule of thumb to not get rekt in cryptoland.

there are so many factors especially right now that we see so many developments in the space. To start with, BTC is about to fork which has the effect of everyone buying into it, altcoins are usually dropping during such days. In addition you have CME group which wants to offer BTC to institutional investors which is huge (the least), there have been many talks about institutional investors getting involved into the Blockchain and this is it basically. The biggest futures and derivatives trading group is offering exactly that. It's expected that the market will react by buying more BTC, because when these investors have access to BTC, it will drive its price up even more. So whoever has some Ethereum is selling it to buy BTC, to answer your questions, and by doing so ETH is depreciating while BTC is appreciating. Don't worry though, the markets will correct sooner or later and we'll be likely see a retract of BTC and more buys into Alts.

I consider airdrops as "dividends". I would not have them in the first place without having the coins I have, therefore I don't sell them, just let them appreciate. It's fair for the project doing the airdrop as well, for example, OMG recently gave out a good portion of their total supply and distributed it to ETH holders. Would be a rough move if everyone would sell OMG after they got it and convert it to ETH, it defeats the entire purpose of the airdrops which makes the entire thing useless. Most projects do airdrops to simply increase their user count and for people to find out more about the coin and what it offers. Either way, since they are not worth all too much (depending on your holdings) it's usually not even worth converting them (time/reward ration is low).

If you have enough capital it would be good if you invest in both equities (stocks/shares) and crypto coins. The shares will help you hedge against the risky crypto's essentially. Share are much less volatile because they are already matured securities and their valuation is based on fundamental analysis (reading the company's financial records and balance sheet), that option however, is not available with crypto's. Cryptocurrencies and projects related to them are not publishing any sort of financial records, because they are not required to (by the regulators), this is the main reason why there is so much debate on whether crypto markets should be regulated or not, to give investors a better playing field when risking their money. Things are as they are though, and the crypto market has become a speculation market, based on beliefs and projections, which might come true and might fail. Keep the biggest portion of your capital in share/equites and invest a 10-20% in crypto's, that way you'll be exposed to both markets and won't risk losing much.

I ask myself before investing whether there is a possibility for long-term finance planning, in other words, whether the project can sustain itself beyond the ICO and how it will finance operations in the future. It's very important for any project to have a financial plan, and break up the various expenses for departments IT expenses (hardware,domains,severs)/Marketing and advertising/Legal Expenses/Salaries etc. There should be some sort of break down explaining in detail all these expenses. Other questions that can be asked, are whether for example there is market demand for the specific product/service, what the target market is, and even growth projections for the industry the project is sailing forth. Experience as you've mentioned is one of the most important questions to answer, if the team has a great idea but lacks the technical know-how on how to implement, then the idea become worthless. There are a lot of factors to consider, and even if everything does look alright, things might happen in the future that are unexpected *cough Tezos *cough.

the market has it's up and downs.. a twenty percent appreciation or depreciation is nothing extraordinary in the crypto world, you've gotta hang in there and hopefully for yourself, be not leveraged. That's a thing about evolving markets, they are "new" and therefore not capitalized enough, which makes them vulnerable to price swings and to manipulation. There are some who profit out of it, but the majority will lose. You might have heard of "Spoof" who usually buys/sell huge stacks and can direct the market to his liking, that's a disadvantage but at the same time the exciting part in my opinion. You should be ready to lose whatever you put on stake, so make sure not to invest more than you can afford to lose. Most of the reasons why investors are complaining when huge price swings take place, is because they've lost more than they could afford, either because they invested a lot or because they were trading on a margin account and were executing leveraged trades.

Utrust is definitely not looking like a scam, the project has a great development team and their concepts are quite advanced in regards to B2B payments. They have several great advantages over other providers, especially services that are not in the blockchain, such as paypal. They basically want to create an ecosystem for enterprises to easily accept crypto and convert it to any currency they like (depending on their geographical location). The project had, in my opinion a fair initial distribution, with presale discounts which were not out of the norm, which sold out within a couple of hours. Public sale will be launched too as well, and considering how well the presale went, it wouldn't be surprising to see a successful public sale as well.

even though it's not implemented yet, I'd recommend to invest in ETH and stack up as much as you can. ETH is planning to move to PoS at one time or another, which means sooner or later you'll be able to receive a dividend for simply holding your coins. The reason I recommend that you go for ETH, or more accurate to wait for it, is because no other PoS coin has the ecosystem and adoption that ETH has experienced. It's very likely that this trend will continue and it will sooner or later reflect on its price, when you've stacked and the protocol has been updated, you'll be ready. They are doing other cool things (the Ethereum foundation) such as increasing privacy, which is a very important requirement for many corporations who if decide to implement the protocol in their business activities, will require some sort of privacy for the customer sensitive data, which Ethereum will be able to offer that.

Gnosis?

Yes - Gnosis is considered a good buy, the team is solid and market prediction is by far one of the best implementations of blockchain technology. Even though the projects looks great and the team is competent, there has been some controversy about their ICO, since they only distributed about 10% of the entire Gnosis supply, which has led many to "punish" the project for being "selfish". Price has been underperforming the last six months, it's valued has been at least halfed.

Digibyte?

Maybe - It's a descent platform but I haven't looked much into it, so my advice would not be substantial.

ETH?

Yes - ETH will be by far the biggest player in the crypto sector. The project has enjoyed wide adoption from various developers and has already a quite large ecosystem for the launch of decentralized apps. Considering how many tokens are being launched on the ERC20 standard (Ether's protocol), we can assume that the trend will continue and at some point boom, as more users will start using decentralized apps and see the advantage in them.

DeepOnion?

Can't tell.

Else?

Buy BTC to hedge against the your portfolio.

whichever coin would have a 50x return is probably not launched yet or at least not in the top ten (unlikely in the top hundred coins). This of course depends on whether the market will mature or how much adoption we'll be seeing from the general public. In my opinion we need more than 2-3 years to get the ball rolling, but during that time there are some interesting options. The reason I said a 50x return is unlikely with current launched coins, is because most of them have already capitalized on their "interest" and current demand and are unlikely to add an additional 5000% upside. ICO's from the other hand are more likely to get to that level, but it's a hit or miss game really - we've seen so many great idea going around and raising so much capital, but they're still lagging behind in terms of performance. You best chance to get to that return is create an ICO or project yourself and see how that works out (your chances are definitely better than investing in someone's else project, expecting a 50x return).

I'd recommend you the same even if you had one million. Divide 500/10, and invest in ten different projects currencies, which means you'll invest 50$ in various ICO's - don't invest in already released coins (launched one's) because they don't offer the return potential that new projects offer. By investing in ten projects, even if two of them take off (which is quite likely), you'll easily brake even and even make a handsome profit (depending on the project you chose). Either way, the idea is to diversify your portfolio in various alternatives, instead of putting the entire amount only in one - in that way the chances of completely losing your initial investment are minimized. In other words, don't put all your eggs in one basket, because if the basket drops - you'll break all your eggs.

that's kinda the big issue in the crypto world really, and the reason we are seeing the SEC freaking out and going bananas. It's because a lot of people, as you've mentioned, don't care about the idea behind the project and the real "value" and impact it might provide in the future, but care monstly about making a short term profit. Your approach to the situation looks good, and I believe you should invest in what you trust in. The profits will come with time and you should always look at the long term, the horizon. The industry is still quite new and there aren't many user around to get these service going, but in a couple of year thing will be different, and you might be handsomely rewarded if you'll be invested during that time.