ICOs are created to make money or raise money from the fools, so as long as they can prolong their scheme and earn money from them, they will keep it up. it can take as long as they want and there is nobody looking over them so they do whatever they want.

XRP being a shitcoin is an undeniable fact so there is no surprise there and whenever someone talks about it being scam they do have a point specially when you see them point out the premine, the way they own all the coins and the way they have been pump and dumping it. not to mention that they control the whole network tightly while advertising it as a decentralized coin where it clearly is not! that last one is the biggest scam of all.

the main reason is manipulation. and the fact that everyone loves the manipulation because it is the only way they can make huge profits. if nobody pumped and dumped shitcoins then you could never imagine making 200% profit in only one day

the other reason is that  the market is small and that makes the manipulation easier but also it makes any sell or buy too big for the market to handle and because of it price shoots in one direction or the other.

there is no change in ethereum's performance so far. it is still struggling so hard to keep the price that it already has and it is failing at it hard because there is no more people left to buy it and ever since ICOs died people don't have any incentive to buy it either.
the only thing that can temporarily save it is a pump but that is only putting bandaid on a failing project. the unlimited supply is starting to show its effects slowly now.

it is not unheard of from a centralized altcoin to pay an exchange to add their coin to their list so that they can pump their coin because they know they have no chance on getting pumped but to do things like this to get some temporary hype and stay alive for a little bit longer.
if they did, they failed at it though

obviously not "all" the coins are going to zero but a lot of them are. if no coin ever went to zero then instead of about 2500 altcoins that we currently have in the whole market we should have had somewhere around 14000-15000 altcoins.
going back to zero is a natural order of things in altcoin market. without it, the market can not move forward.

KYC is only needed for a business that is regulated and is forced by the law to implement and enforce KYC on their customers. not a single ICO has ever been legal let alone be regulated or even be a real business so them enforcing KYC is not understandable under any circumstances!

the altcoin market is so alive and is always changing. we will continue to see a lot of coins be created, get pumped and then eventually die to give their place to newer shitcoins to be pumped. that has been the unbeatable trend of past 10 years.

it was not a bull run. it was a pump and it ended with a bubble and followed that up with a dump.

the market has always been realistic but the "reality" is a pump and dump. we will see the same thing again and again. 2017 was not the first pump and dump all over the altcoin market and it will not be the last one either.

not a chance.

i have never invested in any ICO actually. so i wouldn't do it this year either. it is because of the principles that i have. i don't care about the profit of ICOs all i care about is that they are scams and i believe that none of us should give any help to scammers. and investing in their token is like helping them scam more people.

in case you missed it, this topic was started nearly 2 months ago and that is a lifetime in altcoin market where the pump and dump period is usually less than 48 hours. so at the time OP started this, the pump was going on and it has ended then and the rest is history...

Vitalik has no idea what he is doing with ethereum. he doesn't even have any faith in its future and he has been clear about it from the start.

no we shouldn't because it is a token.
can you use it as a currency? of course you can. you cal also use any other object as a currency, for example you can use CS:GO game skins and Dota2 items as currency, some of them even worth thousands of dollars! you can go to a restaurant and pay with one of these but that doesn't make them a currency!
similarly you can use bitcoin for smart contracts but you shouldn't because it is not designed for that! why do you think (pre 2015)  ideas of Vitalik kept being rejected by bitcoin developers team? he was pushing all this on top of bitcoin at first...

ps. and lets not forget the big cherry on top, which is the fact that ETH is not immutable ever since they did that roll back....

it is always so fun to see how centralized shitcoins have a bunch of newbies fooled into believing they have a future while they empty their pockets
meanwhile bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that is decentralized and also consistently rising since it is actually useful unlike all these nonsense coins which are made only for pump and dumps.

there is nothing wrong with investing a large amount of money in anything but you have to follow certain principles first.
1- be OK with taking big risks.
not everyone is a risk taker and not everyone is willing to take big risks. there are a lot of pros and cons to that kind of behavior for example a lot of the millionaires have taken big risks.
2. the risks you take must be calculated ones
some people mistake taking big risks with gambling their money. and because of that they lose money

in short take this example. if someone took a big loan and invested it in bitcoin when it had a slow market back in 2015 (after the big bubble burst) and was getting ready to rise and held it for 2 years then they could have become millionaires.
but the same people who took a loan and invested at the top of the bubble when it was too late or invested it in altcoins and got dumped on lost all they had!

the same scenario is repeating today. people are ignoring buying bitcoin and then when it is too late (like when bitcoin is at $50k) they decide to buy in.

only coins that have actual utilities in the real world not just promise fake ones  and then get pumped and dumped.

so your only option is limited to  bitcoin since altcoins lack utilities.

then you should stay away from altcoins.

the guy who bought pizzas with bitcoin didn't make a mistake! he put out an offer to buy a couple pizzas with bitcoin which was at that time worth less than 1 dollar (i don't remember how much) so the cost was 10k bitcoins.

this on the other hand is a clear mistake which was discussed multiple times in this board by the way!  the person responsible was probably using a bad wallet or a modified script.

things like ICO tend to die fast and usually when they get hyped up a lot, there will always be some people who can't accept their losses and that death so they stick to newer things that are the same old scam at heart.
calling it 2.0 is not going to change anything, neither does calling it STO or anything else. in the end they are scams and they are dying.

i am more interested to know when PayPal dudes are going to be desperate enough to start their own altcoin. it certainly has started like this before many times. the latest example was Jpmorgan crapcoin. they also attacked bitcoin a lot before they made their own altcoin. what would it be this time? peepee coin?

i seriously doubt that can even be remotely possible.

it is not just about ICO hype being dead and ETH needing that hype to pump and without it rise would be impossible. but it is mainly because of a simple supply and demand relationship between anything in any market and ethereum now has a huge supply compared to last time it got pumped and that simply means a lot more sell/dump pressure preventing the pump from reaching that ATH ever again.

i am still expecting a big split to happen and there is a good chance that we end up with two different coins as the old original chain remains and the new one is forked off from it.

as for the price it seems like this time the fork hype is even more disappointing than the last time. last time we at least had a small pump but this time it seems like nobody is willing to touch it anymore!