I'd recommend DCE Brief. I also check into CoinDesk from time to time. You might also look at Medium, and find specific authors who write about cryptocurrency news. Just take everything you read with a large grain of salt. Have fun

ICOs are a huge problem. 97% fail regardless of intention going in. Many are scams from the beginning, but there are plenty where the project leaders sincerely intend to follow through once they raise the money but they can't deliver for any number of reasons. Additionally, governments all over the world are cracking down on ICOs because most of their tokens, probably all of them, actually are securities and their not registering as a security is a direct violation of the law, and not just in the United States. Trading platforms which support ICO tokens that are actually unregistered securities are also facing increasing scrutiny, as they could also be breaking the law if they provide markets for unregistered securities. This means that even if the ICO you invested in was run by honest people, and even if those people had the skills to deliver on their promises, there's still the issue that they have broken the law by not registering their security. This means that the government in the country they operate could shut them down any day and that would mean you lose your entire investment as well.

On a technical level, ICOs could be a great way for legitimate companies to raise money, but it has to be done legally and with investor protection in mind and a legal pathway has not been established anywhere.

Because of all this, my advice would be to simply avoid all ICOs. Don't invest in them.

Thanks for all these links. I will definitely take a look. I awarded you some merit for the post too, because it's truly informative, helpful, etc.

For all you people who joined this forum *only* to make money as soon as possible, yes, sorry to disappoint you, but this is precisely the category of users the forum moderators are trying to weed out. Bye bye!

If you joined this forum because you want to learn about cryptocurrencies and what's going on in our industry, and possibly earn legitimate money by growing your skill set and contributing your own skills to projects, then welcome here! Learn all you can, make some friends, network, contribute meaningfully to projects that you believe in and which pass due diligence, and you will do well regardless of your forum rank. It's really that simple.

People have mentioned looking over the website and whitepaper for obvious typos, bad grammar, etc., and that is a good start. Keep in mind, however, that having a clean and slick looking website and whitepaper is by no means a guarantee of anything. It's very easy to throw a few hundred dollars at a good website with edited content. It doesn't cost much more to come up with cool looking graphics. It is far more difficult to do the real world work it takes to actually deliver on the concept presented. Before you invest, you need to satisfactorily answer the question: Can they deliver?

Also, don't assume you know how to do due diligence if you've never successfully invested before. Look it up and learn what it is and practice looking over financial statements and such. Actually, you could eliminate most ICOs by simply contacting the team and requesting a financial statement of past earnings and expenses. Even if you don't know how to read it, ask for it. Most are unable to even produce that basic bit of documentation, which is why they are trying to bypass the ordinary process of fundraising for their idea in the first place.

Your questions are most welcome here. They represent a different but extremely valuable perspective. A lot of us who are into cryptocurrencies kind of got lucky in certain ways, and now we have to really cram to learn about how investments and high finances really work. So please keep asking, and we may have some questions for you too to help with our education

My wallet works fine and it's on a machine running Windows 10. Could it be a firewall issue?

My #5 post is actually an article that was submitted by the DMD Foundation, and both the original poster and the guy who quoted the post are very involved in the project and likely both worked on the article, so in that case it didn't really matter that I merited a quote of a post. Just a bit of insider information for you

Compilations can be very helpful especially for those who would rather not comb through an entire thread for useful information

I appreciate the support, and we'll see what happens. I'll enjoy giving out s-merit as a source but I'll be OK with out it too

Thanks for getting on it so quickly. I will email them as well and request that DVC get added.

Speaking of the Wild West of ICOs, I posted some questions I have about the Worbli ICO (the example I posted about here earlier). My comment got downvoted by Worbli. I don't want to read too much into it, but it seems to send the message that due diligence type of questions are not welcome. In the Steemit culture, downvoting is fairly rare so when it happens it stands out.

If I ran a project like that I would never want to do anything that could be interpreted as unwelcoming of due diligence. That just seems crazy.

I'm not offended by the downvote or anything. I just find it interesting...

That's interesting that you are tracking s-merit. Who (generally speaking) is receiving it? Does it go primarily to already established members who would likely be very knowledgeable? Or is it going to new members who are showing a capacity to make intelligent posts?

I suppose there will always be those trying to game the system. I guess the best you can do is make it as hard (or better yet, harder) to game the system as it would be to just treat it honestly.

I think one issue is that s-merit is a new addition and I'm not sure the established members have really caught on to how important it is for new members on this forum. It's not like with Steemit where curating content was a part of it from the beginning.

Generally, when one needs points that can only be awarded by other members, then what one needs to do is market and promote oneself in the hopes of being noticed, and possibly flat out beg for merit points. You may write amazing posts, but that's not enough. Those posts would have to be noticed by the right people (those with s-merit to award) as well.

Of course the problem with just anyone having s-merit to award is that they might try to sell it in some way and just award it to those willing to pay for it. I assume that in the merit source application process you would have to agree at some point that you won't do that. And then what would happen if the merit sources become known and become the recipient of tons of PMs begging them to read posts?

I honestly don't know enough about how it's really working to be able to tell if it's helping. I do know that if you join the forum and do honest to goodness networking, forum rank isn't going to matter much. Really, the people I see asking about it or complaining about it seem to be here for only one reason: to make money through signature campaigns. It's helpful to weed them out, so it may be that the system is working perfectly, just not quite in the way initially intended.

I think the way to make it better is to carefully screen some people to be merit sources. There is an application process but from what I understand it's not being vigilantly attended to. The thing is some people, including many longtime members who have s-merit, are really here to network, etc., and they don't even think of awarding merit because they don't see it as important, or maybe don't even know about it. But there are people who would love to award it but they only have a limited amount. So... the solution is to give trusted members a renewing source of merit. That way those who want to curate can, and those who aren't going to get involved in curating no matter how much s-merit they have, aren't going to be hurting anyone.

Thanks for your support. I don't mind waiting a long time to get accepted, but it would be nice to get some sort of confirmation response just letting me know what to expect.

It's not a huge deal to me, but you are correct. I do enjoy helping new people with education and a boost whenever I can.

Part of the issue with merit is that those of us who can give it out tend not to because it's not a habit we're in. I've been giving some out, but I will run out eventually as it's not like my buddies here are meriting me all that much--again, because not in the habit.

You need to have a reason for being here that goes beyond wanting to make money on bounties. If your only reason to be here is to get in on bounties, then I have bad news for you.

I tried to do a few routine things on Steemit this morning and it's not working. For a while I couldn't log in. Steemconnect is freezing. At the moment I'm trying to power down and that's not working. Anyone else having issues?

I've found Steemit to work well most of the time, but it will have these unpredictable and weird partial outages where some aspect doesn't work right. Also, for tax purposes, keeping track of transactions on the Steem block chain is a major pain. I'm actually working on getting out of Steem for those reasons, and into something else that will be easier to work with. That's what you have to deal with when you have limited time.

I guess my power down attempt finally went through...

I hope someone wants to sell, as lots of folks here want to buy! I know I want to buy.

I don't have anything against Israel, so I would invest in a legitimate Israeli company if it fit into my financial goals. It's ICOs I have a lot of hesitations about. The vast majority of them end up never really going anywhere, which means a loss of investor funds. There are, of course, the scams, but there are also those initiatives started by people who mean well and truly intend to deliver, but they lack skills or resources to make it happen. I wrote an article analyzing one particular ICO, but they're pretty much all the same: https://steemit.com/ico/@wiser/a-critical-look-at-an-ico-whitepaper

There's a lot of great advice here. Don't be in too much of a hurry to earn. Learn first. I'd recommend you spend some quality time on DNotesEDU.com It's a financial and cryptocurrency education site with a wealth of knowledge presented in a way that makes sense.

I completely recognize that the merit system has made it more difficult to rank up in this forum. My account was grandfathered in as I've been around for a while and got my rank back when posts and activity were the only criteria. So, when it comes to what shows up on your profile in this particular forum, you newbies have it more difficult.

With that said, keep in mind that this forum is primarily a place where you can learn about cryptocurrencies in general, and also specific projects. For example, if you read some news article about a particular alt coin and you're interested in learning more, you can find its main thread on this forum. It's helpfully linked to on its page on CoinMarketcap.com This forum is also a place to network. You connect with people based on common interests and if you have skills you might put them to work in service of a project you want to support, either as a volunteer or paid contractor.

Once you get involved in a subcommunity here, once you start to get to know people and work with people, honestly no one cares about your rank, so don't worry about it. The only time it really comes into play is with signature campaigns as higher ranking members have more options. But as far as contributing meaningfully to a project or coin's development, your rank here will not limit you at all, so don't worry about it.

The reason most of us old timers who actually have spendable merit don't use it more often is because for the most part we don't care, so we don't think of it. I don't judge you by your forum rank.

I imagine you came here with the goal of getting more involved in the cryptocurrency industry. Then you saw the ranking system and perhaps you got a little sidetracked? Remember your original goal and stick to it.

Unfortunately, often the market manipulators come across to the general public as consultants who just happen to be very good at trading. It's not like they put "Market Manipulator" or "Pump and Dumper" on their Twitter profiles. But some of them have been caught red handed using their subscriber base as fodder for their manipulation schemes. In some cases, their subscribers have been paid subscribers, which makes that abuse all the more blatant.

If you follow an influencer and they start promoting a coin, ask why before you buy.

I believe all the block chain projects are censorship resistant by virtue of the immutability of the block chain and the fact that it's stored on multiple computers, so that is not unique to BTC. But the huge developer community working on value added infrastructure is a very good point, and for now BTC definitely has the edge. I think NEM could be a contender once they have Catapult working for enterprises on more than a pilot basis.