Tezos had a TON of hype, buzz, big names on its big team, tons of social media activity, thousands of followers, etc., etc., etc. They raised $232 million.

But I was never a fan. I avoided it like it was manure. Their value proposition was formal verification and governance. So what? That’s not a new idea. Who was going to execute it? A couple of people who worked in finance? WTF? What the hell do they know about building large, sophisticated technology projects? What have they built before? Nothing.

More news about Tezos just came out:

A U.S. law firm is investigating a class action lawsuit on behalf of U.S. investors in the Tezos ICO
https://restislaw.com/current-cases-investigations/tezos-initial-coin-offering/

They are seeking a refund to the investors.

This is why it is important that you invest in ICOs from countries with extradition agreements. If they screw you over, your lawyers can help get your money back. If the ICO team is in a corrupt country, kiss your money goodbye.

What Lessons Can Be Learnt From Tezos ICO Debacle
https://cointelegraph.com/news/what-lessons-can-be-learnt-from-tezos-ico-debacle


This shows that even an ICO with a big name Venture Capitalist on the team can mean nothing.


Essentially, they were pocketing the money instead of building a prototype or product. It also shows that the White Paper can mean nothing.


Don’t ever invest in an ICO that hasn’t built a prototype or product.

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• Win real value that can be withdrawn from the game or gaming ecosystem, instead of winning just digital goods that are locked in.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.

EOS is one of my favorite projects. Dan Larimer has a great track record in proving that he can build a product. But investors overpaid. Last time I checked a month ago, they raised $230 million. Someone said that they raised $300 million so far. Market cap is at $217 million.

Bancor was another over-bought ICO. Investors gave them $153 million. Now, the market cap is $85 million. That’s a loss of 44%. The price will need to rise 80% for investors to break even.

Tezos Derivatives Crashes Amid Management Infighting after $232 Million ICO
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/tezos-derivatives-crash-amid-management-infighting-and-stalled-development/


Actually, it looks like they are locked at an impasse:


This shows that even if an ICO has Venture Capitalist backing and raises a ton of money, they still cannot prove that they can build a product.


Reduce your risk. Look at ICOs that have already built a prototype or product.


This seems to be the case with most ICOs.

Spectre is impressive because they have an alpha release that you can test out today. This is good news.

However, Spectre is talking about a niche in the trading world, where traders are trading against the broker.

Brokers are typically middlemen between the buyers and sellers. When you are trading on the big brokerage house accounts, such as Charles Schwab, Fidelity, TD, etc., you are trading against other traders, not brokers.

Spectre is talking about going into the market that MetaQuotes, Spot Option and TechFinancials are in. MetaQuotes is the developer of MT4/MT5. MetaQuotes is not a public company, so it isn’t that big. According to Spot Option’s website, they have 150 employees, so it is small. According to TechFinancials’ website, they have 130 employees, so it is small.

Spectre is really a gambling app that lets traders bet against the house. Some gambling sites allow you to bet against other users. Stockbet will allow you to do both.

An issue with Spectre is that they are telling token buyers that they will earn a dividend. This means that they are blatantly pushing a security and likely breaking securities laws. If regulators start enforcing the laws, they will go after these types of ICOs. If they do, then not only will the project team suffer, but so will the token holders.

One of its videos says:


This sounds like a lie. If every trader was winning on every trade, then Spectre and the token holders will lose their shirts. This will only be magnified on higher volume.

The last issue with Spectre is the vig, which is 25%. This sounds very high. But I could be wrong because it could be normal for the niche that Spectre is going into. Most financial betting sites charge far less. If few traders use Spectre because of the high vig, then Spectre and its token holders are not going to make much money.

Blocklancer is going to compete against Upwork. This will be a big undertaking. It will require a ton of software development.

It claims these business problems:


Is that a problem on Upwork?


Is that a problem on Upwork? If you believe so, then maybe Blocklancer is onto something. I don’t think this is a business problem on Upwork. I would think that even if it was, and if it was replaced by thousands of token holders, then it will likely introduce other problems. How much longer is it going to take to get multiple token holders to arbitrate the dispute?

Blocklancer says that token holders will earn fees from the platform. But how profitable is this business? How much profit is Upwork making? If Upwork is making a lot of profit then Blocklancer has potential. But if Upwork is not profitable, I do not see how Blocklancer will be able to pay token holders, especially if Blocklancer plans to charge a lower to fee to customers.

The biggest issue with Blocklancer is that they want to put job offers on the blockchain. I wonder if they have ever run a full node of Ethereum. Putting job offers, and I assume job postings and messages between contractors and employers, onto the blockchain will make it much bigger than Etheneum’s blockchain. Blocklancer will have significant scaling issues and will unlikely ever be able scale as much as Upwork.

They mean nothing unless they improve business metrics, such as improving the combined ratio by X% or improving the returns on investment of the premium pool by Y%, and you can prove these with references.


So, who is deciding which investments (Bitcoin, stocks or fixed-income) to make? The insured member pool or the smart contract? If it’s the smart contract, how will it pick the investments?


What percentage of cars are currently hooked up with telematics that can detect damage? Are you going to turn away customers that don’t have telematics in their cars?


Are you saying that claim info is not stored safely? I’ve rarely heard that this is a business problem in the insurance industry.


Bitcoin can go down 40-50% for 2 years. You’ll likely need to pay claims in that time.


As per your request, I investigated. According to LinkedIn, REGA’s CEO, CMO, COO and CFO have never worked in insurance. REGA’s CTO and Chief Architect have no LinkedIn profiles. With all those people and fancy pretentious titles, they cannot get one person experienced in insurance?

They are asking people to give them money to build an insurance business, when they have little understanding of insurance. In addition to this, they are misleading people when they try to make them think that risk is not currently shared. Like many ICOs, REGA is claiming business problems that do not exist.

According to LinkedIn, the CEO was an "Ethereum enthusiast" before starting REGA. You mentioned the Advisor in insurance. If an accountant tells you that he can do surgery because he has an Advisor who is a doctor, would you let him cut open your heart?

Read:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2243157

for suggestions on how to filter out the scams and crap to find legitimate ICOs.

As an example, the poster above me is pushing Electroneum. Electroneum is dishonest with their sales pitch.

Read:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2243157 (page 3)

for a short write up about CarTaxi

Hello Leo Mor,

What capabilities and efficiencies will new technologies bring to the insurance business? Who or what is going to invest the premium pool? You refuse to answer this question.

You don’t have to call it a bubble if you don’t want. Bitcoin went down 40-50% for two years in 2014-2015. You alluded that your premium pool will be in Bitcoin. What happens if Bitcoin goes down 40-50% again for 2 years? How is REGA going to pay the claims?

So what if Mutual insurance companies lack technological efficiencies as insurtech solutions have. What are these technological efficiencies that will resolve the flaws with REGA that I had pointed out earlier?

Claim adjustment is done by voting? With what information are the token holders going to use to decide how to vote? Let’s say I’m an insured. I claim that my car is destroyed and I file a claim. How are the token holders going to verify that I’m telling the truth? Do I send in photos? If so, I can grab any photos from Google Images and defraud your token holders.

Let’s say my car is truly damaged. How will you ensure that I get it repaired at trustworthy body shops? How do you ensure that I do not send it to my cousin and tell him to over-charge REGA? How do you ensure that I sent you the real receipt, and not a fake one that I made up? Who is going to process these receipts and send the reimbursement to me?

If I was a token holder (voter), I would not want to review information from hundreds of claimants to ensure that they are not defrauding me or over-charging me. Even if your token holders are willing to do this, they are not trained adjusters. Are you going to send them to training school?

I read the white paper. If you want me to go deeper, you need to provide more information and especially good answers to my questions.

I think you’re missing the point. The REGA team didn’t care to go deeper inside the insurance business to understand how it works.

I don't think it's in your best interest to keep discussing REGA. The more we discuss it, the more flaws we uncover.

Hello Leo Mor,

Are you saying that one of the problems of Mutual insurance is that the “investments assets that can chosen by a few people to invest into”? Why is that a problem? What are you proposing? Are you proposing that all REGA users invest the premium pool?

Are you saying that REGA will invest its premium pool into Bitcoin and Ethers? Bitcoin has had 4 bubbles. Nobody knows if this if the 5th bubble. It went down for 2 years in 2014 and 2015. What if that happens again? How will REGA pay its claims if it loses 40-50% of its premium pool?

You wrote: “The excessive funds are returned back to the community by paying premiums back.” Mutual insurance companies do this already. Even then, rarely are they or other insurance companies able to pay premiums back. That’s why mutual insurance companies are small in numbers.

When an insured makes a claim, an adjuster physically visits the insured, inspects the damage and tries to prevent insurance fraud by customers. Are you going to have a fleet of adjusters? How will you build this staff and manage them? How will they be paid?

Hello Leo Mor,

Not only did you claim business problems that do not exist, you are claiming that I wrote things that I did not.

- I never wrote that “decentralized insurance is not needed”. Re-read what I wrote.
- I never wrote “that p2p lending is not needed, because there are centralized banks that know better how to give you money”. Provide the quote. In past comments, I pointed out a poll of Bitcointalk users, the majority of which voted that they do not believe in Bitcoin banks. I did not tell them to vote that way. But if you’re investing in a crypto bank, you should be aware of this. I assume that they voted that way because it is risky to centralize your money, such as in an exchange (dozens have been hacked and stolen from) or investment fund ($50 million stolen from DAO). Even Andreas Antonopoulos, the biggest optimist of Bitcoin, warned about creating a “honey pot”.
- I never wrote the “Blockchain is not needed because there is MC and VISA to transfer money”. Provide the quote. I wrote in the OP:


Blockchain is needed for many applications, which I cited. It takes several days and a lot of fees to withdraw from gambling sites. Crypto is a great solution for replacing credit or debit cards at gambling sites.
- I never wrote “that p2p money such as Bitcoin is not needed, because there are Central banks as emission centers”. Provide the quote.
- Decentralizing is a feature. You need to explain what benefits it creates for your application. Customers do not care about features. They care about benefits, such as saving time or money. REGA’s customers will not save money if they do not invest the premium pool properly.

Decentralizing a currency provides benefits to the currency, such as no single entity (government) can control it, shut it down or print more of it. Decentralizing is needed to create the blockchain and maintain the integrity of the ledgers for a cryptocurrency. Decentralizing is needed for Proof of Work, Proof of Stake, Delegated Proof of Stake or Proof of Importance. Without decentralization, you would not be able to create a crypto currency.

Now that decentralization has created a crypto currency, what are the benefits of the crypto currency over existing currencies? It can be transferred much faster and cheaper than bank wire transfers, Western Union or credit/debit cards at gambling sites. In the long run, it should be better at storing value than fiat currency because governments keep printing more fiat. It is better at storing value than gold in some respects, such as divisibility and cost of storage. These are the benefits ultimately.

You want to create an insurer (or insurers) by decentralizing the stakeholders. (Mutual insurance companies have already decentralized stakeholders.) Now that you have created an insurer, what are the benefits of your insurer over existing insurers?  

Based on your approach and method, it has flaws, and investors should be aware of these flaws.

You haven’t been able to show how the flaws are not flaws. This is what you should be doing to win the confidence of investors.

Nobody buys Bitcoin because it is decentralized. People buy it because it stores value and transfers value faster and cheaper than fiat.

There is pushback on my suggestion about corrupt countries.

Here is the logic behind it.

It is a common statistic around the world that young males cause more car accidents than anyone else. That means you (as most people in the crypto space are young males) are high risk. If you are a car insurance company, you would be crazy to accept the same premium from a young male as from a 45 year old. If you did, you will be losing money in no time. Or, you would accept fewer young males as customers than older customers.

Is every young male a dangerous driver? No. Is every ICO in a corrupt country a scam? No. But you need to assess your risk appropriately based on probability. It makes financial sense to reduce your risk exposure to young males.

As already explained in the OP, law enforcement is a deterrent to criminal behavior. If there was no law enforcement, crime shoots up. More Germans will be scamming and killing Germans. More Canadians will be scamming and killing Canadians. More Australians will be scamming and killing Australians. This is an undeniable fact.

Store owners understand this phenomenon. They secure their stores much more so before a hurricane because they know that the police will be unavailable and criminals will be out to loot.

If there was no law enforcement, why wouldn’t people steal $1 million instead of working at their crappy $20/hour job?

If there was no inter-country law enforcement through extradition, crime shoots up. More Germans will be scamming Canadians. More Canadians will be scamming Australians. More Australians will be scamming Germans.

If there was no inter-country law enforcement through extradition, why wouldn’t people steal $1 million from foreigners thousands of miles away, with impunity, instead of working at their crappy $20/hour job? In the past, this didn’t happen very often because it was difficult to rob a store or bank in another country and drive back home. Now, it is easy with the internet, crypto currencies and ICOs. Scammers can do this without changing out of their pyjamas in their basement.

Many countries have inter-country law enforcement through extradition. Most corrupt countries don’t. If you get scammed by a fellow citizen, your government can help you. If you get scammed by a foreigner in another country without an extradition agreement, you are S.O.L (shit out of luck). You need to be aware of this and assess your risk. If you do not, you will be losing money like the insurance company that accepts too many young male customers.

I’ve heard from ICO team members from a country with extradition agreements. They’ve told me that they think that their coin can increase in value, but they won’t say that to investors, in fear of prosecution from securities regulators. This makes their ICO less attractive to investors. If an ICO tells investors that their coin is going to go up in value and it does not, the ICO is guilty of fraud or false advertising, both of which are punishable. Securities laws have been around for a hundred years. This is because for hundreds of years, there have been scammers selling securities.

But ICOs in some countries need not fear. They can say whatever they want with impunity. This is why I see ICOs making crazy claims about paying dividends, spectacular returns on investment, etc. This attracts buyers. But when the buyers find out that they’ve been defrauded, they are S.O.L.

Read:

3 kinds of ICOs - Protect Yourself
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2243157

Yes, every ICO should have a table, comparing themselves to the competitors, explaining why each of their features, functions and benefits are superior to the competitors.

Most ICOs do not have this. It is naive for investors to think that they don't have competitors. Eletroneum is a great example. They have many competitors:  Monero, NEM, Dash, PIVX and Zcash. These competitors are not new ICOs. These competitors are among the biggest coins on Coinmarketcap. But Electroneum does not even mention them as competitors. I'm sure that there are many newbies who think that Electroneum is the first cryptocurrency on a mobile phone.

Good day, Leo Mor,

1) I never said that the sharing economy is not a trend. I said that there is no such thing as a risk sitting on a parking lot and unused 90% of the time, which is what a car is.
2) Sharing is already intrinsic in insurance. Insurance cannot exist if people do not share risk. Insurance equates to sharing risk. Insurance is one of the first industries to start sharing, starting hundreds or thousands of years ago, when villagers shared the risk by pooling their money together to pay the unfortunate. That’s why many insurance companies have names that start with “Mutual”. "Mutual" insurance companies evolved from people pooling money together to share risk. REGA Crowdsurance is trying to make the reader think that they came up with this idea of sharing risks, which is misleading. "Mutual insurance" companies are already doing much of what REGA wants to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_insurance :  3) These people are supporting the creation of one or more entities into insurers. There’s nothing wrong with that. New insurers are created every day.
4) Vitalik moved to Canada at age 6 and grew up in Canada. Then they started Ethereum in Switzerland. The risks involved has nothing to do with where a person is born. It is related to the country's modus operandi, culture and especially the country's law enforcement. Someone born in Denmark but running an ICO in another country without extradition agreements, where he is immune to punishment from other countries (and from his new country), will much more likely exaggerate and claim anything he wants on his ICO.
5) I have never bought an insurance policy for the strict purpose of obeying rules. I bought insurance because it is a service. If you’re not doing this, then you need to shop around among the thousands of insurers.
6) Yes, the returns from investing the premium pool goes to the insurance company. But if the insurance company cannot invest wisely, they can go bankrupt or fail to pay claims, which hurts the insured. Many insurance companies lose money on underwriting and make up the loss from the investments. REGA or its users will have to do something similar. Who is going to invest the premium pool? REGA or its users? For you to guarantee that you will always be profitable from underwriting is naive. Almost all insurance companies lose money from underwriting in some or many years. Rarely are any insurance companies able to repay premiums because nothing happened to the insured. REGA’s business model is flawed if it is assuming that it will do this.
7) You are claiming a business problem that does not exist. What corruption? There are tens of thousands of insurance companies competing against each other vigorously. The regulations are for the protection of the insured, to ensure that the insurance company has enough capital to pay off claims, to ensure that they do not squander it and to ensure that the insurance company does not take excessive risk by putting the premium pool into derivatives or leveraged bets.

Electroneum has an app, which is very good news. They’re based in a country with lots of extradition agreements, which is very good news. Their business is understandable, which is good news.

They’re probably low risk, with some potential. However, I don’t think they are completely honest. You can read my comments about them in a previous post on page 3 of this thread.

I took a deeper look and found the following:

Electroneum plans to have 21 billion coins with 2 decimal places. This is a mistake as this is not nearly enough (either before or after the decimal place) if they want millions of people to use it.

Bitcoin and Ethereum have scaling issues. As Andreas Antonopoulos said, the reason most altcoins do not have scaling issues is because they do not have as many users yet. Once they do, they will likely face similar issues. Bitcoin’s blockchain is 120 GB in size and growing. You cannot run a full node on a phone.

Their technical white paper says that their blockchain is based on Monero’s and that the phones will not download the blockchain. Computers will. That makes sense. It sounds like the phones will be acting like a mining pool.

But, there are already mining pool apps for phones, such as this one, which mines multiple coins:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.miner&hl=en

Here is an Android app to mine Monero:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.myportablesoftware.minermonero&hl=en

The technical white papers says:


This sounds like the majority of the mining will still be done on computers. So, how much mining will the phones do and how much of the block rewards will the phones get?

Their technical white paper talks a lot about privacy, but this is already provided by Monero, PIVZ, Dash, NEM and Zcash. All of these other altcoins also have mobile wallets.

Therefore, I didn’t read much difference from what Monero already has.

It’s possible that I did not grasp their technical white paper completely. Maybe they’ve invented a way to mine much more efficiently. However, I didn’t see it. They should’ve shown a comparison between their mining and the existing mobile mining apps, and explain clearly how their mining is superior.

As it stands now, there is no evidence or proof that Electroneum's mobile mining is any better than Monero's mobile mining. If you test these two, you'll likely find that Electroneum will run faster, but that is only because its blockchain is so small and they have so few users relative to Monero. So, users who download Electroneum will think it is fantastic. Several years ago, Bitcoin's transactions confirmed in less than a minute. Now, you can wait for more than an hour.

In regards to Cindicator, a prediction market project, I had written the following in a previous post:

---

PeerGuess is one of those ICOs using the same star constellation animation that I've seen on other sites. Are they using the same graphic designer, or is PeerGuess another ICO put out by the same group of scammers? Even if PeerGuess is not a scam, it is TOO LATE and TOO LITTLE.

TOO LATE: Gnosis, Augur and Stox already had ICOs to get into prediction markets, though Gnosis and Stox still haven't built anything yet and Augur built a beta that is barely usable. This shows that execution is much harder than anything they've done before, including an ICO.

TOO LATE and TOO LITTLE: Stockbet already has built software that lets people bet on crypto currencies (and stocks). PeerGuess has a sales pitch.

---

According to Cindicator’s Roadmap:


I searched on iOS app store and couldn’t find anything for Cindicator. Can you?

Startups at Y Combinator consist of 2 founders each and they build prototypes in 6 months. Cindicator has been working on this for 36 months, since November 2014. They’ve stacked their team with 28 people. They should’ve built 6 to 84 prototypes, or multiple products, by now. This shows that ICOs with large teams mean nothing. They are just blowing smoke. Since Cindicator hasn't built anything significant, it probably means that most members add little to no value, but they included them to make you think that they add value. Most members (assuming that they are real people) probably do no work for the project, but simply agreed to let the founders add their names and photos.

I tried to read their white paper, but the scrolling was slow and jerky, so I gave up. If 28 people cannot fix this, how will they build artificial intelligence?

Cindicator is also from that large country that is east of Europe, with no extradition agreements with much of the world. If they screw you, there’s nothing your government can do to help you.

If I have time later, I’ll look at Trackr, Bitjob and Blocklancer.

Read:

3 kinds of ICOs - Protect Yourself
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2243157