My God! Ethereum's price is crazy low! I can't believe the coin dropped so much of market value! If more Eth-based projects with real use cases rather than useless trading appear, ethereum's price will be backed up, less volatile and more fair. I do hope eth platform will not crush, because our own project (like many others) depends on it. Eth's price is one thing, but if people leave ethereum, the platform developers will have smaller salaries, the top ones will leave as well and the platform might just crush due to the lack of technical support. Let's hope it doesn't come that far.

It's not the end and nobody could seriously believe that. Yes, when the biggest drop from $20k to $6k occured, some were writing that the price can easily go to $2k and even fall to hundreds of dollars. The community was mainly supporting the fall and people saw it as a way of redistributing bitcoins fairly, allowing newcomers to buy at reasonable price and make the system more decentralized as the whales will live such a risky market. But nobody thought it was the end (apart from those who hate the market and think it's all a bubble). Cryptos will inevitably rise again, but they might need a year or so to do that. And perhaps those that will rise will be different from those we see in the top chart now.

Unfortunately, I think that people are holding cryptocurrencies not because they believe they'll need them to pay for goods and services some day in the future. It's really not like that. They are hodlers until the crazy bullish market when they will be able to sell they coins and get high returns on their investments. If we treat cryptos as money rather than as securities, holding is not a very good thing to do. It is in money's nature to be circulating. If money is not used, it stops being money and rather looks like investment. I suppose we can hold it for now, though, as a forced action due to the lack of crypto adoption.

I agree that we should be considering the reasons to be here. I am not sure I believe in the success of the top cryptocurrencies. They are being constantly traded and eventually people might lose interest and these cryptos will crush. What I do believe in is various ways to use blockchain for creating databases and cryptos that will be money, not assets.

People are writing longreads on the factors to analyze while investing in ICOs. Huge lists are not very helpful, because it will take too much time to do the research and there are too many projects one has to look at to make sure one knows what ICOs are generally like. I wrote an article on medium with 5 easy steps to evaluate an ICO before investing: https://medium.com/@nd.invest.ico/is-evaluation-of-icos-really-that-hard-eb063e1eb73f. Do you agree or disagree with the points I made there? What are the main factors you look at when you evaluate an ICO?

I encountered a very nice ICO today and I just wanted to share it here with you to ask what you think of it. I am talking about https://pigzbe.com/, which is a project of launching a half-cold half-online piggy bank and financal educational platform for children. This is an attempt to make cryptos known and interesting to families and to help kids learn the basics of managing finances. I have never seen an ICO that would be child-friendly and I think that it's really good something like this appears, because it can make crypto reputation of money laundering schemes, drug sells and scams wrong.
What do you make of it?

I understand you. Our company has been managing fiat payments online for years now. We sell cars worldwide and each time the whole thing takes a lot of time, fees and nerves. That's why we decided to launch an ICO and release a crypto token to accept it and only it as payment for our and our partners' products. Cryptos are fast, cheap and borderless. People can use it from anywhere in the world and the deals will proceed a lot faster now. The only big tricky thing here is too make sure you don't disobey any laws by using it. Fortunately, our country is not that bad in this aspect, so we don't expect many challenges on our way to crypto adoption.

I think that mainly the problems are different. When the token gets on the exchanges, people who earned it for easy tasks are starting to sell it for at least some money. Then ICO investors look at their investment going down and contribute to panic selling themselves. Not to mention that when the whole market goes down, these tokens go down along with it. Another problem might be that there are truly some issues with the token. It's mining process is going slower than expected, for instance, is what I believe to be the reason behind electroneum's failure.

It's not like people are just thinking it. Each tether is claimed to be backed up by 1 dollar, which makes the price extremely stable. While investing in tether is extremely dumb, it might be a nice coin to freeze the money inside of the crypto area but outside of the market's bearishness. Nevertheless, many people don't do that because they simply don't trust the hold project and think that there might not be enough dollars to back up each tether and once this fact is revealed, the coin will crush.
As for patterns and influences, I don't think btc and tether are connected in any way.

If people sell bitcoin for other coins, this will lead to btc losing its dominance on the market. It is a good thing, actually,  because a heatlhy dominance is below 45%. It might also lead to its price falling, but I don't think that many people will engage in this activity anyway, so the price will probably stay the same. It's too low to fall even more anyway. Eth is crazily low right now, I don't even understand how such a price is possible. I do hope that new successful ICOs will finally try helping the market, not contribute to its already bad condition.

Ethereum's price depends a lot on the number of successfully launched ICOs on it. The market mainly got bearish because of ICO-related FUD, so less people are probably investing in ICOs. This is also true because of the stats on huge sums of money lost by investors in 2017. Less ICOs means eth price dropping. If people try to invest in ICOs carefully, less scamming projects will make it and the price of eth will grow slowly, but confidently.

Thanks a lot for your answer! I guess there's no strict opinion on whether they are useful for an ICO. I'll take a look at their previous campaigns, of course, but it's sort of hard to determine whether the platform is good this way, because we can't know whether those ICOs were successful because or in spite of using KickICO platform. That's why I'd like to hear some stories from people who already were in the teams of the ICOs that used the platform and know for sure whether it's not a waste of time and money.

ND INVEST is planning to start an ICO that will be finished in May 2019. I came by a KickICO crowdfunding platform that claims to help ICOs raise sufficient funds and only collects fees from the money raised and the tokens released in case of success. They want 4% of eth collected and 4% of tokens released during ICO stage. It's not nothing, I can tell you that. But if it really helps to get people to know about the project, it's probably worth it.
Do you know about successfully launched ICOs that used KickICO? Is it a good idea to start a campaign there?
We are just looking for the best options of promotion. We have nice ideas and decent product, but our marketing strategy is currently forming.
Thanks for your answers!

Don't you think that $5k minimum investment is too much? I am sure many people might be willing to risk a couple of hundreds of dollars, but they might simply not posess such a huge amount. Your ICO would benefit from such middle investments and by setting such a limit you are crossing out a rather huge audience. Even though there are already many exchanges, we still lack the perfect one with fast and cheap transactions, huge amount of cryptos and no identification requirements. Good luck with this project!

We probably already found a decent Legendary member to hire as a manager. I also think that bitcoin campaigns are more rare and more valued, posters do better job there. I'll talk to other members of the team about it. Thanks!

Thanks Silent26 and coupable-1 for your advice on managers and escrow! We'll think it through.

Greetings. I represent a developing ICO on this forum and I can see that for people to get to know it more we need an ANN thread and a campaign. Some ICOs start bounties and pay in tokens that are to be released. Others are paying in bitcoin weekly. What is more effective in your opinion?
P.S. I know that people mainly believe that ICOs are scamming people and try not to deal with them, but I really believe that the company I am working for is different. It has a business and simply wants to expand by adopting blockchain and creating the token of its own.
Cheers and thanks for recommendations!

Your website looks a bit weird, because one needs to scroll down to take a look at the main ideas, roadmap and team. Your whitepaper looks very short in comparison with standard-length ones. The countries are named in Russian in the eng whitepaper and there lack some references on the info you used. I take it that your project is still in early stages (like the one I represent), but the idea sounds very attractive and original. Just work a bit more on the lack of content and stuff, I am sure you can succeed after that! Launching ICOs is not an easy task nowadays, but good luck!

Blockchain allows to make sure that no votes of those inactive are 'used' for them and the info voting data is not faked. It is a really nice idea, but blockchain is a partner of democracy in other aspects as well. Decentralization means that there is no vertical hierarchy and while people are playing different parts in the life of society, they all matter equally. Blockchain could be used for managing any kind of data, really. People could be writing laws together with chains being articles from them. Every thought would be encounted, since nothing can be deleted from it. And yet I think that for current society it's a really bad idea. Unfortunately, most of people are easily manipulated by media, poorly educated and lack the acknowledgement of some basic principles of human rights. If we really want democracy, every person should be rational and well-educated, so that the decisions are not made in splashes of emotions. Honest, clever and ethical people are always the minority and if democracy wins, they will be mobbed by the huge aggressive cruel masses. I am not saying it's a good thing that we live in a society like that. But IMO only people meeting certain ethical and educational requirements should be allowed to make decisions. It would be great if everyone was like that. In this case we would have a true democracy, where blockchain would come in very handy.

Let's hope they do. China is a weird country. While considered to be communist, it usually doesn't prosecute the usage of western websites and apps. It also broadcasts American films. From people who've lived there, I heard it's more of a capitalist country, but than some scary things like total camera control of their citizens happen and you realize you're not in the West. This means that they can stop prosecuting crypto enthusiasts, but can suddenly make attempts to ban them. This would be a huge mistake, because one cannot ban the future. ICOs allow people with limited resources and awesome ideas to create great businesses.

Ethereum is not the best for gaming industry, so I don't understand why would one use it specifically this way. If I had to choose a game, I would probably play on ethercrash.io, because I enjoy bustabit-like games. There are various eth-based sites that use smart contracts. It is pretty cool, because with them you can be sure you'll get your reward once you win, but I've also seen some news about smart contracts being extremely buggy, so perhaps I'd better wait until they fix the system.
What eth is good for is investing in ICOs. We are living in times when they are still on the stage of infantry, but they are becoming stronger each month. Investing in ICOs where the usage of tokens is obviously handy and where there's a real business with a real product that launches this ICOs will probably be a smarter choice than simply gambling the money away.