The concept of ICOs is still as good as ever. The word has gotten a dirt aura because of substandard ones, but that doesn't mean that ICOs in general are bad.

It certainly makes more sense to invest in a coin in an ICO than on an exchange, as that's when you get the cheapest price.

I've come up with seven in my research so far, which is more than I'd expected. I bet there's more. Anyone want to compare and contrast these?

• https://www.rightmesh.io/
• https://smartmesh.io/
• http://skycoin.net/
• http://ammbr.com/
• http://openlibernet.org/
• https://iungo.network/
• http://altheamesh.com/

I don't trust either one.

EOS doesn't have a working project, is run by an entrepreneur with a history of leaving projects half-finished (Dan Larimer), and is using its control over the Steemit platform to unethically market themselves.

• https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2000232.0

IOTA lie about partnerships on a regular basis, and their tech simply makes no sense. It is like, "Yknow that hashpower that makes Bitcoin stable? Let's get rid of that. What could go wrong?"

IOTA is not secure. The ledger can be attacked. This will happen, and it will be ugly.

• https://twitter.com/asozialdemokrat/status/981665979863355392
• https://medium.com/@ercwl/iota-is-centralized-6289246e7b4d

Even if you're just a trader looking for speculative profits, I'd steer clear of these. You might come out ahead by the greater fool principle, but it's very risky.

Day trading is a total crapshoot.

It's entirely about doing blind guesswork, and then being fooled by the randomness.

You can make a bit of money, but on average you'll do worse than passive investors. Now, at times you will do much much better, but don't let that fool you into thinking that daytrading is superior in some nonrandom way; the nature of randomness is that it's sometimes above average.

Why stress yourself out with all that staring at charts when you could just buy&hold and go for a walk?

Yep, just starting to do it at scale.

Plus I used to mine Litecoin and Doge back when you could do it on a desktop computer.

Steemit is biased. Dan Larimer is the architect of both EOS and Steem.

To be honest, Bitcoin has failed to solve the scaling question. It had years to do it, and it's time to call it a failure.

Transactions are slower than ever, and fees are higher than ever.

I remember Bitcoin transactions being basically free and instant.

It's gotten so bad that it'll have to be replaced. It's certainly failing to do its job as peer-to-peer electronic cash.

Doubt is a good thing. You don't want to get rid of doubt entirely - that would make you overly/unrealistically optimistic

You should be prepared for Bitcoin to go up as well as down.

Bitcoin has a scaling problem. SegWit failed to make that any better.

It also has a centralisation problem.

Given that it was the first, I imagine it will probably be replaced by something more sophisticated that can learn from its mistakes, like MySpace.