Airtoken is lying or sounds like a pipe dream. In order to pay the users for advertising, Airtoken will need to get advertisers and earn advertising revenue. Then it needs complicated processes to show the ads where the advertisers want, to charge properly and to share the revenue with users. This incurs significant costs and is a huge undertaking, which requires much more than just creating an Ethereum token. They need to show how they will be able to do these numerous processes much more cheaply than the existing companies, in order to be able to share some of the advertising revenue with users. Have they ever done anything similar to this before? Probably not. They have 6 reviews of their AirFox Browser on Google Play, probably by people who saw their ICO.

Airtoken’s website states: “Publishers will have higher monetization, new user reach, and a better user experience.” But its white paper does not explain how. Is this blowing smoke?

There is another major problem with Airtoken. They want to provide micro-loans. This is a complicated, costly and money-losing business. Google “micro loan failure” and you’ll see articles like:


Micro loans was concocted by emotional socialists who think with their hearts instead of their brains, which always makes a country poorer.

The Airtoken team only needs to do 5 minutes of research on micro-loans and would have found the above. This means that they are dishonest. If they did not do the research, then they are incompetent.

Somebody asked me to comment on Polkadot.

The white paper is written by Gavin Wood, founder of Ethereum & Parity. This is obviously a credible developer. It passes my first filter with flying colors. It also passes my second filter.

However, I don’t know if it passes my third filter. It is filled with technical features and functions, but little explanation of the benefits. It wants to connect (bridge) different blockchains, which will enable scaling, which is a good thing. However, to do so would be an incredibly difficult task and I question if Polkadot will be able to pull it off. Hopefully, they’ll prove me wrong.

There is another project that is trying to connect different blockchains together, as well, but I forget the name.

If Polkadot wanted people, other than blockchain developers to understand their project, they should’ve done a better job of explaining the problem(s) that they are trying to solve and the benefits of solving those problems to non-technical people. But, do they need to? I don’t see any info about ICO or token sale. Maybe they have enough money from their ETH holdings that they don’t need funding.

One interesting excerpt from the white paper is this:


I’m not quite sure how the Polkadot tokens will go up in value. For any token or coin to go up in value, the usage or demand must go up. Bitcoin is going up because people are throwing money into it to store value. Ethereum is going up because people are throwing money into it, in order to buy tokens at ICOs. What will be the fuel for Polkadot?

If it is indeed Gavin Wood running this project, then it is obviously not a scam or crap. It’s just hard to quantify the benefits of holding Polkadot tokens.

Though, there is one minor stain on Gavin. Someone hacked $32 million from Parity. Who hacked it? Was it an inside job?

Airtoken is lying or sounds like a pipe dream. In order to pay the users for advertising, Airtoken will need to get advertisers and earn advertising revenue. Then it needs complicated processes to show the ads where the advertisers want, to charge properly and to share the revenue with users. This incurs significant costs and is a huge undertaking, which requires much more than just creating an Ethereum token. They need to show how they will be able to do these numerous processes much more cheaply than the existing companies, in order to be able to share some of the advertising revenue with users. Have they ever done anything similar to this before? Probably not. They have 6 reviews of their AirFox Browser on Google Play, probably by people who saw their ICO.

Airtoken’s website states: “Publishers will have higher monetization, new user reach, and a better user experience.” But its white paper does not explain how. Is this blowing smoke?

There is another major problem with Airtoken: Micro-loans, which is a complicated, costly and money-losing business. Google “micro loan failure” and you’ll see articles like:


Micro loans was concocted by emotional socialists who think with their hearts instead of their brains, which always makes a country poorer.

The Airtoken team only needs to do 5 minutes of research on micro-loans and would have found the above. This means that they are dishonest. If they did not do the research, then they are incompetent.

I agree with EnjinCoin.  You can add Unikoin and Stockbet to that category.

Ambrosus doesn’t make sense.  Why do we need a new altcoin to record the history of products?  Even if you record the history of products on the blockchain, how do you know the data is accurate?  How can you trust the inputters of data?  How do you know it isn’t put in by the manufacturers, who will exaggerate or lie?  This sounds like another project trying to put the kitchen sink onto the blockchain.

Read:

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

When looking at ICOs, read:

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

Change-Bank is a silly project. Nobody is going to put their coins in a bank or any centralized place, for the reasons that Andreas Antonopoulos cited. You cannot trust them because it can get hacked or stolen by a rogue employee.

Change-Bank is way too late to the party. Monaco, TenX and Centra are doing debit cards as well.

Banking and insurance are complicated business.  Nobody on Change-Bank's team has any experience in banking or insurance.

When searching for coins, read:

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

When searching for ICOs, read:

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

When evaluating ICOs, read:

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

Read:

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

Read:

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

There are 3 kinds of ICOs:

1)  SCAMS

There have always been a lot of scammers, hackers and thieves in the crypto space since day one. Think of Mount Gox. According to Business Insider:


If you don’t think that these thieves are trying to steal money through ICOs or from ICOs, you are kidding yourself. You just need to see the Bitcointalk forum dedicated to scams, or to participate in a Slack channel and you will see the never-ending phishing e-mails trying to lure you to their sites, in order to empty your wallet.

In addition to thieves and scammers, there are those who lie or exaggerate. Many users on Bitcointalk are pump and dumpers.

2)  CRAP

Everyone is desperate to host an ICO to make money. Therefore, they are throwing anything and everything onto the blockchain, including the kitchen sink. They may not be intentionally trying to scam, but they think that they have a good enough idea for an ICO. But these will fail because the blockchain will not solve anything for them. Examples include ICOs that want to put 3D data (which would equate to hundreds of Terabytes of data) or 153 exabytes of medical data on a blockchain. This shows that they are clueless about the blockchain and have never run Bitcoin’s full node. Bitcoin’s blockchain is 120 GB and Ethereum’s blockhain is 200 GB and they are both having scaling problems.

Even though crypto veterans and fans would like it to be, the blockchain is NOT the panacea to every problem in the world.

ICOs are also throwing any kind of business problem that they can make up, into the ICO. If they cannot make up the business problem, they will exaggerate about it. They will fail because the business problem doesn’t really exist, isn’t significant enough, cannot be solved by a blockchain or they do not really have the solution, though they try to make it sound like they do with lots of technical jargon.

Swarm Fund cites this business problem:


This is a lie and not a business problem. You can buy one share of a REIT, and there are thousands of REITs to choose from, and you can sell it one minute later. If they start off their pitch with a lie, what else are they lying about?

Energi cites this business problem:


Therefore, the solution is to create more energy suppliers, especially nuclear power plants, which is the cheapest source of electricity. But the project does not propose this. They propose to enable consumers to sell their solar self-generated electricity directly to other consumers.

To do this, consumers should have BOTH solar panels and batteries. This is a TINY market. Though solar panels are growing, it is still a tiny percent of the market and solar generated electricity is still much more expensive than nuclear generated.

Consumers with solar panels do not have that much surplus electricity to sell anyways. They use most of what they generate. Tesla and Enphase hyped up their batteries for solar panel owners to store their surplus electricity. These batteries are NOT selling. Enphase spent over $100 million to develop their battery and partly because of the lack of battery sales, their stock has plummeted approximately 85%.

Of course, the project’s pitch looks impressive at first glance.

3)  LEGITIMATE

There are only a few applications that make a lot of sense for the blockchain: transfer of value (currency), store of value, remittances (disrupt Western Union and bank wire transfers), smart contracts, gaming and gambling. These applications will disrupt their respective industries, because the blockchain will provide a lot of cost-savings or time-savings to the users. There might be other applications that make sense that I missed, but applications proposed by many ICOs do not make sense. Jesus Coin is an extreme example, but there are applications that fall across the spectrum from Jesus Coin to Bitcoin.

---

YOU CAN REDUCE THE RISK AND THE NUMBER OF ICOS TO REVIEW, BY USING 3 FILTERS

1)  The project’s idea should make sense, but do not base your investment decision purely on the idea. Watch:

“Ideas are like assholes - everyone has one, no one cares”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhJgrEackis

Entrepreneurs typically try to hide their ideas because they think they are the only ones that came up with the ideas. Venture Capitalists tell them to scream their ideas to the public and they’ll see that nobody will steal them. Ideas are a dime a dozen. There are probably 10 other people with the same idea that you have or that the ICO has. The most important factor to success is the ability to execute. This is why Venture Capitalists refuse to sign non-disclosure agreements and rarely invest in startups which haven’t built a prototype or product.

HAS THE ICO TEAM BUILT ANYTHING THAT WE CAN USE TODAY?

If not, take a pass. This is the best evidence that the team can execute. It takes way more skill, time, work and money to build an app than to create a one-page website and video. It shows:

• The team has proven that they can develop.
• It is less likely that the team will invest so much and not follow through.

Everything else is useless. Don’t be fooled by big teams, fancy pretentious titles, references, roadmap, video, fancy animations, escrow, blogs, Slack, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and white paper.

One project stacked their team with a dozen people and then lied about them. One member had the title of “Blockchain Expert”, but he worked in Inside Sales until 1.5 months prior. One member had the title “Blockchain Developer”, but he never developed a blockchain before.

Here is an example of a project team using fake photos and fake names: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1949528.msg19485217#msg19485217

Don't rely on Github unless you can verify that they didn't copy the code from someone else and you can run it.

Several high profile projects, with big teams, nice videos, lots of social media activity and hype, raised millions of dollars and still have not produced an app. This number will grow and become more evident in the coming years.

Gnosis raised $12.5 million and their website says:


No app yet.

Qtum raised $15.6 million. I don't see anything produced on Qtum's website.

After raising $50 million, Cosmos's website is still pitching its white paper. Come on. What have they produced with that $50 million?

Augur had Vitalik Buterin on their team. After Satoshi Nakamoto, Vitalik is the most desirable person in the universe to have on an ICO team. After raising multiple millions and after two and a half years, all they’ve released is a simple beta that is barely usable.

Don’t be suckered by animations and videos. Satoshi didn’t have any of this and his coin was the most successful. Besides, the animations aren’t that impressive anymore, as I’m beginning to see the same animation on multiple websites. Some of these teams must be using the same graphic designer.

There is no guarantee that any business will not fail. But, when the ICO team has a prototype/product, they have proven that they can develop. That significantly reduces your risk. With many ICOs, you have no idea if they can build anything. You cannot trust the information on the profile of many ICOs. Just because they can hire somebody to make a video, it does not mean they can write thousands of lines of complicated code. It's like you giving money to someone to fix your car, simply because his video says he can fix cars, but he has never fixed one before.

Y Combinator is one of the biggest startup incubators in the world. They provide a small amount of funding (approx. $25k to 50k) to startups, which usually consists of 2 founders each. Then they build prototypes or products. Then the startups give pitches to angel investors or Venture Capitalists. If prototypes or products are unnecessary, then why do they waste so much time and money before pitching to angels and VCs?

Almost all incubators have startups that consist of usually only 2 founders, that are building prototypes and products. ICOs are stacking their team with a dozen people and they still cannot build anything. With 12 people, they should've built 6 prototypes/products by now. This shows that they are simply stacking their teams with useless people, in order to impress you or sucker you in.

2)  IS THE TEAM FROM A CORRUPT COUNTRY?

Check Transparency International's ranking.

If so, take a pass.

The number of ICOs from corrupt countries, especially those that were famous for sending out phishing scams for years, have exploded.

Yes, there are scams from countries that are not corrupt and successful projects from corrupt countries. What is important is the probability and if you are willing to take the extra risk.

In non-corrupt countries, people grow up with lots of regulations and enforcement. Though there are exceptions, the people feel that the way to get ahead is based largely on merit. In corrupt countries, there is less regulation, less enforcement and more people trying to find ways to get ahead by working around the system. In fact, they see that the most successful people in their country, usually in their government, are those who get ahead by lying, cheating or working around the system, instead of based on merit. If you do not think this is a risk, then we will agree to disagree.

Law enforcement is a big deterrent. Hurricanes prove this. After hurricanes Katrina and Irma, there were widespread lootings. Why? Because police are not on the streets and criminals feel immune from punishment.

Law enforcement through extradition is a deterrent. If an Australian defrauds investors in Germany, Germany can extradite the Australian and punish him. This makes the Australian think twice before he defrauds Germans. However, there are many countries without extradition agreements. This provides immunity to ICO teams. Therefore, they can lie, defraud and cheat investors from other countries, and there will be little to no recourse from the other countries. This can bring out the looting mentality.

There are many ICOs enticing investors, by claiming that their token or coin will go up in value or that token holders will get dividends, profits or ownership in other assets. Some tell buyers that they are “investing”. This means that they are selling securities and are breaking security laws.

I watched a video of a conference. ConsenSys was warning about the repercussions of selling securities. Waves’ CEO, who is from a country without extradition agreements with Europe or U.S., debated this, downplayed the concern and shrugged it off. Why should he care? No European or American government is going to be able to punish him if he broke security laws. Even if Europe cannot punish him, if Europe bans his coin, will you suffer?

Without law enforcement, ICOs can lie and get away with it. One project claimed that they will make 400+% return per year for the investor. In countries that enforce securities laws, if you make this claim and do not deliver, investors can sue you. In countries with advertising laws, the police can punish you for false advertising. In countries that are immune from these laws, ICOs can make any claim they want. One of the most egregious claims is when an ICO tells you that you will be a part owner of a physical company. Good luck in getting a judge in their country to force the company to give you equity because you own some ERC-20 tokens. Good luck to you and your multiple flights to that country.

Few corrupt countries have extradition agreements. For those that do, can you rely on their corrupt governments to fulfill their obligations?

3)  “NEVER INVEST IN A BUSINESS THAT YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND”

This is a quote from Warren Buffett. It is very applicable because many ICO teams try to impress the audience with technical jargon. Many investors are not tech savvy and are baffled or confused, but they invest because they think that the project team must have come up with a technological break-through.

Last word:

You need to be able to verify that the business problem exists, that the market size is truly as big as the ICO claims and that the solution is possible. Quite often, they exaggerate on most of these. You need to verify that a blockchain or a cryptocurrency actually is needed for the solution. Quite often, they’re not.

Do not rely solely on ICO listing or rating sites. They likely do not know about all of the ICOs. Not all ICOs are willing to pay to be listed. They have methodologies that you may not agree with. Some claim to be experts, but you are likely more of an expert in your own field, whether that is medical, law, engineering or finance, than they are. They will likely have biases, especially for ICOs originating from their country or region. Putin wants to increase the crypto industry in Russia. Is this why there has been an explosion of ICOs from Russia? Even Putin’s Advisor ran an ICO. If Russia took out Facebook ads to disrupt U.S. and European politics, who is to say that they will not pay off ICO listing and ratings sites to favor Russian ICOs?

There are a few differences between when Ethereum had its ICO and today:

• There are far more ICOs today than back then, so you can be much choosier
• Vitalik was co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine in 2011. This means that he was already a leader in the field, when he started Ethereum in 2014.  Most of the ICOs today are not started by leaders in this field.  Some of them have only been exposed to cryptocurrencies for a few months.
• Vitalik grew up in Canada and Ethereum started in Switzerland. Today, you have many ICOs coming from corrupt countries around the world:  https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016  In 2014, you didn't.

Datum only needs to be a fraction of the popularity of Bitcoin or Ethereum, and it will have a bigger blockchain and have scaling problems.

Facebook, or any company, can process more data than the blockchain, because their databases are centralized. Centralized databases can process much more. That’s one of the reasons that Visa can process way more and faster than the blockchain.

I’m not invested in any coin bank for the reasons I cited:

Nobody is going to put their coins in a bank or any centralized place, for the reasons that Andreas Antonopoulos cited. You are creating a honey-pot for hackers and employees to steal.

I would not invest in Change-Bank because they lie about their team. Their “Blockchain Expert” worked as an Inside Sales Rep until 1.5 months prior. Their “Blockchain Developer” never developed a blockchain before.

Also, banking and insurance are very complicated businesses. None of the people on Change-Bank's team have experience in banking or insurance.

There will be scams from North America or Western Europe and there will be successful projects from corrupt countries. But when you invest, you have to factor in probability. The probability of scams coming from corrupt countries is higher. If you get a phishing email, it's likely from a corrupt country. It's not just scams. The probability of projects that are not well thought out, that do not fully understand the complexities of business, blockchain or technology, that will exaggerate, will be higher from corrupt countries as well.

Swarm Fund is lying. They say that you need large amounts of money to buy real estate and your money is tied down for an indefinite amount of time. This is false. You can buy one share of a REIT, and there are thousands of REITs to choose from, and you can sell it one minute later.  If they start off their pitch with a lie, what else are they lying about?

There is another flaw with Swarm, which is similar to the flaw with CombiCoin. You will have to trust that the coin is backed up LEGALLY by the land title of the real estate. Who is the owner of the real estate? John Doe? Who is to say John Doe will uphold any agreement that the real estate, which has his name in the municipal records as the owner, will be ascribed to the coin holders?

I would put BurstIQ in the same bucket with Datum and ARToken: The stupidity bucket. As soon as I saw “153 Exabytes of Data” on their website, I stopped reading. This shows that they know nothing about the blockchain or they are lying.  

Bitcoin is already having scaling issues with its 120+GB blockchain and it’s only storing small numbers for each transaction. Ethereum’s blockchain shot past Bitcoin’s and is approx. 200GB. Scaling is Ethereum’s biggest issue. It stores only smart contracts. Who is going to run BurstIQ’s full node of 153 Exabytes? You?

The only way to process that much data is to do it centrally, which means that you cannot have a decentralized system. When its centralized, then you risk the chance of someone stealing the data, like what happened with Equifax. Even then, I’m not aware of any company in the world that can process a database of that size.

I tried to start Confideal’s smart contract but MetaMask told me:


So much for that.

Change-Bank is way too late to the party. Monaco, TenX and Centra are doing debit cards as well.

Also, nobody is going to put their coins in a bank or any centralized place, for the reasons that Andreas Antonopoulos cited. You are creating a honey-pot for hackers and employees to steal.

Also, they lie about their team. Their “Blockchain Expert” worked as an Inside Sales Rep until 1.5 months prior. Their “Blockchain Developer” never developed a blockchain before.

Also, banking and insurance are very complicated businesses. None of the people on Change-Bank's team have experience in banking or insurance.

CarTaxi got a 2.9 out of 10 rating:  https://hacked.com/ico-analysis-cartaxi/  I’m scratching my head trying to figure out why a blockchain is needed to tow cars.

In order for an entity, like CarTaxi, to pay dividends before it is making profit, let alone in operation, then it is a ponzi scheme.


Augur had Vitalik Buterin on their team. Vitalik is the best person in the entire crypto industry that you can add to your team. After raising millions and after two and a half years, all they’ve released is a simple beta that is barely usable.

There are a number ICOs, that haven’t raised anything yet and they already have more software built. Enjin, Funfair and Stockbet already have much more than Augur’s beta.

If anyone understands blockchains, they would know that the Datum team consists of idiots.

Bitcoin is already having scaling issues with its 120+GB blockchain and it’s only storing small numbers for each transaction. Ethereum’s blockchain shot past Bitcoin’s and is approx. 200GB. Scaling is Ethereum’s biggest issue. It stores only smart contracts.

Datum is like ARToken, which wants to store TONS and TONS of data on a blockchain. Good luck with that. Its blockchain will need to be hundreds of Terabytes. Who is going to run its full node? You?

Change-Bank is way too late to the party. Monaco, TenX and Centra are doing debit cards as well.

Also, nobody is going to put their coins in a bank or any centralized place, for the reasons that Andreas Antonopoulos cited. You are creating a honey-pot for hackers and employees to steal.

Also, they lie about their team. Their “Blockchain Expert” worked as an Inside Sales Rep until 1.5 months prior. Their “Blockchain Developer” never developed a blockchain before.

Also, banking and insurance are very complicated businesses.  Nobody on Change-Bank's team has any experience in banking or insurance.

The easiest way to filter out the shit and scams is to use 3 filters:

1)  HAS THE TEAM BUILT ANYTHING THAT WE CAN USE TODAY?  If not, ignore.  Everything else is useless.  There have been many projects with impressive teams, fancy pretentious titles, detailed roadmaps, cool videos and lots of social media activity that have raised millions and still have not released any software.  Let me know if you want examples.

2)  IS THE TEAM FROM A CORRUPT COUNTRY?  If so, ignore.

https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016

3)  RESEARCH THE PROJECT and don't be suckered by the fancy animations and videos.

And don't be scammed by comments from users who are interested in pumping and dumping.

Augur had Vitalik Buterin on their team. Vitalik is the best person in the entire crypto industry that you can add to your team. After raising millions and after two and a half years, all they’ve released is a simple beta that is barely usable.

There are a number ICOs, that haven’t raised anything yet and they already have more software built. Enjin, Funfair and Stockbet already have much more than Augur’s beta.

Change Bank stacked their team with a lot of people. Then they lie. Their “Blockchain Expert” worked as an Inside Sales Rep until 1.5 months prior. Their “Blockchain Developer” never developed a blockchain before.

There have been several ICOs with large, impressive teams. After raising millions, they haven't released anything yet.

If Crowdholding has a working beta, then that is good news. However, I can’t find it on their website. Have you used it? Have lots of people used it to help guide a startup to success?

Their white paper says that the problem is that too many startups fail due to lack of market need. Their solution is that funders (YUPIE token holders) will be able to tell the startups how to find market needs.

This is ridiculous. If this is the case, then companies would be asking their shareholders on what the market needs. Google, Apple, Facebook and the hundreds of thousands of companies should be asking their shareholders about market needs. They don’t. Why not? Because the shareholders do not know. The only people who will know are the end-users and customers. That’s why companies spend billions on market research, focus groups, free samples, surveys, trial products, etc., etc. The only people who knows and will tell the truth are those who have to part with their money and will get enough value in return to justify it. Anyone who has studied Marketing knows this.

Let’s say that there is a startup that wants to sell Japanese seaweed snacks. How much are you willing to pay for the snacks? What would you recommend to the startup? Even if you wouldn’t eat this, how would you know others won’t? You may never have tasted it before, so you will have no idea.

Even if this idea has merit, how do you, as a YUPIE token holder, know for sure that startup companies will reward you after they succeed? The tokens are not legal contracts. You cannot get a judge to force the company to pay.

Startups take many years before they are financially successful. Most companies are still losing money when they go IPO on the stock market. Amazon is barely making any profits. Twitter is still losing money. Facebook took way longer than most companies to IPO and they barely showed a profit. How long will you wait before Crowdholding’s startups start rewarding you?

Crowdholding is simply a stupid idea, and will fail. Most people do not see this because they haven’t spent enough time in the business world and are impressed by lots of jargon and big teams with fancy titles.

Many people who recommend on these forums are pump and dumpers, or lack knowledge about business, technology or the blockchain.

Have you read Energi’s short white paper?  They cite the main problem is:


Therefore, the solution is to create more energy suppliers, especially nuclear power plants, which is the cheapest source of electricity. But Energi does not propose to create another supplier. They propose to enable consumers to sell their self-generated electricity directly to other consumers.

This is a TINY market. To do this, consumers need to have BOTH solar panels and batteries. Though solar panels are growing, it is still a tiny percent of the market and solar generated electricity is still much more expensive than nuclear generated.

Consumers with solar panels do not have that much surplus electricity to sell anyways. They use most of what they generate. There is strong evidence of this. Tesla and Enphase hyped up their batteries for solar panel owners to store their surplus electricity. (Batteries are needed in order to sell your extra electricity.) These batteries are NOT selling. Enphase spent over $100 million to develop their battery and partly because of the lack of battery sales, their stock has plummeted approximately 85%.  Do your own research.

Energi shows a diagram of Current System where consumers sell their surplus electricity to the Supplier and the Supplier sells it to other consumers. Then Energi shows a diagram of their solution, where consumers sell electricity directly to each other, to bypass the Supplier (middleman). How will consumers be able to do this? Will consumers hook up wires from their houses to the other houses that want to buy from them? No consumer is going to do this.

Even if a few deranged consumers spend the thousands of dollars to do this, why do they need a new token? Why can't they use BTC, ETH, NEM, PIVX, DASH, etc.?

Then Energi tries to mislead you by telling you that


But this is mostly nuclear and coal generated electricity and has nothing to do with consumers selling their solar, self-generated electricity.

Solar generated electricity is still more expensive than from the utility companies. The main reason people put up solar panels is because of government subsidies. If debt-ridden governments stop subsidizing, solar industry will crash. Think of Solyndra, which drained $535 million from taxpayers and still went bankrupt.

Energi cites this problem as well:


This is so ridiculous, it’s essentially a lie. EVERY company in the world makes more money from selling more. This does not mean that consumers are not incentivised to change behavior.

Energi cites this problem as well:


That’s because it costs $9 billion to build another nuclear power plant. How will Energi lower this barrier? By creating a token? You’re a sucker if you believe this.

Energi’s team is in the UK. Does that make them experts on how the energy trading business works in the other 100 countries? To try to replace the existing businesses in all these countries will take hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and decades.

Spend 5 minutes to do some research and you'll find serious problems with most ICOs. Most of these white papers are so empty that it takes less time to read them than business plans.

With Ambrosus, why do you need to a new crypto to store product history? Who cares? Let’s say someone wants the data, how do you know it isn’t put in by the manufacturers, who will exaggerate or lie?

Why invest in Crypto, instead of TenX, Monaco, Centra or Change bank, which are all doing debit cards?

Blockv.io is trying to impress you by baffling and confusing you with technical terms. I see no compelling problem that they are trying to solve. So pretentious…and so greedy. The team is keeping 65% of the coins. WTF?

DOVU says people will pay for car data. Who will? What value are they going to get when they can already get tons of data from a fleet of test cars. Let’s say there are, why wouldn’t they pay with BTC, ETH, USD, EUR or any other existing currency?

I see nothing new with Electroneum. Mobile? Lots of altcoins can be on the phone. Privacy? Monero, PIVX and Zcash already can do that. Offline wallet? This is when Electroneum starts misleading. They state:


Are they trying to make you think that there are no offline wallets for Bitcoin and Ethereum? There are LOTS of them.

Request Network sounds like a me-too. Bitpay and other companies already enable online payment.

Hedge is another me-too. There are already many investment funds, and they all suffer the same problem as exchanges or DAO. By doing the taboo, centralizing, you are putting all of your money in a honey pot, which can be stolen by hackers or employees. Hacker stole $50 million from DAO.

Take every recommendation with a grain of salt. Not all, but many recommenders are into pumping and dumping.

It's EASY to detect most of the shit or scams, and most of the ICOs are shit or scams.

You only need to do about 5 minutes of research and you will find major problems with most of the ICOs.

Most of the ICOs have built nothing that you can use today. That is a major flag. This means that they cannot prove that they can build anything.

Several project have raised millions of dollars and still have not built anything, despite their 10 member teams and fancy videos. This number will explode in the coming years.

Most of the recommendations seem to be for projects that cannot prove that they can build anything.

Crowdholding’s big team means nothing. I’ve seen projects that have stacked their teams with a dozen useless people and then they lie, such as Change-Bank.

Change-Bank is stupid. Nobody is going to put their money in a centralized location, in fear of getting it stolen by hackers or employees. Their debit card is too late. Monaco, TenX and Centra doing debit cards as well. Banking and insurance are very complicated. Their team has no experience in either.

They lie about their team. Their “Blockchain Expert” worked as an Inside Sales Rep until 1.5 months prior. Their “Blockchain Developer” never developed a blockchain before.

Don't rely only on ICO rating organizations.  They may claim to be experts, but you don't know for sure.  You are likely more knowledgeable about your field, whether it be medical, engineering, gambling or finance, than they would be.

They would also be biased.  Some are staffed by mainly people from a certain country or region.  Does that mean that they are biased for ICOs that are from their region?  Putin hosted Vitalik Buterin in Moscow.  Russia wants to grow the crypto industry in their country.  After that, there has been an explosion of Russian ICOs.  Is Putin funding these ICO ratings organizations to favor Russian ICOs?  We just found out that Russia took out lots of ads in Facebook, to disrupt US and European politics, so it wouldn't be stretch to think so.

I would recommend against most of the recommendations made on this forum.

Some of them might be valid but most are trying to pump and dump, as most buyers seem to be interested in mainly dumping their tokens immediately after the ICO ends.

It would also seem that most people on the forum lack acumen, critical thinking and research capabilities. You only need to do a few minutes of research and you can find serious problems with many of the ICOs.

I came across a recommendation one time that recommended a project that would put 3D data onto the blockchain. This shows that they know NOTHING about the BLOCKCHAIN and that the project has never even run a full node for Bitcoin or Ethereum. Both of their blockchains are already having serious scaling issues with 200 GB of data, and the new ICO wants to put hundreds of Terabytes of 3D data on the blockchain.  Idiots.

The ICO space is filled with people who understand little about technology, blockchain or business.

Andreas Antonopoulos said that 99% of the ICOs are shit or scam. I'm beginning to think that he is right.

As I've written in the past, you can easily filter out most of the shit or scams by using 2 simple filters:

1)  HAS THE PROJECT BUILT ANYTHING THAT WE CAN USE TODAY?  If not, move on.  EVERYTHING ELSE IS USELESS, including team, fancy pretentious titles, references, roadmap, video, fancy animations, escrow, blogs, Slack, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and white paper.  Several projects with impressive profiles raised multiple millions and still haven't delivered any software.

EOS raised $230 million and said that they were going to release something by end of summer.  Nothing yet. With $230 million, EOS should have solved world hunger by now.

Gnosis raised $12.5 million and their website says that they are releasing their game by first half of 2017. Nothing yet.

Qtum raised $15.6 million. I don't see anything produced on Qtum's website.

After raising $50 million, Cosmos's website is still pitching its white paper. Come on. What have they produced with that $50 million?

MobileGo raised $53 million. Here's the roadmap from their white paper:


However, I don't see any of that on their website. They're mainly bragging about how their token is on exchanges. What are they doing? Day-trading their own token?

2)  IS THE TEAM FROM A CORRUPT COUNTRY?  If so, move on. In corrupt countries, ethics and honesty are more lax, which means that they will have a higher tendency to exaggerate or lie.

https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016

There are ICOs coming from countries that sent out thousands of phishing scams in past years. Why would you take the risk of investing in ICOs from those countries?

I've come across projects that stack their teams with over a dozen useless people. Then they lie. They give them titles like "Blockchain expert" or "Blockchain developer". I researched into their backgrounds and the "expert" worked in Inside Sales until 1.5 months prior. The "developer" never developed a blockchain before.