Check out A beginner’s guide to Ethereum tokens.

Bounty campaigns are usually to promote a new token sale. That's why you get paid in tokens. After the ICO the token could be listed in an exchange, but there is no guarantee of what its value will be.

dApps are decentralized apps, which are applications built on top of Ethereum platform and a DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization, which is a decentralized company based on smart contracts.
An ICO usually distributes tokens and their meaning or value depends on the project.

When someone says the founders should cut the umbilical cord with the project they are probably talking about making the project decentralized. Usually the developers/founders make an ICO to distribute token and keep part for themselves as a compensation for their work. When the product is built and functional, if it makes sense for the business it could be left to be managed in a decentralized way by the community. In some cases it makes sense, in others don't. But if the founders stay connected to the project/platform they could be held liable for an eventual problem or represent a single point of failure.

It varies from iCO to ICO. Usually you can define this rules in the ICO smart contract. I've seen projects that don't allow token creation after the ICO ends and projects that do. Sometimes it is impossible to issue more tokens, but the founders keep a reserve for a future token sale if needed. If you don't have experience with smart contracts you should check if the ICO contract was audited by someone reliable.

Not always the sentence "the whole idea is for it to be decentralized" is true. In fact, most ICO are public token sales to fund the development of a product, platform or service in a centralized way. An ICO should exist to cover development expenses, but the roadmap is controlled by the Dev team. If you participate in an ICO it won't allow you to "vote" on development decisions. But, again, it varies from project to project. Maybe in the whitepaper of a specific ICO project they state that the token issued will be used as a share with decision power, and the more tokens you hold more powerful your vote is.

This is all defined in the smart contract and token sale rules. You can have an ICO distributing 100% of the tokens, or only 1% or anywhere in between. You can have a token that can only be created during the ICO period and a token that the owner can create whenever they want. Investors should look at the contract code (or at an audit results report) and decide by themselves if it is reasonable.

I assume that at this point, from my others answers, you have undestood that it is not as decentralized as you were thinking. The ICO smart contract has an owner, that is an Ethereum account, which can be managed by one or more of the founders. They control the ETH raised during ICO. They can cash out right after the ICO ends and use the money to pay salaries, bills, marketing and whatever they want. It is possible to create mechanisms to prevent them from offloading the ETH as soon as the ICO ends, and they have an escrow controlling the funds, but again this parameters are specific for each project.

Usually, when you invest in a project during ICO phase, you are trusting that the team can deliver what they are promising and you believe in the potential of their idea / value proposition. More experienced investors are able to judge if the project seems legit based on smart contract auditing, roadmap viability, team background and stuff like that. If it is not stated in the smart contract code, it doesn't matter that it is written on the website or in the whitepaper, people would be able to act diferrently. If the website says "maximum cap is of 50,000 ETH" but you can't find it in the smart contract code, it is up to them to stop the fundraising when they reach the maximum cap.

Even though I am a big supporter of the blockchain technology and specially of Ethereum, I am keeping an eye on Byteball and BlackByte development. They use a different technology (DAG instead of blockchain) and BlackByte looks like a promising coin for anonymity.

Thery are currently distributed for free if you already own Bitcoin or Byteball. Byteball is traded in exchange, but Blackbytes are only traded agains byteball in their own wallet.

There are a lot of game related projects using alt coins (there is GameCredits, FirstBlood, and a lot of Ethereum-based gambling tokens), but I don't know if there is already something related to Bitcoin. But of course you could think about selling items in RPG online games using Bitcoin.

In some exchanges (such as Bitfinex and Poloniex) there is the option of margin trading, where an user can borrow crypto coins from other users to trade with leverage: "Bitfinex allows trading participants to use third party peer-to-peer financing from other participants on the platform to trade Digital Tokens. Financing Recipients may obtain financing in one of two general ways: they may place bids for financing on the Financing Order Book; or, they may elect to be automatically matched through the Site’s order matching engine with one or more Financing Providers on the Financing Order Book at the best prevailing price on the Financing Order Book."

You can lend BTC, ETH and other coins to other people and get them back with interest.

The longer you lend it, the better are the rates you get. But if you lend it for, say, 30 days, and suddenly (before the 30th day) price goes up and you want to sell, you won't be able until the person who borrowed from you send it back to you.

There are already other smart contract platforms. Some were originated from Ethereum forks (such as Ubiq and Expanse) and others are independent.

However, Ethereum is still under constant development and they have new releases planned to solve the issues you mentioned. You should try to read about the Metropolis release planned for later this year and plans of implementing Proof-of-Stake and other improvements in the network.

I googled it and found a post from february that looks interesting:
https://www.ethnews.com/ethereums-road-map-for-2017

So, for me, Ethereum technology still plays a major role in the future of blockchain and I am not looking for another smart contract platform to support.

Bitcoin = First decentralized digital currency, widely adopted, very solid, entrance door to crypto world.
Ethereum = Smart contract platform on Blockchain, enables development of decentralized apps and decentralized autonomous orgs.

Why do I keep seeing threads comparing both or saying one will kill the other?
Blockchain technology is still very new to general public and both (bitcoin and ethereum) are now undervalued if you think about future potential. When the value of Bitcoin increases, it makes all other coins stronger.

I have never tried EtherDelta, but if you want to do so maybe you should create a new wallet, but a small amount of ETH (or other tokens you want to trade) and try it yourself. If you find out that it is not safe after all, at least you won't lose everything at once. Keep your private keys of your main wallet to yourself until you get confidence. And always double-check URLs (myetherwallet, etherdelta, and all the other where you need to paste your private key).

I know that recently a lot of people are angry or annoyed by scams and really weak projects raising a lot of money, but imagine this wasn't the case. Without recent frauds and other problems, don't you think that the idea of a democratic crowdsale to fund a promising project that could increase the blockchain technology popularity and maybe help to improve the quality of a specific market segment or product has everything to do with what you call "the basics of crypto"?

I am interested in why do you think ICOs go against the basics of crypto and what are the basics of crypto to you.

I am not saying I support any kind of ICO and I am expecting some kind of change in the current scenario to help prevent people from falling for scams and solve other ICO issues, but "the basics of crypto" for me is about decentralization and allowing anyone in the world to get access to investment and participation in different projects and technologies they support, no longer relying on big corporations, regulators and government to do so.

I think that, problems apart, the ICO model was a big disruption in traditional investment model but now some malicious people are trying to take advantage of it. Besides, I don't think that this problem (of scams and people trying to take shortcuts to big profits) is unique to ICOs.

Well, I won't comment on specific ICOs as saying they are good, bad, promising, scams or anything like that, but I will share my vision.


To start, I think the answer to that question is pretty straight forward. I believe that even people that want to support the blockchain projects and community wouldn't invest just to help the people behind the ICO, everyone is expecting finantial returns. What do I think investors think to get in return? Money.

This happens because before this ICO madness began it was something less accessible and more risky to common investors (as it still is, but now more people are interested). One year ago a promising ICO would have raised around 5 million dollars and be considered succesful, and then as the company starts to show progress in their project development more people want to invest in them (through exchanges, after ICO period) and them its market value increases a lot, and people that participated on the ICO get higher profits.


You should invest in an ICO if you think the project's value proposition is good, if it makes sense to be in the blockchain and if you trust the team can deliver what they are promising. If this is the case, price volatility is a common thing in crypto currencies and you should keep yourself updated about the project you invested in and see if their business is growing. Finantial returns should come naturally if you believe in the technology potential and in the specific application the ICO is proposing.

I have been following Ethereum-based projects for a while and there have been a lot of exciting ICOs in the recent past (such as Golem, Iconomi, BAT, TenX and others).

I see the blockchain technology and specially the smart contracts playing a major role in revolutionizing exchange of goods and services in a decentralized way.

ICOs are a good way to finance good projects avoiding traditional red tapes and paperwork, but the success of promising projects ICOs led to some people believing they can raise millions without a good plan or innovative idea.

Of course there will still be some good ICOs, but you need to separate the wheat from the chaff before thinking about investing.

Since ICOs are drawing a lot of attention, we can expect more regulation in the future, as recent news about the SEC are showing.

As mentioned, Ethereum is a platform and technology, and it is not competing with Bitcoin.

I really support Ethereum and I don't think it really matters which one has the biggest market cap, for me both are undervalued right now.

Bitcoin is being accepted in more and more places and in some countries, including mine (Brazil) it is still the only way to enter the crypto world (meaning that I still can't trade my local fiat currency directly to ETH yet in Brazilian exchanges, I need to buy BTC first and then trade it for ETH), but as an investment and technology I prefer Ethereum.

I like the idea of descentralized exchanges to trade between ETH and Ethereum Tokens, or even between different blockchains if possible (as I read Waves is introducing an Ethereum trading gateway).
I also like the Bancor Protocol that introduces smart tokens with reserves of other tokens so you can trade directly from the smart contract.
But for now as ahmedjamal mentioned you still need centralized exchanges to trad fiat for crypto (unless you already have so much invested in crypto that you won't need to use more fiat  )

I left my feedback. I like the idea of a game that helps people to learn about blockchain, since I believe in the future of the technology.
But I think the game needs to have more than that to keep people interested.

Unfortunately I don't have any idea on dividends distribution. Earlier this year Iconomi published a post introducing their repayment program using buybacks and explained why:
https://medium.com/iconominet/iconomi-introduces-repayment-programme-54bfa449d458

I have been thinking about this and did some research but the problems pointed by Iconomi's team really make distributing dividends difficult. This is another good analysis:
https://hackernoon.com/the-iconomi-burn-crypto-buybacks-f9edb30530fe

As they wrote, problems include:
 - Exchange cooperation: "Dividends create a variety of problems in the digital asset space, one of the primary concerns is paying dividends to tokens held on an exchange. Dividends would be sent to the exchange’s custodial address, not the individuals who should own them, as they are the custodian(holders) of assets on their exchanges."

 - Transaction fees: "There is also the transaction cost of sending dividends to ICN holding addresses, as there are currently thousands, and it is likely there will be MANY more in the future."

 - Regulation issues: "Having a dividend pay out pretty much guarantees that an asset will be considered a security according to regulators - which means heavier regulation concerns and government interference."

 - Lost addresses: "The case of lost ICN holding address keys/passwords is also important. The infant cryptospace is filled with the unfortunate mishandling of important data. It seems that almost daily there are new stories of people who lost their passwords, accidentally deleted important files, or their computer broke and they didn’t have a backup of their wallets."

So I would stick with buybacks, as did Iconomi.

Bitcoin won't kill what you guys call "altcoins" in the same way that altcoins won't kill bitcoin because they have different purposes.

Some (or most) of the alternative coins discussed here are platforms using the blockchain wuth more functionality than just coins. We have smart contract platforms, games, investment funds, advertisement platforms. Bitcoin will probably remain as the entrance door for the cryptocurrency world (even when Ethereum surpasses its market cap) and maybe the global digital currency of choice for general population, but Ethereum and its tokens will be the technology behind Web 3.0

Ethereum is not the only technology with Smart Contracts, so I will split my answer in two:

 - Why smart contracts?
The blockchain technology introduced with Bitcoin provides a public record of transactions that you can't change in your favor. The smart contract technology exists since before Bitcoin, and consists of contracts between two or more parts that don't need human intervention to be executed. It provides security and lower contracting costs compared to traditional contracts. Associated with the blockchain transparency, it becomes more powerful since you can keep the contract terms recorded publicly in a immutable way.

 - Why Ethereum?
Ethereum is the biggest smart contract platform today. The same way Bitcoin is the strongest crypto currency because it is the first and more solid, the most prominent smart contract implementation is the Ethereum blockchain platform. A lot of big companies are using or supporting Ethereum (check the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance at: https://entethalliance.org/) and the technology is probably going to evolve more and more.

So, why Ethereum smart contracts?
Because they represent the next Internet generation, with the decentralization of everything. With Ethereum smart contracts you won't need Uber to connect drivers and passangers, and you won't need Airbnb to connect hosts and guest, and so on.

The only difference between the two addresses is that the first one has all letters in lower case.

Ethereum addresses are not case sensitive. If that is really the only difference between the addresses, you didn't do anything wrong. The exchange provided you the address in lower case, but after the transaction got registered in the blockchain it shows the address with case sensitivity that is used for optional checksum.

If your ETH didn't appear in your tradeqwik.com balances yet, contact their support with your transaction ID, it is probably an exchange problem.

Well, in my opinion serious projects start before the ICO. I don't think you should "decide to have an ICO to raise millions of dollars" and then look for team and look for an idea of product.

Of course this could work out for you, but I wouldn't be one of the investors willing to send ETH to this ICO that came out of nowhere.

I think that usually team members already know each other (have worked together before), usually have blockchain/technology background, and have an ongoing project or an idea to start a new product that could take advantages of blockchain technology.

When you have your business value proposition figured out you can come up with a budget plan that should guide you in the decision making regarding how much you should raise and stuff like that.

It is not very difficult to learn Solidity and smart contracts development if you already have a programming background.

There are already some good books, but you can start studying online as well.

If you really don't know anything yet, this is an introductory tutorial with sample code available in Ethereum website:
https://ethereum.org/token

This is a simple example of smart contract for creating a custom token.
There are more tutorials there:
https://ethereum.org/crowdsale
https://ethereum.org/dao

For quick testing your first "hello world" contract, you could try the Remix online solidity IDE:
https://remix.ethereum.org/

After going through these beginner level quick examples, you can see if you are interested in buying more advanced books and explore the language a bit more. I recommend using the Ethereum wallet (Mist) on a Linux OS to deploy a contract is the Testnet and really start having fun with smart contracts.