In regards to PlayKey, they seem to be much further along than most ICOs. They not only have a working product, but they had it for a few years and it looks impressive, though I didn’t try it. Their business is understandable.

If they got 2.5M users in 2016, I do not understand why they need an ICO or another cryptocurrency. Why don’t they continue growing their customer base? If their market is truly as big as they say, then they should be able to make more money by growing their revenue instead of fund-raising through an ICO.

Why don’t they show any revenue from the 2.5M users? Does this mean that they really don’t have 2.5M users, or that their free service does not provide enough value to warrant a fee?

Their website says that the game industry is $109 billion. This is misleading. This would include games for infants and Zynga Poker. Their source (https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/the-global-games-market-will-reach-108-9-billion-in-2017-with-mobile-taking-42/) shows that most of this is not relevant to PlayKey. I would assume that it is the $24.8 billion of “BOXED/DOWNLOADED PC GAMES” that is relevant, and NewZoo says that this is dropping.

Their white paper claims that 1.5 billion people play PC games. If we assume that PC games are played mostly by males, then this means that close to half of all the males in the world play PC games. Is this believable? Most infants, middle-aged men and seniors do not play PC games. I would think that it’s mainly teenage males up to men in their 30’s that play these games. A significant part of the world do not have PCs. 4 billion people do not have internet access.

Their video tells you to “invest” in their token. This means that they are pushing a security, which is illegal in most of the Western world unless you restrict your investors to accredited investors and comply with KYC (Know Your Client) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) requirements.

Because the team is based in Russia, they are immune from European and North American laws because Russia does not have extradition agreements with them. Therefore, the team doesn’t need to worry about pesky European and North American laws. The team can say and claim anything they want. They can lie and worry much less than other teams about repercussions. If they defraud you, there is little that your lawyers or government can do to help you. An American law firm has filed a class action lawsuit against Tezos (based in Europe) to get money refunded to American investors. Your law firm won’t be able to do that against PlayKey. You won’t be able to do anything.

The risk with any ICO that is selling a security is that if the regulators crack down on these, the token will crash. Teams that are in Russia may be immune from punishment from regulators, but you will still suffer if the token crashes.

Their website says that they raised 16 039 ETH from 1048 backers so far. When I looked at their smart contract (https://etherscan.io/address/0x26d08b9d227933a85e855656dc46ab889e183c88), it says that it received 2,404 Ethers, not 16,039 Ethers. Maybe they withdrew some Ethers from the smart contract, so I went through all 25 pages of the 1242 transactions and none of them were withdrawals. So, are they using a second smart contract, or are they lying about the amount of ETH raised so far in order to give you the impression that they are more popular than they really are? I would tend to think the latter. Since they are immune from European and North American securities laws, they will not get punished for fraud by them, so they can lie a lot more.

I think many ICOs lie about the amount that they’ve raised.

This makes me question the validity of PlayKey’s other numbers:

2 500 000 games
120 servers
$7 000 000 raised from VCs and business angels

It would seem intuitive that there should be a sizeable market for this business. The risks that you are taking are:

• Will regulators ban the token in the future?
• Their numbers are not reliable.
• If they defraud you, you have no recourse.

Hey jlp, what do you think about Playkey ICO? It seems quite promising.

Papyrus is probably the 3rd or 4th project I’ve seen related to a new token being able to control advertising.

They cite a lot of business problems, which seem legitimate. But I don’t see how they can solve them.

Papyrus states the following as a Papyrus Advantage (solution to problem):


How?

The majority of advertising that you see is from Google, Youtube (which is Google), Facebook and Twitter. You can’t control the advertising that they show you. When you search on Google, it shows ads on top of the search results. How do you think Papyrus is going to let you control that? Are they going to hack into Google’s servers? When you watch Youtube, it shows commercials at the beginning of the video. How is Papyrus going to let you control Youtube? When Facebook shows ads in the right column, how are you going to stop them? Is Papyrus going to use a blockchain to stop these ads? How?

The biggest source of revenue for Google is AdWords and Google is the biggest advertising middleman on the internet. Therefore, Google AdWords is the biggest form of advertising on the internet, and it runs on Google's sites. How is Papyrus going to interfere with this?

For all of the other sites on the internet that have ads, most of them use Google AdSense. They put Google’s code into their website, select some parameters and let Google serve the ads into their websites. Then Google charges the advertiser every time a visitor clicks on that ad, and pays a percentage of that to the site owner. How is Papyrus going to interfere with this?

Papyrus has all of these fancy diagrams, but no mention of Google Adwords or AdSense.

The people who controls the advertising are the people who control the traffic. How will Papyrus convince these people to let them take over control?

I didn’t read all of their information, so maybe I missed it. Maybe someone can explain to me how a blockchain is going to enable Papyrus take control.

In regards to Crypto20, I think there is a need for an index fund of cryptocurrencies. However, the risk with crypto investment funds is that they centralize money and therefore create “honey pots” (term from Andreas Antonopoulos) for hackers and thieves. A thief stole $50 million from DAO. Hackers (and possibly employees) stole from many exchanges.

The other risk with Crypto20 is that they are obviously and blatantly selling a security. If and when regulators come after ICOs for selling securities, they will go after the ones that were most obvious. If they do, then both the project team and token holders will suffer.

How do we know that the Crypto20 tokens truly have ownership of the underlying assets (top 20 cryptocurrencies)? Is there a Crypto20 smart contract where we can call one of its GETTER functions to see the balances of the 20 cryptocurrencies that the smart contract is holding? I did not see this in the white paper. Even if we can verify that the smart contract is holding the 20 cryptocurrencies, how do we know that the Crypto20 tokens own the assets that the smart contract holds? But the smart contract does not hold the 20 cryptocurrencies. According to the white paper, these will be held in cold storage.

If the majority of the Crypto20 token holders want to claim the assets (20 cryptocurrencies), can they? Can they go to a judge and prove that they legally own the assets in Crypto20’s cold storage? I could not find answers to these questions.

Tether has the same principles. It is supposed to be backed by and track the US dollar. Each Tether is supposed to equal one US dollar in value. There are talks that they do not have enough US dollars and they have not been able to prove that they do. Let’s say there are 1 million Tether tokens, but they only have 100,000 US dollars to back it up. What do you if you are a token holder? Take a flight to the team’s country and try to hunt them down?

When you give your ETH to Crypto20, they are supposed to take that and buy the equivalent amounts of Bitcoin, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum Classic, NEM, Dash, etc. How do you know that they have? You cannot have access to their cold storage. How do you know that they haven’t skimmed off 50% of the ETH and put it into their personal wallets?

These are the risks of every type of crypto investment fund. There are many of them now. Some of them might be honest and legitimate. Some of them will not be. The risk is that it is hard to be sure that you are investing in the honest one, unless they provide all of the answers to questions like mine. If there is a way to know for sure that they cannot screw you, then these types of investment funds can provide a lot of value.

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.