ICO model is broken:whales are the only players

[aventus]

Folks,

We are planing an ICO in mid-July and would be happy to avoid one common hurdle we can see nowadays.
With the current ICO hype, it starts to be difficult for small players to buy token. When the project is attractive, most of token will be bough in just a few minutes by whales.
As you can read on this tread, this issue is now very annoying. It is time for us, token seller, to think about how we must conduct our ICO to give a chance to everyone to participate.

I am waiting for you some ideas about how we can solve this issue and make our ICO open to most of us.
Thank you for any ideas to improve the process.

The Aventus Team

[BitV666]

Very Interested In this...

[kc.]

I think the Discussion section would probs be better to ask in - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0

[shanem]

Even if you don't issue coins by ICO, whales will still be the biggest players. In POW system, whales have the best mining hardware to extract the biggest share of the coin in every block. Difficulty will rise and the small players can only get a nimble with a mining pool. It doesn't matter what system is used, whales will always have advantage over the small players.

[JapieAmerika]

I don't know if the underlying platforms would allow this, but my suggestion would be:
- Fix the gas limit (if using Ethereum)
- Randomly select which transactions go through
- Put un upper limit to the number of tokens which can be bought per transcation

[European Central Bank]

declarations of intent on here from aged accounts. that's the way you prevent avalanches of transactions buying everything. not perfect but more controllable.

[ttookk]

What you could do exactly one time would be a system where bigger accounts receive relatively fewer tokens and get the difference in investment refunded

The upcoming identity projects (status, air and so on, there are at least 5 out there) may actually help mitigate the problem, once they start working.

Until then, "Frankenwhales" of smaller investors pooling their money together, managed and controlled ("controlled" as in who enters, preventing double entries and so on) by trusted members, which buy into an ICO as a single entity may be a way to go…

[puremage111]

exactly


Look at the recent ICO, especially one built on top of ERC20 platform


Everything just ended within hours, some even within minutes


I read a post about the problem with recent ICO where whales, majority from china are going to gamble their fortune for a fix duration, perhaps sell after x2 or even leave it for 3-9 months.

Because with a fix supply of token, with a constant development there's no doubt that the price will increase and rise, because more people will get into it while token is fixed especially the ICO's.

Even tokens with ICO + POW/POS would not control the price in a fair range because once the whales started to get in, the amount of coin generated by POW/POS is not Break even to the amount of BTC the whales would cash in.

And once the whales cash in, there will be people started to joined the hype and the price will then rise again.


IMO, i wouldn't say that this recent ICO instant funded phenomena is bad as

Whales Got what they wanted.
Crowdfund Project is funded.

Just that people who are interested would need to purchase it from the people who participated in the ICO.

[AdobeWriter]

I mostly agree. Many times a few huge whales hold the majority of coin availability and every time the coin sees some pump they create huge dumps plummeting the price. This is unhealthy for the growth. However this way the situation gradually improves as the tokens are in the end still getting distributed among a wider group of holders.

I'd like to see something done to improve the situation, but I don't think the buy cap proposed by many people is the right course of action here. Not only does it go against what we stand for in the crypto economy, but it also can be easilly bypassed. ICO funded companies also wouldn't have too much interest in that, since they mostly need to collect their funding quickly and smoothly, and that will make the crowd funding campaigns longer.

Something should be done to make the potential ICO organizers combat this issue, and when a solution is available in the future maybe people should start boycotting ICO campaigns that don't make use of it.

[buwaytress]

I don't see how the  ICO model is broken. I support fair models and dislike ICOs in principal but what else can you expect from an idea whose sole purpose is to raise as much capital as is needed from investors?

[DaveyJones]

Find an exchange ask them to do the ICO for you with verified members only and max coins per User... doesnt get easier :p

[xypos]

Folks,

We are planing an ICO in mid-July and would be happy to avoid one common hurdle we can see nowadays.
With the current ICO hype, it starts to be difficult for small players to buy token. When the project is attractive, most of token will be bough in just a few minutes by whales.
As you can read on this tread, this issue is now very annoying. It is time for us, token seller, to think about how we must conduct our ICO to give a chance to everyone to participate.

I am waiting for you some ideas about how we can solve this issue and make our ICO open to most of us.
Thank you for any ideas to improve the process.

The Aventus Team

Agreed. But what isn't being controlled by whales? They have the money so therefore they can do whatever they want - nothing we can stop them from doing honestly. Even if you get some sort of system up, sure it'll slow down the process of whales obtaining the coins but if your coin is something real hot, they'll find loopholes or ways to bypass that restriction.

Find an exchange ask them to do the ICO for you with verified members only and max coins per User... doesnt get easier :p

That would lead to buying and selling/borrowing of verified exchange accounts for the purpose of purchasing ico... See what i'm getting at?

[fudster]

Folks,

We are planing an ICO in mid-July and would be happy to avoid one common hurdle we can see nowadays.
With the current ICO hype, it starts to be difficult for small players to buy token. When the project is attractive, most of token will be bough in just a few minutes by whales.
As you can read on this tread, this issue is now very annoying. It is time for us, token seller, to think about how we must conduct our ICO to give a chance to everyone to participate.

I am waiting for you some ideas about how we can solve this issue and make our ICO open to most of us.
Thank you for any ideas to improve the process.

The Aventus Team

Agreed. But what isn't being controlled by whales? They have the money so therefore they can do whatever they want - nothing we can stop them from doing honestly. Even if you get some sort of system up, sure it'll slow down the process of whales obtaining the coins but if your coin is something real hot, they'll find loopholes or ways to bypass that restriction.

Find an exchange ask them to do the ICO for you with verified members only and max coins per User... doesnt get easier :p

That would lead to buying and selling/borrowing of verified exchange accounts for the purpose of purchasing ico... See what i'm getting at?

Everything is controlled by whales. you may try to limit how much can a participant buy. But it doesn't makes sense because after all developer team is aiming for huge marketcap. If a whale buy millions of the tokens, why prohibit.  Let them participate, you care for a successful project, let the whales fund ya.

[jackychanxxx]

yeah, I agree that the ICO bubbles are getting bigger and bigger