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You're not wrong, but the fact is LinkedIn profiles can also be made up, or scammers can list the profiles of people who in real life have never heard of the ICO in question. Every ICO, short of, like, the brainchild of Vitalik Buterin and Da Hongfei, carries quite a bit of risk, and anyone who spends money on them that they can't afford is asking for trouble. You take a risk, and maybe you get rewarded or maybe you lose it all.
But more importantly, what are the incentives for a scammer? If the goal is to take the money and run, there are easier ways of doing it than the path WiC has been on (30+ pages on the original thread this spring, and now almost 90 on this one, active engagement with the community, partnerships with livecoin and reputable escrow-ers, etc.). You're unlikely to go through all that if you don't even plan to send out tokens. And if you do send out tokens, you might as well follow through with the idea at least far enough to pump the thing and get even more $$ out of it. In the latter case, ICO participants likely also do well.
The point is probably 1 ICO in 100 actually succeeds in the bigger picture, but from the perspective of the investor, ICOs are more about short-term profit than they are about finding the next ETH. With that in mind, the standards for judging the merits of an ICO change somewhat. It's less about 'will this really succeed?' and more about 'will this appeal to the extremely Lambo-obsessed crypto community enough to capture their attention and spike in value after release?".
I apologize for going offtopic in advance, but I feel our conversation may be of some use for other forum members.
I agree that any ICO is a risk, then it's up to you how do you choose to mitigate the risk and maximize success when making the decision whether to participate - this is what I'm mostly ranting about.
The incentives for a would-be-scammer are money from ICO, and I think there are plenty.
Note that I'm not saying CryptoWi is a scam and I'll be happy if in a couple of years I can walk streets of, say, Madrid, as a tourist, while enjoying Wi-Fi access through CryptoWi app. But still.Possibly, we assess the effort and costs differently, but lets look what we have:
1) thread for 130 pages on the forum where someone would post news, answer questions etc
2) create, host, maintain a website (without any complex functionality and amateurish-looking, to be honest)
3) develop "application prototype" shown on videos
4) maintain telegram channel/facebook page
5) promote on steemit, medium, icolert, some other crypto media sites?
6) escrow
anything else I missed?
My estimate for pp.1-4 is more than $50k. I dont know how much p.5 and 6 cost, but I doubt the total would exceed $200k. Even if I'm wrong and underestimating the costs for 2-3 times, there is still plenty of incentive, and I'm not aware of an easier way of doing a million dollars in a few months (pls PM me if you do
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As for the ICO model you've described - I understood it as a pyramid. Get tokens earlier, sell them later to someone else for inflated price, move on. So yeah, as in any pyramid, some people will make money.
But how do you think, would this make more people put more trust into ICOs/crypto as a whole?
Wouldn't it actually harm the crypto industry (still in its puberty, if not childhood) if there are two projects on the similar topic, but one of them is a pyramid?
Would scams cause more attention and regulation attempts from the government?
I agree that very little percentage of ICOs are successful projects - basically, as any startups - but by participating in pyramid-like ICOs we ourselves are making this percentage even smaller, aren't we?
So, however naive and pompously this may sound, I'm all for investing only in the projects that wouldn't consider a pyramid, to ultimately help mass adoption of crypto and personal gain, rather than personal gain alone.
Thanks for reading this, apologies for offtopic once again, and sorry for any mistakes in my English.
