Numerousity of ICOs and Coins: A Blessing or Curse?

[Opurum]

Just thinking... the exponential growth in  ICOs recently is a trend that could have diminshing effects on the value of tokenized investments. I so think based on the following assumptions: 1. Investment fund is scarce resource 2. Every potential investor is rational with resources 3. More ICOs = more investment alternatives for would be investors in the market, which also implies increased substitution for existing coins. Based on the assumptions above, the likely scenerio in a multiplicty of ICOs would be that fewer investor funds would chase more supply of  ICO products in the market and naturally push down the demand for already existing coins. And of course, lower demand translates to lower token prices.

What do you think, guys?

[A L I E N]

But also more and more people knowing about bitcoin and altcoins. So money just pour in cryptocurrency world. And actually nobody can't control it
So the Genie was let out of the bottle!

[onyebuchi81]

I think it's a complex scenario where all the possible outcome are valid.more ico means the money coming into  crypto is spread thin over a large number of coins.but then the awareness created by these icos is bringing 'young' money running into billions into the ecosystem.checking the market capitalizat pre and post ico era gives u an idea of how much money has enter the ecosystem due to the emergence of ico.so I that it's both a blessing a curse. It just depends from which point u view the pendulum

[indrakusumaindra]

bleesing. we dont have to worry about too many ico. cause the best ico will the one that will survive. and i belive thats make the market stable. the more coin and ico means many company trying to use this technology for their business. and many to come i belive. so dont be afraid of ico. its not threat

[Polygora]

I'm not going to propose an from the frame of reference of a value investor, but from a different perspective. (Prepare for hyperbole within my narrative.)

Every week, there's ten new ICOs, all clamoring for your funds. Assuming they're all legitimate, and not massive scams, nine out of ten of them all do the exact same thing as Bitcoin. They provide a means of exchange through the medium of a digital currency. I will admit, some of them do provide improvements, those being the tokens built on Ethereum, or perhaps Byteball, as they allow for all sorts of contractual mechanisms and the like.

The problem is the deluge of all these coins diminishes the usefulness of every other coin that achieves the same goal.

Imagine someone designs a coin for people to buy porn website subscriptions, SpankCoin. For the sake of example, SpankCoin has just launched an ICO. Some people invest, as you do. "A coin related to jerking off? Awesome!". The next week, comes the unveiling of WankCoin - it does everything SpankCoin does, but worded differently. However, since people are in the stage of throwing money at everything, WankCoin also makes a ton of money from investors. Now, there's two coins vying for success in the porno coin market. But then, in the same or following weeks, come new coins - SplurtToken, CockCoins, DickBits, and the people with FOMO who missed out on one ICO will buy the next. And now there's five coins vying for the porno market.

Can you tell me how many merchants are going to accept five, let alone one, speculative investment coin? When you have five coins all doing exactly the same thing, how do you pick which to work with? How do consumers know which to buy? And so what happens, is nobody buys any of these tokens off the investors, and the investors lose all their money. Nobody knows what to buy, and merchants don't have anything to accept without risking losing all their money in massive volatility. And this is happening for every market and every niche - look at all the weed coins, and the piss coins, and the game coins. All this diversification is bad for crypto.

And at the end of the day, Bitcoin does all of these things, already. Monero does all of these things already, and isn't 6k a piece. Why would anyone use a niche coin you can only use to buy porno, over something that you can spend on porn, or sandwiches? All these ICOs for coins that are already being done better is hurting the value of every single coin, in the long term.

[Opurum]

There are too many ICOs no doubt. But I think natural selection will come to play and only the strongest will survive. I can already see a future where our individual selves will be tokenized, and the value of each one will base on ones productivity and relivance in the economy. Whatch out!

[Opurum]

It is a free world and a free market. And in that circumstance competition should not be seen to be evil. If you think competition is expensive try out monopoly and see for yourself.

[MissionPhailed]

Regarding my opinion on this I'm leaning towards a curse. The tons of coins and ICO's nowadays result in an oversaturated market at best and a minefield of scams at worst. Several days ago I've read parts of an old thread here on BCT about some ICO. The dev managed to raise a significant sum of money, and subsequently announced he was scamming everyone and posted pics of him enjoying an expensive vacation/holiday made possible by the raised funds.

Personally, I'm not gonna touch ICO's even with a broomstick!

[cabron]

Its a curse. Its like these developers can't wait for an ICO to be done that they kept introducing more projects everyday and yet though they'd be funded. Teams should check first whether people will try to send ETH/BTC to them when at the time they created and ANN thread there were also better ICO than them.

[anasso]

no blessing and no curse! we can see ICO like start ups and they can succeed or fail!

one difference, start up raises money from banks or investment funds but ICO raises money from people!

[Argoo]

While the ICO activities are not as effective as we would like. Most of them are only trying to earn money and do not care about the tokens created and the further implementation of the announced projects. However, a certain part of them is quite successful, and the created coins find their application and bring people benefits and convenience. While we must accept this state of affairs, we must carefully make our investments, and in the future the market will show which coin deserves to continue to exist and which does not. In general, ICO projects are a boon, as some of them bring tangible benefits.

[Polygora]

no blessing and no curse! we can see ICO like start ups and they can succeed or fail!

one difference, start up raises money from banks or investment funds but ICO raises money from people!

That is why I like ICOs. The best way to kill the banksters is to put power in the hands of the people.

[Opurum]

Well said. It a matter of the survival of the fittest.

[kryptqnick]

But also more and more people knowing about bitcoin and altcoins. So money just pour in cryptocurrency world. And actually nobody can't control it
So the Genie was let out of the bottle!

Good point. I think both you and the op are right on this matter. There are two tendencies:
- more people get involved into the market and invest into more coins
- investors seek stability and would like the amount of choices to decrease. ICO regulations are following this path.
What will win - nobody knows.
In general, I think it is rather bad that there are no standards and a lot of useless stuff enters the market and by being very massive (lots of bad icos) form obstacles for those who want to find real world-changing projects to support them. I hope the amount will decrease but the demand for those remaining will be bigger.

[Tamy]

Numerosity of ICOs and Coins are not blessing and nor curse. It is a free market and people are trying to earn some money raising funds from ICOs. For us who would like to invest and earn some money, it is a challenging task to recognize which one are scams and which projects are worth of our money. We need to do a good research before we invest our money. This can be very time consuming but can prevent losing money on scam projects. It is really important to check the story behing the project prior to investing money.

[karasuri]

Just thinking... the exponential growth in  ICOs recently is a trend that could have diminshing effects on the value of tokenized investments. I so think based on the following assumptions: 1. Investment fund is scarce resource 2. Every potential investor is rational with resources 3. More ICOs = more investment alternatives for would be investors in the market, which also implies increased substitution for existing coins. Based on the assumptions above, the likely scenerio in a multiplicty of ICOs would be that fewer investor funds would chase more supply of  ICO products in the market and naturally push down the demand for already existing coins. And of course, lower demand translates to lower token prices.

What do you think, guys?

I want to add that most of ICO is a SCAM so it is not progressive for real and it is only trend.

[MiningSensei]

Yes most ico's are being scam right now, and everybody is aware of that.. This new generation of developers are just trying to create more altcoins in order to increase their capital like a skyrocket, i dont know why they are trying to make useless projects with a huge marketing in order to make them look like a serious bussiness, honestly, and this is happening right now on the whole community.
They are investing thousands of dollars in marketing in order to make people trust them much more.

[Snaic]

The existing variety of coins on the one hand is a blessing, as it enables them to develop and receive certain new qualities, and on the other hand, given the large percentage of their uselessness, does not give anything good. It is necessary either that states begin to regulate the ICO process at an initial stage in order to exclude them only to raise funds and exclude possible risks, or somehow the community itself must establish rules for improving the quality of conductive ICOs.

[Opurum]

I still think some form of regulation for ICOs will be good. Contracts should be such that project administrators and devs may not be able to pull out or access their portions of the raised funds until the project archives a level of adoption. 

[Polygora]

I still think some form of regulation for ICOs will be good. Contracts should be such that project administrators and devs may not be able to pull out or access their portions of the raised funds until the project archives a level of adoption. 

And how do you propose the arbitrary value of "adoption" is transferred into immutable code?