ICOs: The Cancer of the Digital Currency Industry

[Homeless_Victim]

The recent drops in the digital currency prices have been unparalleled in the amount of market capitalization dollars lost. In the past there has been some examples of large drops in Bitcoin and Altcoin prices, but what’s happened over the last 10 days cannot be an accident or attributed to the Bitcoin Cash hard fork. There are certainly more sinister forces at work...

https://cointrader21.wordpress.com/2018/11/25/icos-the-cancer-of-the-digital-currency-industry/

[The Sceptical Chymist]

O-o-o-kay.  Did you write that article and want to point people to it, or was there something else you wanted to say about it?  It's not a very in-depth piece of writing; it's basically calling ICOs scams without providing a real argument for why people should think that.

Not that I completely disagree with it, but I've got my reason for thinking so and if I just wrote "ICOs suck; they're killing the crypto industry" it wouldn't be worth much as a published blog article.  Know what I mean?  Want to spark some sort of discussion about this?

[Homeless_Victim]

O-o-o-kay.  Did you write that article and want to point people to it, or was there something else you wanted to say about it?  It's not a very in-depth piece of writing; it's basically calling ICOs scams without providing a real argument for why people should think that.

Not that I completely disagree with it, but I've got my reason for thinking so and if I just wrote "ICOs suck; they're killing the crypto industry" it wouldn't be worth much as a published blog article.  Know what I mean?  Want to spark some sort of discussion about this?

I wonder if we'll ever know how many individual investors lost money on the ICOs. I would think the number has to be in the hundreds of thousands, if not a few million.

[Argoo]

O-o-o-kay.  Did you write that article and want to point people to it, or was there something else you wanted to say about it?  It's not a very in-depth piece of writing; it's basically calling ICOs scams without providing a real argument for why people should think that.

Not that I completely disagree with it, but I've got my reason for thinking so and if I just wrote "ICOs suck; they're killing the crypto industry" it wouldn't be worth much as a published blog article.  Know what I mean?  Want to spark some sort of discussion about this?

I wonder if we'll ever know how many individual investors lost money on the ICOs. I would think the number has to be in the hundreds of thousands, if not a few million.

Investors in the last year lost not even millions, but tens of millions of dollars, investing in ICO projects. However, this does not mean that this activity is generally detrimental to cryptocurrency. Since there are a lot of fraudulent projects in it, which is a crime, states should have started regulating this type of activity a long time ago in order to protect the rights of investors.

[Homeless_Victim]

O-o-o-kay.  Did you write that article and want to point people to it, or was there something else you wanted to say about it?  It's not a very in-depth piece of writing; it's basically calling ICOs scams without providing a real argument for why people should think that.

Not that I completely disagree with it, but I've got my reason for thinking so and if I just wrote "ICOs suck; they're killing the crypto industry" it wouldn't be worth much as a published blog article.  Know what I mean?  Want to spark some sort of discussion about this?

I wonder if we'll ever know how many individual investors lost money on the ICOs. I would think the number has to be in the hundreds of thousands, if not a few million.

Investors in the last year lost not even millions, but tens of millions of dollars, investing in ICO projects. However, this does not mean that this activity is generally detrimental to cryptocurrency. Since there are a lot of fraudulent projects in it, which is a crime, states should have started regulating this type of activity a long time ago in order to protect the rights of investors.

I never bought an ICO, but I knew early on that they were a problem. I remember seeing an interview with Andreas Antonopoulos in the summer of 2016 and he warned people to not invest in them. He said they were basically scams, I believed that then and I believe it now.

Study Concludes 80 Percent of ICOs in 2017 Were “Scams”
https://ethereumworldnews.com/ico-80-percent-scams-2017-2018/

[amishmanish]

ICOs are a typical example of people spoiling a good thing through greed. When the craze started, it was hailed in the US and other western countries as the Little guys chance to get rich. It was celebrated as a way by which anybody having BTC or ETH could be a part of investing in startups. The ICOs like Tezos, Bancor broke records and raised millions of USD in BTC/ ETH.

At the chance of sounding regionalistic/ racist, I must say, this is when the netherworlds of Internet took notice. Russia, Eastern Europe, Thailand, Phillipines, India etc. all had a lot of tech savvy youngsters good at 'copying' stuff and making it look snazzy. So they copied the typical website template. Whitepaper, Crazy techno-babble about vaporware and buzzwords like decentralize, Permissionless, Blockchain, AI, Machine Learning, etc etc. The most important part was the Team and Advisors..

10 people dressed in suits to appear as the CEO, CFO types and 10 people with curly long hair and beards to appear as the crazy programmer type (Tech Lead, CTO etc etc).  Man this shit would be hilarious as hell if it hadn't made people bleed so much money. Hell, its hilarious even now because all sort of greedy idiots fell for them.

During the 2017 bull run, the clogged transactions on BTC and ETH were a result of people trying to get the earliest tokens as soon as "Pre-Sale" started. These people then simply disappeared. It was all assisted by bounties by irresponsible managers here at Bitcointalk. Fake facebook and twitter accounts with 5000 followers for highest stakes, rows upon rows of excel sheets. People putting others articles in their own name for stakes. It was crazy as hell for anyone who wanted to believe in the initial euphoria and promise. I was personally disappointed and disgusted by seeing the levels to which people would fall to scam others.

This is when the racist comments about "third-world pajeets" became the trend and frankly, I could never fault them for being that angry and disgusted. Now it looks like a bunch of those ICOs dumped their ETH and BTC onto exchanges to secure their ill-gotten gains as soon as possible.

I just hope enough people have learnt their lessons.

[Homeless_Victim]

ICOs are a typical example of people spoiling a good thing through greed. When the craze started, it was hailed in the US and other western countries as the Little guys chance to get rich. It was celebrated as a way by which anybody having BTC or ETH could be a part of investing in startups. The ICOs like Tezos, Bancor broke records and raised millions of USD in BTC/ ETH.

At the chance of sounding regionalistic/ racist, I must say, this is when the netherworlds of Internet took notice. Russia, Eastern Europe, Thailand, Phillipines, India etc. all had a lot of tech savvy youngsters good at 'copying' stuff and making it look snazzy. So they copied the typical website template. Whitepaper, Crazy techno-babble about vaporware and buzzwords like decentralize, Permissionless, Blockchain, AI, Machine Learning, etc etc. The most important part was the Team and Advisors..

10 people dressed in suits to appear as the CEO, CFO types and 10 people with curly long hair and beards to appear as the crazy programmer type (Tech Lead, CTO etc etc).  Man this shit would be hilarious as hell if it hadn't made people bleed so much money. Hell, its hilarious even now because all sort of greedy idiots fell for them.

During the 2017 bull run, the clogged transactions on BTC and ETH were a result of people trying to get the earliest tokens as soon as "Pre-Sale" started. These people then simply disappeared. It was all assisted by bounties by irresponsible managers here at Bitcointalk. Fake facebook and twitter accounts with 5000 followers for highest stakes, rows upon rows of excel sheets. People putting others articles in their own name for stakes. It was crazy as hell for anyone who wanted to believe in the initial euphoria and promise. I was personally disappointed and disgusted by seeing the levels to which people would fall to scam others.

This is when the racist comments about "third-world pajeets" became the trend and frankly, I could never fault them for being that angry and disgusted. Now it looks like a bunch of those ICOs dumped their ETH and BTC onto exchanges to secure their ill-gotten gains as soon as possible.

I just hope enough people have learnt their lessons.

I would agree the ICOs have screwed up a good thing and that they've been a plague on the industry. A lot of the ICO money has gone to Israel but that's not really politically correct to talk about. And really that needs to be reported on far more. The following is a pretty good story about it.


Israeli Startups Raised $600 Million Through ICOs in 2018: Report
https://www.coindesk.com/israeli-startups-raised-600-million-through-icos-in-2018-report

[Homeless_Victim]

Andreas Antonopoulos: ICOs Are ‘Total Shit Right Now, Revolutionary In 15 Years’
https://cointelegraph.com/news/andreas-antonopoulos-icos-are-total-shit-right-now-revolutionary-in-15-years

[Kakmakr]

Would you have said the same thing about ICO's if the price was still $19 000 and climbing?

The ICOs were blooming in 2017, when the price was high and then large companies started to ban Crypto currency advertisements and this triggered a large drop in the price of Crypto currencies. Some people might say that the increase of scam ICOs has caused this, but others might say that institutional investors and fat cats in Wall Street might have been behind this decision. <If millions of average Joe's can also invest and fund small start-ups, then nobody would want sharks like them to control these businesses.>

The legitimate ICOs created a lot of employment for 1000s of people and it gave the opportunity for many small businesses to enter the market, without large investors taking a huge share of their business.  

[Homeless_Victim]

Would you have said the same thing about ICO's if the price was still $19 000 and climbing?...

Actually yes, because the ICOs from the beginning have been scam coins. They're not created to work like the conventional digital currencies. They want to start at a high price while not having any fundamentals. While Bitcoin and the other coins have to work hard over time (years) to create good fundamentals, like adoption and usage, as well as being traded.

[Homeless_Victim]

Jimmy Song: “EOS is a Scam,” “BCH Has No Reason to Exist” and ETH is Amateurish and Stupid
https://ethereumworldnews.com/jimmy-song-eos-scam-bch-has-no-reason-exist-eth-amateurish-stupid/

"...“Well, I think EOS is a scam, and I don’t think you should work on it …

    Working for something EOS… I don’t think it’s a really idea because it will die in a horrible dumpster fire in the next five years. Doing something for an ICO, that’s not gonna last. You’re not going to have anything good on your record by joining a lot of this stuff.”..."

[btc_angela]

They tend to exist because we are willing to invest on them because majority has the mindset that we can be millionaires in short amount of time. That's why ICO's keeps popping every minute and thrive and like a parasite evolving itself because people didn't learn their lessons and keeps coming back for more. Lol. If there's no investors on ICO then they will simply die, but it won't because people remains gullible and greedy and believed on those promises by this project.

[lionheart78]

I do not think ICOs are cancer of the Digital Currency Industry if it is regulated.  Though I can say at this point scam ICO maybe one of the factor why cryptocurrency are being frowned upon by many people but I think legit ICO brings people to Industry.  Without these startup that perform ICO in their fund collection there will be less and less adoption.  The reason is that they need to advertise their project in order to get investors, then they define digital currency, educating people what it is about.  With this ICO reach people faster and point them to the industry.

[amishmanish]

Would you have said the same thing about ICO's if the price was still $19 000 and climbing?

The ICOs were blooming in 2017, when the price was high and then large companies started to ban Crypto currency advertisements and this triggered a large drop in the price of Crypto currencies. Some people might say that the increase of scam ICOs has caused this, but others might say that institutional investors and fat cats in Wall Street might have been behind this decision. <If millions of average Joe's can also invest and fund small start-ups, then nobody would want sharks like them to control these businesses.>

The legitimate ICOs created a lot of employment for 1000s of people and it gave the opportunity for many small businesses to enter the market, without large investors taking a huge share of their business.  

The drop in price wasn't that closely related to the banning of advertisements. The BTC correction was mostly attributed to the Futures trading I think. By then ICOs had already shown themselves to be non-reliable with multiple exit scams. The ICO craze also brought about the "securities" question in the spotlight and led to the SEC entering the game.

Then again, the bust of BTC prices has way more things behind them from Tether issuance being used to prop up the price to Multi-million dollar hacks of exchanges. I don't think the ICOs played much of a role in that. What they did ensure was the slow bleed from the 7-8K mark. A majority of these ICOs were in ETH. It has been going down since the ICOs started cashing out.

Sure there are legitimate ICOs but the whole ecosystem had no time to build up self-regulation. The scammers were quick to take advantage of that. Even today, like you say, if the price booms, we will probably have another shit-ton of ICOs and shitty managers will climb onto the bandwagon of managing bounties, albeit with their "disclaimers" now..

[Homeless_Victim]

I do not think ICOs are cancer of the Digital Currency Industry if it is regulated.  Though I can say at this point scam ICO maybe one of the factor why cryptocurrency are being frowned upon by many people but I think legit ICO brings people to Industry.  Without these startup that perform ICO in their fund collection there will be less and less adoption.  The reason is that they need to advertise their project in order to get investors, then they define digital currency, educating people what it is about.  With this ICO reach people faster and point them to the industry.

I would say that there must be much greater transparency before ICOs should even be allowed to exist. Also I would like to see the smaller digital currencies be given their fair share of coverage from the digital currency news outlets. So many of these smaller coins have far better fundamentals than the ICOs. Yet so many of these coins have super low valuations. The people that created the smaller coins work very hard to create good fundamentals for them and they're not rewarded for that.

The sponsored media coverage has been a huge problem, the ICOs take in money up front and then they pay cointelegraph and other outlets to give them favorable coverage. The ICOs, nearly all of them were started with seed money from venture capital, or vulture capital, and these ruthless scamming capitalists are by far the biggest part of the problem.

As the ICOs were getting coverage people were buying their coins in the pre-sales. Then the ICOs were buying more sponsored articles and paying slotting fees to be listed on the different exchanges. The exchanges are another big part of the problem. So really in the grand scheme of things the ICOs and venture capital have corrupted the whole industry.

[yitzjoe]

there are many factors that make the crypto price fall a few days ago, one of which is the hardfork BCH and force the BCH account to break into 2 camps and this takes up a lot of crypto resources until the price falls very deep, but other problems also need to be taken into account to contribute to the price collapse crypto like ETH, BAKKT and FUD news that continues to hit crypto

[Homeless_Victim]

there are many factors that make the crypto price fall a few days ago, one of which is the hardfork BCH and force the BCH account to break into 2 camps and this takes up a lot of crypto resources until the price falls very deep, but other problems also need to be taken into account to contribute to the price collapse crypto like ETH, BAKKT and FUD news that continues to hit crypto

I agree that those things are part of it. But I think a majority of the problem is the ICOs and the venture capitalists that started them. EOS is a big part of the problem too.

[Homeless_Victim]

This is quite damning...

Initial coin offerings have raised $1.2 billion and now surpass early stage VC funding
m/2017/08/09/initial-coin-offerings-surpass-early-stage-venture-capital-funding.html]https://www.c[Suspicious link removed]m/2017/08/09/initial-coin-offerings-surpass-early-stage-venture-capital-funding.html

[eaglewhite80]

In a way, we can just assume that at some point, greed kicked in for so many, which includes both the team coming up with projects as well as investors looking to get rich over night. In the end, it all ended up in shambles. No real life product for a lot of them, pollution in the space, which is what I see them as, and now it seems everyone is trying to bail out with the little they can at least get back. Since it is an unregulated space, it is a normal thing to see stuffs like this happening. It is crazy, but one way or the other, most of us do have some roles and parts to play in it.

[Homeless_Victim]

In a way, we can just assume that at some point, greed kicked in for so many, which includes both the team coming up with projects as well as investors looking to get rich over night. In the end, it all ended up in shambles. No real life product for a lot of them, pollution in the space, which is what I see them as, and now it seems everyone is trying to bail out with the little they can at least get back. Since it is an unregulated space, it is a normal thing to see stuffs like this happening. It is crazy, but one way or the other, most of us do have some roles and parts to play in it.

I think ultimately we can blame the venture capital firms and the people who own and operate them as the main source of the problem. I think more people will figure this out and some may take matters into their own hands and pay some of these venture capitalists a visit.