Topic: 3 kinds of ICOs — Protect yourself - page 12. (Read 13692 times)

I think this is good, not all is scam and if find a good once you can 3-10X your acc..

If I have time, I’ll take a look at those. In the meantime, I'll comment on Mark Cuban.

I think he’s completely overrated. He became rich because he sold his company, Broadcast.com, near the peak of the Dot Com bubble in 1999 to Yahoo for $5.7 billion, netting $1 billion for Cuban. But the company was TINY and LOSING MONEY. It was so worthless and burning so much money that Yahoo shut it down 3 years later.

https://www.gurufocus.com/news/138012/mark-cuban-and-broadcastcom-the-multibillion-dollar-coup
“When Broadcast.com was taken public it had fewer than $7 million in revenues, $28 million in equity, and an accumulated deficit of of nearly $10 million dollars in its brief history. In reality, the company had little or no chance of achieving profitability in the foreseeable future.”

Here is a micro cap stock that you’ve probably never heard of:  Castle Brands
https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSEAMERICAN%3AROX&fstype=ii&ei=dejwWcmaGcaWjAG2sYiAAw

It does $77 million of revenue and has a market cap of $184 million.

Broadcast had one eleventh the revenue. Essentially, Broadcast was a micro micro micro cap.  But, it sold for 31 times more than Castle Brands. Yahoo overpaid by 341 times. Can you imagine paying $13,630,000 for a car that is worth $40,000?

Fortune Magazine listed Broadcast.com as one of the 5 worst internet acquisitions of all time:
http://fortune.com/2013/05/21/5-worst-internet-acquisitions-of-all-time/

Yahoo executives, who were responsible for buying Broadcast.com, were canned.

Essentially, Cuban owes most of his wealth to winning a lottery.

I’m not saying that Cuban is a lousy businessman. He was a small businessman. You probably know businessmen or entrepreneurs who created bigger companies than Cuban did.

Cuban never created any hugely successful operation like Google, Apple, Qualcomm, Foxconn, Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Oracle, eBay, PayPal, Facebook, Tesla, etc., etc., etc. Not even close. Yet the media treats him like he has more business acumen than the entrepreneurs or executives from many of those companies I listed.

Cuban, the successful businessman and investor, is completely a creation of the media. It's hugely fake news.

Therefore, ignore anything that Cuban says or does.

Great thread. Agree with everything.

Stockbet passes all of your filters. Check it out.

Hey jlp, what do you think about Mobius Network? More importantly, what's your take on Mercury Protocol ICO, project in which Mark Cuban has invested as well?

Bitjob sounds like a project where the founders were trying to find something to throw on a blockchain in order to get money from an ICO.

I’m not saying that a job site is not needed for students. I don’t know. Maybe they’ve identified a need. But they should show their market research as to why students need their site.

The video says “Bitjob is a global job marketplace powered by the Ethereum blockchain technology”. What does that mean? How does a blockchain power a job site? It’s like saying Indeed.com is powered by PayPal technology.

The main powering that a job site needs are:
* Lots of coding for a feature-rich site or app
* Lots of marketing

It sounds like the team is trying to make to project sound like a blockchain project, when it is really a “build a job website” project.

If Bitjob is planning to store all of the job information on the blockchain, especially Etheneum’s, they are naive. The blockchain cannot store that much data.

If I was a student, I would need to spend most or all of my earnings on tuition, books, rent, food, transportation, beer and girls. So, I don’t know why I would want to be paid in Bitjob tokens, when I will need to convert it immediately. Bitjob provides PayPal as an option. I would opt for the PayPal option all the time.

There are hundreds of job sites. Yet, their white paper does not show a comparison of Bitjob to their competitors. This means the founders are naive or trying to deceive the readers. It’s ridiculous to think that they do not have competition.

They have 17 team members and 12 advisors. This is a joke. They’ve been at this since Nov 2016, which means they should have been able to build something much more sophisticated than their alpha. Every once in a while, their alpha will hang on me for about 10 seconds. Would you use this to find a job? They are a long ways away from having anything comparable to existing job sites, such as Monster or Upwork. Startups from Y Combinator with 2 founders build more than this after 6 months.  Most of Bitjob's 28 people are useless.

very nice thread. thank you.  i only can agree with you

In regards to GUTS, this is not the first project that is putting tickets on a blockchain. I forgot the name of the other one(s).

I think that ticketing is a good application for the blockchain. It’s not a great application such as currency, store of value or gaming/gambling, but still a good application. It also seems that it should be good to automate tickets, by putting them on a phone. It’s good to see that they have a demo/prototype. It's not impressive and probably doesn't require a lot of complicated code, but decent.

I think it’s good that GUTS is going to eliminate scalpers. This is a sore point with most venue customers. However, is this what venue operators want? Scalpers provide an early source of revenue. With that early revenue, they can spend it on marketing to get more customers. This is why ICOs have pre-sales or 2 rounds of sales. Has GUTS done market research, from both venue customers and operators, to find out how much market demand there is to eliminate scalpers?

Will customers be willing to go through the hassle of downloading, installing a wallet and buying GET tokens, just so they can attend a venue once every year? Some people attend venues once a month. Some attend once every 5 years. Some people may not have smart phones. Has GUTS done market research to answer these questions?

One of GUTS’ value proposition is:


I wouldn’t want to give my data to the venue operator because I wouldn’t want to be spammed.

I can see the need to eliminate the counterfeit or fraudulent tickets. That is a legitimate business problem that GUTS can solve. But how big of a problem is this? I don't know. Did they say? I didn't catch it. It’s hard to know the full potential of GUTS unless they have done more market research.

Thats correct. If they are real people in real life, you can bet they will perform.

It would be interesting to get a poll to find out the % of investors who have done this. You're honest enough to admit it, but the poll will not be accurate unless people can anonymously answer.

I find this advice the most helpful, I invested in a few projects that I heard and there was buzzwords flying all around, but I didn't knew exactly why they will be useful. And of course they were just pump and dump coins. I guess I will try to learn from mistakes.

We have to check about the people behind ico and business, strategy, long run, commitment. Some coins give multiple returns in short time because they have good fundamentals.

This is a very important thread, I got to learn new things I was not aware of before hand. It good of the op for bring this to the awareness of others. This is a real ico101, that need to being taken by investors

I am very interested in this thread. As I am specialize in doing community management, our team do have a checklist to identify if the ICO is worth taking up or not.

One of the most important point is the development team. We will check the individual profile and their related working experience. I remember attending a talk from an ICO cofounder. He was an CEO of a popular company but the product of the ICO that he was working with had no relevant to his previous company. And it seems like he did not have proper knowledge in blockchain and crypto to answer some of the questions.

I really appreciate too the information given by our co bitcoiners here in forum i think that they take some information regarding on their what experience for.

How is the initial quote of Swarm Fund used out of context?  Swarm Fund cites this business problem:


This is untrue.  How is it out of context?

By saying this, Swarm Fund is trying to make you believe that this is a business problem, when it is not.

https://www.swarm.fund/how-swarm-works/ shows Alice. “She is a small-scale investor”.  “Most of the attractive opportunities are outside of her financial means.”  “She finds out about Swarm Fund”.

This is misleading. There are thousands of REITs in 30 countries that Alice can choose from and she can buy one share for as little as $5.

Please explain how Swarm’s “subfunds” will be able to compete against the variety and liquidity of REITs. Alice should do some reading about REITs:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcprosser/2017/07/19/data-proves-reits-are-better-than-buying-real-estate/2/#7c4b113f5cc3

REITS vs real estate crowdfunding (author is from private equity real estate)
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4051897-reits-vs-real-estate-crowdfunding

Swarm Fund should be explaining how they are superior to REITs, not trying to make the reader think that he/she could never have invested in real estate before Swarm Fund came along.

Man you guys are paranoid eh! No one at Swarm Fund is lying.  You are all totally misunderstanding their platform and how their tokens work. It might be worth reading this to bring yourselves up to speed. https://www.swarm.fund/swarm-token/  

The "asset-backed tokens" mentioned are backed not by actual property deeds but by legally binding Private Equity investment contracts with real world funds that focus on projects that invest in real assets themselves.  Yes you have to trust the teams that are executing the real-world projects... but only in the same way you would need to have trust in any crypto team you invest in to deliver a blockchain product. The difference is these Real Estate funds already have an investment performance history and so too the two finance-focussed founders of Swarm... you only have to google their names Timo Lehes and Philipp Pieper to see their previous successes.

To answer another question about how you "hold a title deed in a wallet" and where is would be accepted etc etc you should really look at the tech that LA Token are building. The way that works is that when a property is to be tokenised they physically sell the property to a custodian or legal trustee for a fixed period (10 yrs). That trustee then issues a limited issuance of asset-backed tokens on LATokens platform and those tokens can be held in a wallet. I believe the tokens act like a futures contract and therefore expire after a fixed period of time with the price difference credited / debited from the holder at the time of expiry.

You should really read the Swarm Fund literature more carefully, look at the hugely experienced Private Equity founders and stop spreading all this negativity.

If you can see that some countries did really made such move on making ICO to be regulated to prevent or avoid this kind of situation on ICO because some people do really make this as a safe haven for them to make easy money from the community.Just make a new coins,get their hands dirty,announce it on public then viola instant money specially if the coin did able to hype up.

Most of ICOs are scams. Almost all knew that but continue to give the scammers money. Need control over new ICOs i think.

I think the OP and you are both genuinely misunderstanding the Swarm Fund model. Also the OP's initial quote of Swarm Fund is clearly being used out of context...

Perhaps you should reread their offering.... but in short....

Swarm Fund are providing a platform for existing funds, such as the existing US-based Real Estate fund they are launching with, to gain access to new sources of capital from the crypto markets. Property title deeds are not held by Swarm or the users of the platform, they are held by the third-party RE fund. The investors sourced via Swarm will be issued asset-backed tokens that represent the dollar-value that they invested into that fund initially. As the Real Estate fund gains in performance the asset-backed tokens increase in value and may be exchanged at any time via the Swarm Network exchange, providing instant liquidity in what is normally a less liquid market.

I'm not saying it's likely or that it's going to happen realistically, but I know that if you need to write the deed, things can be added in there. Although I agree the likelihood of anyone knowing exactly how to even get started would be a stretch. But not impossible.

Forgot to add the other part of you question. They can only prove that the wallet owns the property. Not the token themselves. Just like anything else on the deed it says "Value exchanged for deed" tokens are simply a medium of exchange. Again, not likely, but not impossible.