Topic: 3 kinds of ICOs — Protect yourself - page 16. (Read 13704 times)

Could have saved me some bad investments if I had being paying attention to the actual capabilities of the team based on whether they have a working prototype prior to ICO. If they are serious about the project, they should be able to provide a working model to prove the viability of the project prior to asking strangers to give them millions of dollars.

I think its biggest proof of the professional capability of the team.
on ICO stage the company must have some previously build product.

I feel like the best way to figure out which ICO's to believe is in the whitepaper. Start to familiarize yourself with what to look for and red flags that present themselves to you. Always ask yourself is it a better investment than just putting it in btc and watching it grow slowly and consistently.

Great advice. Especially now that there are more ICO scams than ever.

Electroneum has an app, which is very good news. They’re based in a country with lots of extradition agreements, which is very good news. Their business is understandable, which is good news.

They’re probably low risk, with some potential. However, I don’t think they are completely honest. You can read my comments about them in a previous post on page 3 of this thread.

I took a deeper look and found the following:

Electroneum plans to have 21 billion coins with 2 decimal places. This is a mistake as this is not nearly enough (either before or after the decimal place) if they want millions of people to use it.

Bitcoin and Ethereum have scaling issues. As Andreas Antonopoulos said, the reason most altcoins do not have scaling issues is because they do not have as many users yet. Once they do, they will likely face similar issues. Bitcoin’s blockchain is 120 GB in size and growing. You cannot run a full node on a phone.

Their technical white paper says that their blockchain is based on Monero’s and that the phones will not download the blockchain. Computers will. That makes sense. It sounds like the phones will be acting like a mining pool.

But, there are already mining pool apps for phones, such as this one, which mines multiple coins:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.miner&hl=en

Here is an Android app to mine Monero:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.myportablesoftware.minermonero&hl=en

The technical white papers says:


This sounds like the majority of the mining will still be done on computers. So, how much mining will the phones do and how much of the block rewards will the phones get?

Their technical white paper talks a lot about privacy, but this is already provided by Monero, PIVZ, Dash, NEM and Zcash. All of these other altcoins also have mobile wallets.

Therefore, I didn’t read much difference from what Monero already has.

It’s possible that I did not grasp their technical white paper completely. Maybe they’ve invented a way to mine much more efficiently. However, I didn’t see it. They should’ve shown a comparison between their mining and the existing mobile mining apps, and explain clearly how their mining is superior.

As it stands now, there is no evidence or proof that Electroneum's mobile mining is any better than Monero's mobile mining. If you test these two, you'll likely find that Electroneum will run faster, but that is only because its blockchain is so small and they have so few users relative to Monero. So, users who download Electroneum will think it is fantastic. Several years ago, Bitcoin's transactions confirmed in less than a minute. Now, you can wait for more than an hour.

thanks for this nice thread.
yes we have no chance to be certain and sure about investing an ICO but we are able to take some true decisions after good research and we were informed. Reading much more articles like below gives true ideas and knowledges to the investors and also helps about to understand contents of ICOs when we see and read.

Thanks, this is informative..

Thank you for taking the time to thoroughly break down the validity (or lack thereof) of these ICOs. I'm literally now seeing them pop up everywhere, as if all of a sudden the blockchain is the answer to all of these problems that really don't exist or are just wildly inflated to create an unnecessary solution. Having said that, I also feel that a lot of these scam ICOs exist because people aren't doing their research and just hopelessly investing in something they know nothing about with the mindset of hitting the jackpot. These 'developers' realize that and then just put together a whole bunch of nonsense that sounds good without creating any value whatsoever. ICOs, in and of themselves, are absolutely necessary to help cultivate new ideas that can legitimately help revolutionize or innovate certain segments or industries but, unfortunately, more often than not the majority of them out there currently have very little substance to them and have only one aim in mind.

Having said all that, do you think Electroneum falls into any 3 of those categories? 

I wanna thank you again for your informative response to my request. Am not about to defend any project or any ICO but i just have some notes:
  

I still don't have a smartphone but when i checked i found that cindicator has an already running application via google play (check this link:  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cindicator  with a good feed back. I agree with you about the complicated whitepaper and the regulations terms in the country where the project has been established but i know a little more about hybrid intelligence and its potentials in the prediction markets (cindicator reached enougn funds to establish such a powerful system) when other projects still seeking their ways to create real values so it's may be not too late nor too little for Cindicator. Indeed i don't know so much about other projects in the prediction markets (unless what you wrote in this fantastic thread about Augur and others) so i really still don't have enough machanisms/knowledge to make such compares or analysis.


Make sure that am not the only who wanna read your opinions about Trackr,Bitjob,and Blocklancer  

Nice thread. Definitely need to do a lot of research before buying into an ICO. When I read the whitepaper of some of the ICOs I just find it ridiculous. No solid idea, no plan for execution, just hype of blockchain. If they can't put what they are going to do on paper, they won't be able to execute it either.

Thanks for the write-up!

This is a great thread, I found this as very informative to all the ICO enthusiast out here. Also this serves as a pre-advisory for all the starters, for them to be more aware whats in store when they join campaigns and for them to not even experience these bad scenarios. Thanks for this! In addition, I would just like advise everyone that you must not join/enter any transactions empty handed or having no or even little knowledge. Make sure always that you 'll always feel assured in everything you do, because that only means success will soon come near to you.

In regards to Cindicator, a prediction market project, I had written the following in a previous post:

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PeerGuess is one of those ICOs using the same star constellation animation that I've seen on other sites. Are they using the same graphic designer, or is PeerGuess another ICO put out by the same group of scammers? Even if PeerGuess is not a scam, it is TOO LATE and TOO LITTLE.

TOO LATE: Gnosis, Augur and Stox already had ICOs to get into prediction markets, though Gnosis and Stox still haven't built anything yet and Augur built a beta that is barely usable. This shows that execution is much harder than anything they've done before, including an ICO.

TOO LATE and TOO LITTLE: Stockbet already has built software that lets people bet on crypto currencies (and stocks). PeerGuess has a sales pitch.

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According to Cindicator’s Roadmap:


I searched on iOS app store and couldn’t find anything for Cindicator. Can you?

Startups at Y Combinator consist of 2 founders each and they build prototypes in 6 months. Cindicator has been working on this for 36 months, since November 2014. They’ve stacked their team with 28 people. They should’ve built 6 to 84 prototypes, or multiple products, by now. This shows that ICOs with large teams mean nothing. They are just blowing smoke. Since Cindicator hasn't built anything significant, it probably means that most members add little to no value, but they included them to make you think that they add value. Most members (assuming that they are real people) probably do no work for the project, but simply agreed to let the founders add their names and photos.

I tried to read their white paper, but the scrolling was slow and jerky, so I gave up. If 28 people cannot fix this, how will they build artificial intelligence?

Cindicator is also from that large country that is east of Europe, with no extradition agreements with much of the world. If they screw you, there’s nothing your government can do to help you.

If I have time later, I’ll look at Trackr, Bitjob and Blocklancer.

Thank you for sharing this story, it was very useful for me.

Thank you good sir for this post. Im new in the bitcoin world and planning on doing some signature campaign work for ICO. Its very informative at the same time makes me worry that i might end up campaigning  the wrong ICO. Hope I don't encounter these scam ICOs.

that's right why making yourself trying to understand things which is new to your ears better to go and proceed with project that you are already aware so it wont complicate your understanding, placing money in an ico is really like risking your money into a gambling games if you don't have any idea but if you
have advantage will be at your side.

Great post. This is a must read for newbies. I might not agree with everything you said, but I really liked your explanation regarding what things could work and couldn't work in the blockchain. When I first started learning about ICOs (less than 3 months ago, so I wish this article had been out there), I would focus only on the ones I could understand the language because, why complicate myself even more? So I would always lean towards gaming and gambling oriented projects ... yes, that doesn't make it legitimate on their own, but at least I feel my gut has been leading me in the right direction (before reading your article I hadn't thought of what applications made sense for the blockchain ... everything seemed exciting).

Instead of asking it ask yourself because all of the information that will help you in understanding any ICO or esport ico have a good project or not. See it in the OP Post how he analyze every ico.

That is the best article that I read on ICO. Thanks to the author! I'm sure that this will help to educate newbie investors.

WOW!!!! Thanks a lot!