Topic: 3 kinds of ICOs — Protect yourself - page 18. (Read 13692 times)

It's obivous they spend money on advertising. Not only on ICO rating sites, they also pay youtubers and statistics of their website show they also use every possible way of advertising including news sites, display adds, e-mails, social media. I don't think that's but neccessary for successful ICO. There are legit projects out there that will fail to collect enough funds just because noone knows they exist. So I think investing in marketing is important.

Forex is very tough market. Estimates are only up to 5% traders are able to make profit long term. And not all of them are managers. It think most managers would lose their clients if they used Genesis Vision or not just because clients would leave them because of bad performance anyway. Making bad performance of managers transparent is actually good for their clients. It would make competition between managers tougher and only those who would be best of the best would remain giving clients top notch performance on markets, probably much better than an average client receives now. that might be one of possible scenarios too. But noone can know for sure what will happen with the project. Will they succeed to deliver? Will their model realy work? There's many things that could go wrong with every project. All startups even those funded by VC have more than 90% chance of failure and ICO's aren't any different. So investing in long term is very risky. But Genesis Vision at least seems legit and serious project that is trying hard to succeed and stand out of the crowd of below average ICO's. I think investor has still some chance investing in such a startup, but investing in some crappy unserious project he has no chance at all.

I think many people investing in ICO's aren't in for the long term profit anyway, but looking for quick profit after an ICO is listed on exchanges. They also managed to get some kind of permit so US citizens can participate. There's hardly any such ICO so I expect this will bring in a lot of investors from the US. And I think Genesis vision is marketing themselves well, they already have arrangement with their first exchange and they're not crappy project. This seem very good combination for some quick profit and they probably won't have trouble reaching hard cap.

About the tokens. They probably could have done the project without issuing their own tokens that's true. But then they couldn't make their ICO, they would have to get funded the harder, slower and more expensive way gathering VC funds. Many projects collect their funds this way. I know many people think that's bad. But I don't think that's always the case. It can be good business decision. Why would someone company choose to spend more resources than they have to achieve their goal. Well there are ICO's that incorporate tokens in their projects in a stupid way like CarTaxi for example, that makes their model worse than if there were no tokens at all. But I think Genesis Vision use of tokens makes at least some sense and doesn't hurt operation of the platform. And it also gives us opportunity to invest with possibility of quick profit (mind this is not investment advice or prediction, it's just my humble opinion). If they took the VC root we wouldn't even have the possibility to invest.

Great post, there needs to be more information like this out there for retail / new investors in the crypto-space.

Too many vulnerable people are being hit with scams.

You made a lot of point, this are useful information that need to be keep as a reminder for all of us..i truly believe that most of ico fall in that 3 category and i think wide regulation in every ico project must be implemented and this is the right time were the cryptocurrency are on its peaks time.
Theres no doubt blockchain technology are great.but lot of start up right now are completely unrelated to blockchain industry, everything they build are there just to make money and no value at all.

thanks for the info

Thanks for this, it was a very good read and highlights some very important issues.

Very nice and instructive post, thank you!

Great output! Thanks for the informative info!
Too many people have seen ICOs rising few hundred percents and in the rush to follow suit a lot of them do not research that thoroughly, thus falling into scams ICOs in the end!

What can you say about vibehub and eloplay? Thanks for your response

Thanks

i think they is 4 type of ICO money grabers.
There is a lot of ICOs in space that will rapie you.
Have you heard of PRESALE Cheesy.. own yea.
Now imagine sand ico and regular price was like 1.5$ per token but...
insider got deal like 0.25$ per token. Those gy got so cheap token becouse those groups will promote an shill for that ICO.
With such shit you can essy and with bag of shit.

There is always option that ICO creator will self invest in own ICO making it price looking much better tht it is in reality.
This is crypto here all shit moves are possible guys.

I read all of this word carefully to understand how to decide good ico or not but i still can not do. Since there are many of them offer a good thing but they just scammers. But thanks for sharing this thread.

A very insightful article, yes we need to be very careful while choosing ICO as most of the icos doesn't solve a business problem and some are pure scams. I also ponder the way ICO's raise money so quickly instead if people are eager to put that money in humanitarian efforts the world would be a better place with less hunger and poorness. But human greed it seems just wired into genes.

I think is more, 95% ICO are scams. After the ICO eBTC exploded then other dev trying to make it happen too. Beware !
Thank you for reminding us bru

great input, thanks for providing these details.

1. Invest in an existing product
2. Invest in a team that has a proven record!

One point you may have missed is the level of invention. ICOs attract inventors and invention minded people. Everyone want to be the next Bitcoin. But those really big ideas take time and might fail. That is probably why some of those ICO you mentioned that are big have not produced anything yet. I don't know, I didn't look them up, but for ICO advice, if the product is so revolutionary that everyone will surely want one, it's has a high likelihood of failure, because the idea is just too big.

Safer, yes, but many ICOs have produced sizable returns. If an ICO meets the criteria in this thread, to me it's worth the risk for a small amount. The scams are really the worst part. I always check LinkedIn profiles to make sure these people are real. I found a professor listed on a site and wrote him and he said he is not advising them. Scam! Do your homework.

Really nice thread, very informative. Thanks for sharing with us!!!

It's probably safer just to skip most ICOs and wait for the coins to be listed on exchanges.  If they can make it that far, you'll get a fairly good idea how solid a project is based on how quickly the ICO buyers dump their coins onto the market 

Zonto is very high risk.

Zonto has a business plan. I’ve rarely read a business plan that was so filled with jargon, yet meaningless. It has tons of hard to understand and disconnected features and function. No benefits. After 10 pages, I couldn’t read any more. Maybe they’re onto something, but I couldn’t figure it out.

It looks like they grabbed every jargon they can find and threw them into the business plan and white paper, to see what will stick.

Their white paper has 14 pages of text. 5 of those are about their ICO and bounty. This tells you where their priority is.

They will give ZONTO coins to users for free. Businesses can get ZONTO coins from users (I assume from selling services) and pay Zonto for advertising.

From what I can tell, they are in the social network field.

This is a high risk project for these reasons:

• Google has access to BILLIONS of users and top technologies. Google+ tried to compete against Facebook and they failed. You are dreaming if you think a rag tag group is going to successfully compete against Facebook. Creating a new token does not mean that you will become a competitor to Facebook.
  
• Even if Zonto gets millions of users, it does not mean it will make a profit. Facebook lost money for most of the first 9 years. For year ending 2013, Facebook made $1.73 profit per user. Twitter is still losing money.

Even if Zonto can miraculously come up with better technology than Google or Facebook, it doesn’t mean it will get lots of users for these reasons:

• NETWORK EFFECT. Nobody at Facebook is going to leave their 200 friends to go to Zonto. I’ve seen several ICO projects trying to be the next social network. They are dreaming and most likely will fail. They claim that they will get users because the users will be paid. From whom? The money has to ultimately come from advertisers.
  
• Monero, PIVX, Zcash, Dash and NEM have better technology than Bitcoin in terms of privacy, lower energy usage and (currently) speed. But people buy Bitcoin because of Brand awareness. Better technology does not always win. There are hundreds of altcoins trying to dethrone Bitcoin and they cannot.

An analogy of losing money for Zonto would mean that they are giving more coins to users than they are receiving from advertisers. This equates to inflation, which equates to devaluation of the coin. So, if Zonto is losing money like Twitter, or Facebook in the first several years, its coin will devalue during that time.

If Zonto follows the same EXPLOSIVE path that Facebook had, which would be an absolute miracle, its users will watch their ZONTO coins devalue for 9 years before it starts increasing in value. Would you want to be one of these users?

The difference between Twitter and Zonto is that Twitter can always go to the secondary markets and sell more stock to raise capital, in order to pay for its annual losses. Can Zonto do that? Is it going to host an ICO every year?

Another problem is on the advertiser side. I assume that the advertiser buys Zonto coins on an exchange, in order to pay Zonto. This adds a layer of hassle for the advertiser that he doesn't have to put up with when he advertises on other sites.