Topic: How to Identify Good ICOs for Investment - page 5. (Read 771 times)

Lol, I understand what you feel, it is not really easy to discern the project, some will come to you like sheep's, meanwhile they are in wolf’s clothing, but with a good knowledge of the industry we are, we should be able to spot some of them out when we do our analysis on those project, book wise and physical wise.

Most project that I have invested in, I make sure that I check the concept of the product first and see if it is a project that make sense and will have real use case, when I am convince about that, then I move to checking everything about the team, I check if the team well knowledgeable about the project and also look for project that has team that can do video calls or conferences, at least their  face will be open to the public in that video.

Article's definitely a very good go-to for anyone just starting out in the ICO venture. Very brief and concise. Got a good grasp of some of the basic concepts that I neglected to look into before, like open and hard cap. Thanks for sharing.

Indeed. I tend to mostly agree with very few exceptions. Caveat Emptor rule always applies, but there is no standard way to evaluate / conduct due diligence.
Difficult to separate the marketing hype from the network value.

Team experience & profiles - Not a reliable indicator of project success
I've seen projects with teams of highly experience ppl and long resumes fail miserably while teams of humble no-names succeed and gain notoriety.
Having more tech ppl actually working full-time on the project does go a long-way.

Whitepaper - Does not represent anything other than a vision. Not to be relied for ROI purposes.

Corporate backing - Not a necessary guarantee of success, as many companies are keen to capitalize on marketing hype for stock valuation purposes or other

Clear use case - Most "clear" use cases today were only "obvious" in hindsight a few years afterwards.

The best projects are usually bland, boring stuff that takes time and effort to build, not very conductive to a media hype frenzy of revolutionizing/disrupting.
Think low-key projects raising low to medium amounts for a well-defined business-case.
Building stuff takes time, patience and hard work. Again, not rly aligned with pump&dump high-speculatory environment.

A project still alive and active after 2 years, with paying customers and revenue stream (from network, fees, etc) and a committed team.
That's the hallmark of success. That must come first so that the tokeneconomics fall in place.

An ICO project using fake profiles or someone else's profile is one good indication that they are heading to scam gullible investors.
But even for those authentic projects, they can't escape from the reality that if one of their team members decided to screw the project because of greed, their fate would be hazy too.
Investing in ICO entails great risk even if you consider all major facets to look at. There's no guarantee in this side of business. Just take precautions to minimize big losses.

In theory, there's no really way to filter out and point that this ICO is scam or this ICO is bad after all they've just released their product to the market. So in paper there's no way for us to really identify good or bad ICO's. There is also this thing called marketing, so they will promote it so hard that you will be sway to joined them. However, if you see that this ICO is just a copy of a previous project, chances are it could fail because investors are looking for projects that can a real life usage.

My otherwise question is whether there is really a way to know an ICO project that will not scam people? They are beds of sane finger that flick together. I mean, you can't just hold them from not running away 

I do agree with you because majority of the ICOs would tick all of these box established and also with other suggestions other people have equally listed but at the end of the day either by intention or omission, it just does not work out. Some could be the greediness of the managers others could just because the product did not appeal to the generality of the people they are trying to entice and aside that there could be series of project at the same time. The point is, all of these characteristics does not guarantee the best outcome just reducing the chance of being at the disadvantage from the start.

Its much better in this year to invest in IEO instead

In the flood of ICOs is really hard to tell which are worth investing. Sometimes is also hard to make a proper background check.
Even if it's not about scam majority of ICOs will not end well on the market so you will not make profit or it will be very little. That is why to my opinion ICOs are usually not worth time and money. Don't let greed to be your only motive.

Most of these ICOs may end passing all these red flags but that doesn't mean that they are scams, I like the idea about knowing the people who are in charge of the ICO before investing but even in that case, people do change and where there is a lot of money involved people become greedy.

Indeed, people are free to share their knowledge and opinion which is useful because they can enlighten you about something you are lack of.  If we have any concern or problem we can just ask for some thoughts and opinions that can give us idea about some things we need to do to surpass that specific problem.

I like this quote from the article:

Yeah, I found it to be pretty useless myself.  OP probably has some relationship to that site and is just shilling it for clicks.

That is a very great tips that you have right there, the most important of those tip is the aspect of verifying team qualification, because the lifeline of the project really depends on the team of the company, how intelligent they are to really carry out such project, and the experience they have had so far in the area of the blockchain technology they are trying to propose.

I think I would also want to consider that aspect of cap, I must confess to you that it is in your write-up that I am seeing the open cap fund rising, how can a project just have unending donations, to me, I will strictly just term such projects as scam, because feasibility ought to have been done for a project and them have a limit of what the really need to run the project smoothly, but not to have a wallet that will always take in Mooney from investors.

The article is just a compilation of every ICO investors opinion. Like the usual answer of someone when you'll ask them what are the things to consider before investing to an ICO.

• Team
• Whitepaper
• Use case / legitimacy

You should at least write what you thought about the article that you shared above. Seems like you have a hobby of making new threads with just a single link in it.

Anyway, forget about ICO. If you want to make money without thinking too much, just buy IEO from Binance or Gate. Their market maker will pump your bought coins like crazy for the first few hours, regardless of the quality of the project itself. Nice money grab machine.

This is the beauty of this forum where members can really help out to verify and identify which one is a potential fraud or not.
You can get recommendations basing on actual users experience and insights which is very helpful.

The best part of the article is the Bitcointalk part, here in this forum we can expose who are and who aren't, a project may have everything investors are looking for a project, but if they cannot address issues and concerns raise by members of this forum they are in trouble, take a look at Adab they look very impressive, but they are exposed as a dubious project, and this forum exposed them.

Well said but don't think anything will change, the exchanges themselves aren't regulated either so scammers can take advantage of them, especially the new exchanges coming into the scene and immediately offering their platform as a host to IEOs. The centralized exchanges can't be trusted too as most of them put profitablity over their reputation. Trying not to mention names but some exchange that has once been accused and proven of listing a scam coins is now be promoted as the best platforms to carryout IEO. Also considering the expenses involves in this IEO listing process, there isn't any guarantee the team of those projects won't dump their allocations on the market to recover some funds for further development of their project. The whole IEO system won't work or get close to the success level of ICO unless the ridiculous fees associated with carrying out an iEO is reduced and also the requirement of holding certain coins to be eligible to participate in the fund rising process is been eliminated.

Following the tips given on that article above can be helpful but not a guarantee that something will not go wrong as there are many good projects that caught the attention (and the purse, of course) of many but they eventually turned out to be a big nightmare to the tune of millions of dollars flying into thin air and the supporters left with empty plastic bags (hope they don't throw them into the ocean!).

The truth is that the very nature of the ICO platform is quite risky -- very risky -- all because the marketplace is not regulated and when anything is not regulated that is when the dark side of human nature can easily take in. With no sense of legal responsibly, project proponents and developers change theirs mask into that of a scammer.

Hopefully, with the coming of the IEO where exchanges are injected into the scene, things can get better but until there is a clear-cut regulation on the whole crowdfunding process there is no guarantee that a project will not, one day sooner or later,  just evaporate like a vapor under the light of the sun. Oh, well...

I have read and it really helped me a lot in analyzing projects to submit to my small investment groups. thank you very much.