Most of the ICOs are not profitable to anyone. While I say most of them are not good, but still there are few ICOs which are linked to a real life business. When a new company decides to list in to a stock market, they offer their shares through IPO which is Initial public offering. But in real life stock market, we have regulators who ensure that the company is already an established one and they have registered profits since last three years (in my country). But the ICO is a method through which a company raises funds for their upcoming ventures. So they want to raise fund for a business which is yet to come and doesn't exist now. So the risk is very high.
China has already banned ICO and Canada government has already started cracking them down. Which looks like a proper step to me. If it can't be regulated now, it will become a ponzi market and people will start loosing big amounts of money. Invest in ICO but make sure they have a legal business to back them up.
I was just discussing with a couple of parters actually touching on something you said.
I'm not a big ICO chaser. This year, I participated in exactly three, and all modest sums below USD 1,000, basically a small pool between myself and two friends who can't be bothered to get into crypto. At this very moment, none of them are profitable! Other than an actual interest in the tech/product, I spent considerable time and effort to conduct some research and invest only in those we felt were long-term buys, with solid developers on the team, etc etc.
It seems even the best-researched decisions are prone to failures.
For our next possible venture, and perhaps for the foreseeable future, we have actually thought along the lines of ICOs that are more like IPOs. Similar to our second ICO, we want something with a real world business that simply wants funding to expand. So not necessarily blockchain innovation or decentralised solution. Simply a business with a tokenised model for expansion.
At least we'd have a product with a track record to look at!
