I've noticed quite some changes in ICOs and bounties:
- The whole market is flooded with BS projects
- There are way too many ICOs
- Teams are often fake
- Telegram groups of 25k people don't mean a thing
- Hardcaps aren't reached anymore. Remember a few months ago when some ico's were sold out in minutes? When does that still happen? It doesn't... the contrary is happening: icos last for months and months
- Bounties: they sell them by their hardcap number at the price of the last stage. For example: 4 million USD bounty! That is IF all 400.000.000 tokens are sold AND you could sell them at the last price of 0.1$ which you never will.
- Bounties/caps are often calculated in eth and for some reason ico-people still think 1 eth is 1000$. Wake up and smell the news! 1 eth is less than half of that!
- Nobody is buying tokens anymore
- They lie about how many tokens are sold
- Private investors... don't make me laugh. There are no private investors.... If there were, they would be bragging about which ones which they don't. ALL lies and more lies.
EDIT: (since most posters only read the OP): That's why:
- Every ICO team member should do a mandatory KYC so everybody can find these people when the shit hits the fan.
- Vitaliks DAICO idea with escrowed funds that are released when certain goals on the roadmap are met.
- Pay bounties in eth/btc/fiat and not in tokens
- Team tokens should be locked for a year (a lot do this already).
- Delete Telegram as a whole
(no j/k I don't like chat groups of 50k people, they are useless)
EDIT2:
I invested in a lot of ico's last summer. Most of them made profits, sometimes huge profits. When the market turned red, I stopped investing money and started investing time. I turned to bounty hunting (mostly translation jobs, some sig). By doing that I read a lot of WP, did a lot of research on teams and websites and then it started to occur to me that there are A LOT of fake teams, fake linkedins, vaporware products that only consist of marketing.
I always wonder: how is it possible that if they present you a team of so called experts with years of relevant experience in IT, financial industry, marketing, etc that in most cases these people are nowhere to be found prior to the ico? You google them: nothing, you search for their pictures: nothing, you google the companies they so called worked for: you can't find them (you can find the companies but you can't find evidence that they worked there). There are only a few ico's that I participated in (with a bounty) that were 100% transparant, where you could actually find the people aboard. Neufund was one of them. Most of the times those icos are the ones with hardly any bonuses, no pre-sales, no months long ico's, no facebook and telegram lemmings who try to shill a product and team they don't know.
Yes, There is something to think. But i don't thin bounty era becoming end. but I agree with that you talking about. I also saw some ICO programs. runs by very young people. and they say they are experts in the field and no working products. only concept. Yeah, community-scale can't measure ICO strength. Because of 1 or 2 airdrops and giveaways enough to boost community scale to 20,000+. Project good or not it doesn't matter to them. They are joining. The official Web page also same. any good designer can design a professional website easily. But I trust websites which have good web ratings and good traffic level. I agree with you they can manipulate us using fake ICO details. Some project starts very actively. after the weeks and months, no any updates from the team. Last time I saw bitcointalk thread describe how to get scammed. here is steemit article.
But I believe ICO programs which have already working product for a long time. The can be trust mostly than a project only depend on a concept or future product. Advisory board also good... I think an Expert advisory board is good to trust ICO. Those advisors easy can find on the internet and easily find information about them. Are you think they support to scam ICOs only for a money? These are the points I use to filter scam project. I would like to have your opinion on it. thanks