11–20 of 60 posts
This is becoming more of a problem. That's why I only stick to mining certain coins.
To summarize the probably resulting discussion of this question: The profit is probably in doing ICOs and offering business opportunities on top of coins, not in mining the coins.
To get the noodle baking about the first part: The goal of every public offering is to make more money than what the stuff you're offering is worth to you. Of course it may have more value to other people for different reasons, but the basic idea is not to get the same value or less of what it's worth to you. So to some degree an ICO always plans to take more than it gives.
How to avoid being scammed: completely ignore the world of "coins" and other nonsense.
The worst schemes are the "Oh No, we've been hacked during our ICO, stop sending those 'other people' your money!"
They are not, Dan bytemaster was around when Satoshis was active back then
Nobody wants a domain specific currency. If I want to purchase services whether it's from a company or from some kind of decentralized amorphous protocol I want to make that purchase in fiat cash or some general purpose crypto cash like BTC or ETH. I do not want to convert cash into some domain specific currency. That's annoying and introduces complexity, breakage, and market inefficiency.
Regular crowd-funding mostly have rules about what you pre-buy. Regular IPOs have tight rules and regulation on how, when and to whom you may offer.
I fail to see how and why we should tolerate these ICOs scams these days. A lot of people will lose a lot of money.
But seriously this is exactly what happened in the late 90's during the rise of the web. There is real value in Bitcoin, there is real value in blockchain technology. There probably isn't any value in PETCOIN or AOLCOIN if you catch my drift. Smart investors who can stomach risk can make a lot of money over the next few years before all the shit hits the fan. Gotta love irrational exuberance.
A pump-and-dump scheme drives the price up by promoting the commodity only to allow insiders who bought it earlier to sell when the price peeks just before the the price plunges again. You can easily see it in penny-stocks and/or OTC-stocks. The price stays flat, then peaks, then crashes to about the pre pump-and-dump price. I haven't seen such a behaviour in any of the new coins. Does anyone have an example or link…