How to avoid being scammed: completely ignore the world of "coins" and other nonsense.
That's akin to saying in order to avoid the dot-com crash you should avoid the web in 1997.
Avoiding being scammed in ICO “pump-and-dump” schemes
21–30 of 60 posts
Re: Avoiding being scammed in ICO “pump-and-dump” schemes
#22Just to provide more options to the discussion and because nobody has mentioned it: Have you considered that all ICOs are a scam of some sort? Or that you can participate in scams and still end up being a winner? 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 fo…
Ehhh the definition of every successful business is one that creates more value than the sum of its parts. There has to be a consumer somewhere, and consumers usually buy something with intrinsic value (you chop down a tree, I buy the wood from you for my house.)
When there is no intrinsic value being gained, this means that the company is really just a shell game, moving money around. Think poker. People are voluntarily risking money, to play a game, to get someone else's money (and some slight entertainment.)
So, if a business markets itself as one that is creating value ("we do easy digital, global payments!"), but is really just moving money around ("buy our ICO, get in on the ground floor!")...
then buyer be aware :)
Re: Avoiding being scammed in ICO “pump-and-dump” schemes
#23I wonder if there is an opportunity here for an unbiased certification process that ICO founders can request. Sort of like a Morningstar rating.
Here's my unbiased certification:
I hereby certify that all of these ICOs are crap. The world doesn't need another highly frothy 'currency' with no underlying value, whose only useful properties are some famous dude (or some guy on YouTube) says it's cool and you can think you'll get in early like when you missed out on Bitcoin or whatever.
Re: Avoiding being scammed in ICO “pump-and-dump” schemes
#24How to avoid being scammed: completely ignore the world of "coins" and other nonsense.
That's akin to saying in order to avoid the dot-com crash you should avoid the web in 1997.
Not sure what you and sibling comment are getting at. Noone is forcing you to participate in cryptocurrency ICO's, just like noone was forcing anyone to participate in dot-com stocks back in the day. In both cases it was perfectly avoidable.
Re: Avoiding being scammed in ICO “pump-and-dump” schemes
#25Just to provide more options to the discussion and because nobody has mentioned it: Have you considered that all ICOs are a scam of some sort? Or that you can participate in scams and still end up being a winner? 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 fo…
I think it's important to maintain a distinction between an intentional, predatory scam and something that's just an ill-conceived, but well-intentioned, bad idea that ends up flopping.
Re: Avoiding being scammed in ICO “pump-and-dump” schemes
#26Ah the dot-com bubble 2.0. I think it'll go down in history as the crypto-crash because that's cool to say. 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…
No, this is substantially worse than the late 90s.
In the late 90s there were a lot of very premature IPOs and a lot of money raised for bad ideas, but very few of them were total cranks or scams. I could in fact buy pet food on pets.com-- it just wasn't a viable business and wasn't well executed. The CueCat was a horrible business idea but CueCats actually did exist and you could in fact use them. (I used to have one! Kept it for teh lulz.)
Most ICO projects are complete and utter vapor consisting of nothing more than a stock bootstrap web site and a "white paper" that could have been generated by a Markov chain model using crypto and decentralized systems buzzwords. A few have a bit of code online that doesn't work. Of those that have shipped most of them are unusable, and of those that are usable I am only aware of maybe one or two that are at all interesting. Of those none are very compelling and none are things I couldn't do without.
There are literally no hits in this space. It's all junk, and most of it is outright scams. I'd be surprised if a single current generation coin ever actually delivers real ROI.
It pains me to say it too. This stuff is very much in the "I want to believe" category for me. But I've gone through them and that's what I see. It's depressing.
We've discussed an ICO here at ZeroTier and I've consistently come up against it. There is so much fraud here I don't want to go near it even if there might be good use cases. A lot of capital is sloshing around but I have both ethical and pragmatic problems with participating in a system so absolutely rife with fraud. I also don't particularly want to deal with SEC investigations.
Cryptocurrency on the other hand is useful. We have used Bitcoin to pay overseas contributors for open source work and consulting. The function for which block chains have become most known is so far the most useful and real.
The only upside is this: I find it satisfying that the scammers are gaming the "serious math/CS papers must be written in TeX" heuristic by writing their buzzword salad white papers in LaTeX. I hate lazy prejudiced heuristics like that.
Re: Avoiding being scammed in ICO “pump-and-dump” schemes
#27Ah the dot-com bubble 2.0. I think it'll go down in history as the crypto-crash because that's cool to say. 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…
No, this is substantially worse than the late 90s. In the late 90s there were a lot of very premature IPOs and a lot of money raised for bad ideas, but very few of them were total cranks or scams. I could in fact buy pet food on pets.com-- it just wasn't a viable business and wasn't well executed. The CueCat was a horrible business idea but CueCats actually did exist and you could in fact use them. (I used to have on…
> I do find it a bit satisfying that the scammers are gaming the "serious math/CS papers must be written in TeX"
Some don't even bother to do that. This is literally the white paper for one of the hottest cryptos out there right now :
This is the codebase :
https://github.com/neo-project
The current net value of the entire circulation is about 3.7 billion, all of which was pre-"mined" and 50% of which is reserved by the creators.
Re: Avoiding being scammed in ICO “pump-and-dump” schemes
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, this is substantially worse than the late 90s. In the late 90s there were a lot of very premature IPOs and a lot of money raised for bad ideas, but very few of them were total cranks or scams. I could in fact buy pet food on pets.com-- it just wasn't a viable business and wasn't well executed. The CueCat was a horrible business idea but CueCats actually did exist and you could in fact use them. (I used to have on…
> I do find it a bit satisfying that the scammers are gaming the "serious math/CS papers must be written in TeX" Some don't even bother to do that. This is literally the white paper for one of the hottest cryptos out there right now : http://docs.neo.org/en-us/ This is the codebase : https://github.com/neo-project The current net value of the entire circulation is about 3.7 billion, all of which was pre-"mined" and 5…
I have a strong suspicion that some of these exist as fronts to move flight capital out of China, Russia, and other places that hemorrhage dodgy money.
There almost seems to be an inverse relationship between reality and funds raised. Here's one of the very few real ones:
They got nowhere near the funding, and most of it was conventional:
It's one of the few coin-backed distributed things that seems like it might be useful to the point that I may actually try it, and I've heard it actually does work.
Guess that's passe in these quarters.
Re: Avoiding being scammed in ICO “pump-and-dump” schemes
#29Ah the dot-com bubble 2.0. I think it'll go down in history as the crypto-crash because that's cool to say. 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…
No, this is substantially worse than the late 90s. In the late 90s there were a lot of very premature IPOs and a lot of money raised for bad ideas, but very few of them were total cranks or scams. I could in fact buy pet food on pets.com-- it just wasn't a viable business and wasn't well executed. The CueCat was a horrible business idea but CueCats actually did exist and you could in fact use them. (I used to have on…
I can agree with that. There isn't a whole lot of utility in individual ICO's. However if you look at ICO's in general the concept is pretty remarkable, ICO's essentially facilitate the "move fast and break things" mentality of Silicon Valley. If ICO's work over the next 10 years (after the crash and into the future) that's a pretty great tool that Silicon Valley now has, they can now surpass the SEC and having the burden of pleasing investors and most importantly posting quarterly profits and still raise all of the money that they need.
This goes back to my original point that there is value in cryptocurrency and the technology behind it. It's just going through a period of explosive interest and growth, which in turn is causing the technology to get better rapidly.
The multimillionaire investors are going to be made over the next 3 years. The next google could come out of an ICO in 10, it's just a matter of the market correcting itself once the hype wears off.
Re: Avoiding being scammed in ICO “pump-and-dump” schemes
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's akin to saying in order to avoid the dot-com crash you should avoid the web in 1997.
Not sure what you and sibling comment are getting at. Noone is forcing you to participate in cryptocurrency ICO's, just like noone was forcing anyone to participate in dot-com stocks back in the day. In both cases it was perfectly avoidable.
Well obviously, but if you don't see the value of the blockchain and the technology behind it then you're on the wrong site my friend.
I'm saying that it's always better to get familiar with new technology at the earliest point possible. To "Completely ignore the world of coins" would be kind of stupid and shortsighted don't you think?