Half of ICOs Die Within Four Months After Token Sales Finalized

In contrast, the ICO for SingularityNET has actually done quite well and received 5 times the amount of demand expected for their token sale; they postponed the end of their token sale date to properly handle the overwhelming demand. Feels most ICO sites are giving them 4/5 rating on average, but we'll how that goes. I think the reason this one in particular is doing so well is that the purpose of the sale feels useful, which is "to let anyone create, share, and monetize AI services at scale". According to them, the world’s first "decentralized AI network" has arrived.

Anyone have thoughts as to why this ICO could be different? ICO Drops says it was a whitelisted ICO:

https://icodrops.com/singularitynet/

Interesting note from the website: "While we are aware that the AGI token is currently being traded on some exchanges, we do not encourage or facilitate this exchange trading in any manner. Speculative secondary trading is against the spirit of the AGI token and SingularityNET project. We strongly discourage speculative secondary trading and officially ask AGI token holders to act accordingly."

Do you understand the concept of a stock share?

Well, just remove the company, the product, and the regulation, and that's an ICO.

The issuer of the coins/tokens do not have to buy anything back. The idea is that they will increase in value and function, and others will want to buy them from you.

It goes like this:

1. "RichCoin" is created and the creators begin selling them at 5,000 Richcoins for 1 Bitcoin. Ads are pushed across social media platforms and web communities are seeded with information that encourages people to invest.

2. 50,000 people spend a total of 1000 Bitcoins buying the first 5,000,000 RichCoins.

3. After public launch, 5,000 people sell their RichCoins to late investors, netting ~20% profits.

4. The remaining 45,000 people "HODL", hoping that their $1 RichCoins will one day become $100 RichCoins so that they can move to a private island and never work again.

5. RichCoins fall to 10% or less of their ICO value as all official websites disappear.

6. The creators of RichCoin, who long ago converted their 1000 Bitcoins to $5,000,000 USD, move to a private island and never work again.

The article gleefully ignores the positive side of these investments documented by the authors of the study:

>We find evidence of significant ICO underpricing, with average returns of 179% from the ICO price to the first day’s opening market price, over a holding period that averages just 16 days. Even after imputing returns of -100% to ICOs that don’t list their tokens within 60 days and adjusting for the returns of the asset class, the representative ICO investor earns 82%.

Not saying I want to participate in any ICOs, especially now that a lot of frothiness has gone out of the market, but this article is clickbait garbage if they can't even summarize some of the main points from the abstract.

Eventually people are going to realize that

(1) all of these can essentially require transparency + encryption (i.e. git + signatures), not the whole blockchain,

(2) hence can be had without the huge energy losses (that come from many nodes (re-)computing the same result over and over, and

(3) centralisation is a feature most people want, because it helps resolve conflicts (à la Vitalik's centralised resolution of the DAO conflict).

Centralized databases are faster. Centralized consensus is dangerous for the same reason that a dictatorship is dangerous. The organization in charge of said solution would exercise dramatic control over the execution of said code. You need not look very far into the past to see egregious examples of organizations abusing their centralized position over data. I shudder the thought of a centralized actor having the same precise control over all monetary transfers.

Meanwhile, the banking system itself is not centralized. It's quite slow to settle monetary transfers from bank-to-bank.

Right now, Lightning Network is live on BTC's chain. It's instant, near free, and yet it's decentralized.