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81% of Recent ICOs Were Scams, Research Finds (bleepingcomputer.com)
Four out of five initial coin offerings (ICOs) that have taken place in the last year have been classified as scams, according to a recent study by Satis Group, an ICO advisory firm. From a report: ICOs have been the rage of the cryptocurrency world because they allow companies to raise money for various ventures by issuing cryptocurrency tokens that users could buy and later trade on cryptocurrency exchanges. The concept is similar to an IPO, but instead of shares, companies issue tokens, and some companies promised to buy tokens back from users after a product became successful and the token's value increases.
The study's results don't bode well for people who've invested in one or more and are expecting profits sometime in the near future. The Satis study organized ICOs in six categories, based on their current status. Only ICOs with a market cap of $50 million or higher have been included in the results, and the percentage of scammy ICOs would have probably bee higher if researchers looked at the smaller ICOs. According to researchers, 81% of ICO's were Scams, 6% were classified as Failed, 5% had Gone Dead, and 8% went on to trade on a exchange.
The study's results don't bode well for people who've invested in one or more and are expecting profits sometime in the near future. The Satis study organized ICOs in six categories, based on their current status. Only ICOs with a market cap of $50 million or higher have been included in the results, and the percentage of scammy ICOs would have probably bee higher if researchers looked at the smaller ICOs. According to researchers, 81% of ICO's were Scams, 6% were classified as Failed, 5% had Gone Dead, and 8% went on to trade on a exchange.
Ha ha!
A fool and his money are parted, especially when that fool wants to play in unregulated financial markets.
Don't tell us you didn't see this one coming.
With a margin of error +/- 5% shenanigans.
IPOs are tightly regulated by the SEC for many years. ICOs are scarcely regulated and are the current "hot thing" for speculators. Is anybody truly surprised by this? Of course ICOs will bring out scammers who prey on people hungry for "the next Bitcoin." This is to be as expected as flies drawn to a steaming pile of dung.
As somebody working on what I imagine will be an upending blockchain solution, it's rather disappointing to have to deal with this. People either think every solution is going to be a scam, when sometimes the problem is the investor is overvaluing them. When things settle down and the industry regulates itself (or SEC forces the issue), ICO's will be the new Silicon Valley for VC's.
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The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?
... so far.
19% to go.
Log in or piss off.
In shocking news today apparently 19% of ICOs are not scams. Economists interviewed about this story are at a loss to explain the situation.
Although according to the summary the number is closer to 8%.
I read the internet for the articles.
I'd be curious to see how much the surviving currencies are actually trading for, given how most cryptos that aren't Bitcoin or Ethereum trade for under a dollar, with many trading for a fraction of a penny per coin. I somehow doubt that any of the surviving coins have made money for anyone but their creators and those firms that will do pump and dumps on various cryptos and spread the news to their paying clients.
Looks like some libertarians had a taste of a true free market, unhindered by the burden of overbearing government regulation...
Personally, I pledge my faith in Dogecoin.
because I can get a GTX 1060 6gb for only $120 more than I paid a year ago. I suspect the prices'll go back to normal soon. There's outfits out of China working on ASICs that can do Ethereum.
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Researchers unable to identify the scam in 19% of ICOs.
Those were not coins, they were tokens. They don't need to be mined or anything, they're just made up.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Is there a Darwin Award for big monetary loss?
Table-ized A.I.
Their pursuit of a Mad-Max-esque (MME) world may be legitimate, from a certain angle. One cannot say that a MME world is objectively bad. It's a matter of preference.
A libertarian may reply and say, "I made an x-coin purchase choice and it didn't work out. Live and learn. If I die due to my bad decision, so what. The species overall will be stronger. Survival as a species is better than fluffy comfort in the short term. It's not about just me."
I consider many libertarians a hybrid between Klingons and Ferengis.
Table-ized A.I.
Simply untrue, but hey, you+'re welcome to continue believing nonsense.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Obviously. Greed makes people blind.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
From a speculator's perspective they are identical. It does not matter if the mining is done by the company releasing the coin or by 3rd parties, they are still created and traded in similar manners.
WTF. They are not created in similar manners.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The initial motivation is for a mechanism for transferring value between two parties, without requiring a central entity to mediate the exchange.
We can do this in the real world by handing cash from one party to the second.
Cryptocurrencies allow us to do this over the internet. The problem at the moment is that they do not allow us to do this *well*.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco