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Half of ICOs Die Within Four Months After Token Sales Finalized (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: About 56 percent of crypto startups that raise money through token sales die within four months of their initial coin offerings. That's the finding of a Boston College study that analyzed the intensity of tweets from the startups' Twitter accounts to infer signs of life. The researchers determined that only 44.2 percent of startups survive after 120 days from the end of their ICOs. The researchers, Hugo Benedetti and Leonard Kostovetsky, examined 2,390 ICOs that were completed before May.
Acquiring coins in an ICO and selling them on the first day is the safest investment strategy, Kostovetsky said in a phone interview. But many individual investors can't participate in ICOs, so this option isn't open to them. Still, all investors should probably sell their coins within the first six months, the study found. "What we find is that once you go beyond three months, at most six months, they don't outperform other cryptocurrencies," Kostovetsky said. "The strongest return is actually in the first month." The Boston College study also found that ICO returns are declining, as startups have becoming savvier about pricing coin offerings and more people have jumped into ICO investing. According to Bloomberg, "Returns of people who sold tokens on the first day they were listed on an exchange have been declining by four percentage points a month, Kostovetsky said."
Acquiring coins in an ICO and selling them on the first day is the safest investment strategy, Kostovetsky said in a phone interview. But many individual investors can't participate in ICOs, so this option isn't open to them. Still, all investors should probably sell their coins within the first six months, the study found. "What we find is that once you go beyond three months, at most six months, they don't outperform other cryptocurrencies," Kostovetsky said. "The strongest return is actually in the first month." The Boston College study also found that ICO returns are declining, as startups have becoming savvier about pricing coin offerings and more people have jumped into ICO investing. According to Bloomberg, "Returns of people who sold tokens on the first day they were listed on an exchange have been declining by four percentage points a month, Kostovetsky said."
No, investing isn't gambling, it's not black and white like that.
There's more of a scale. At one end you have "gambling" and at the other you have "investing". At the far gambling end of the spectrum you have games of chance (e.g. roulette), binary options (which is gambling dressed up to look like investing), slot machines etc - basically all the types of things where the house always win. At the other end you have things like bonds, traditional long term buy and hold in blue chip companies etc. There's still some risk but on that end of the spectrum, it's not a zero sum game nor "the house always wins".
If you say all investing is gambling because there's some risk and can never be a sure thing, then you get to the reductio ad absurdum argument that absolutely everything is gambling, e.g keeping your money in a savings account is also gambling because that's not a sure thing either.
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