For the whitepaper's emphasis on user-friendliness, it is ironic that a relative newbie like me had to also read a bunch of thread pages to finally deduce the apparent intended purpose of Ascendancy, beyond a very vague goal of helping people create decentralized applications.

(Imagine if someone said their business plan was simply "to create applications": You'd ask what applications, why, and how, in which market sector, with what advantages over competitors and alternatives).

Apparently Ascendancy's actual purpose can be summed up as: kind of like LISK but supposed to be more user-friendly and modular, to whatever degree that matters, also somehow more efficient

Lisk is a large $16 million market cap coin, out for a long time.  Yet, as near as I can tell at quick glance, nobody has so far ever developed a decentralized application on it that is actually functional with real users, beyond their brief list of concepts and prototype ideas.

I'm pretty sure, if that is accomplished in Lisk or another decentralized application framework like hypothetical Ascendancy, the pioneers will be groups of experienced programmers, not utter casual newbies.  Yet, along with a silly unprofessionally irrelevant quote bashing U.S. math scores compared to other countries, Ascendancy's whitepaper talks about target users for whom "cryptography is a scary word" because "they associate it with mathematics."  Those are not the people going to be creating some of the world's first dApps anyway.

The actual example applications in the whitepaper seem to be what would not be tried by mere newbies, so, if user-friendliness is a particular advantage obtained, it would only be user-friendliness by the standards of a tool built for programmers or close to it.

One example application is a "fully featured cryptocurrency in a separate container."  That possibly means helping some users create a new coin or token, in a more customizable manner than just an Ethereum token or just paying a fraction of a Btc to a coin creation service like Creatio.  Having a market niche of large enough size is unknown, particularly as I know Creatio is currently bringing in only around a bitcoin a month in net service buys (other than cycling Yobit bots and speculators).

Another example Ascendancy application is creating a "website/blog," which is presumably cryptocurrency-related in some unspecified manner.  A high-end interpretation would be something heavily cryptocurrency-based and aimed at taking on the likes of Wordpress or Steem, but it seems to rather be in the "simple" section of the list.  So maybe it just means adding some kind of crypto payment widget to a website otherwise unrelated to crypto.

But nearly all of this has to be deduced or wildly guessed, as the whitepaper is mainly just vague.

To have even a chance at obtaining anywhere close to 480 Btc, drastic measures would need to be taken, probably including an improved whitepaper and some working example of something, before the end of the ICO.  You're presently asking for a half million dollars with a whitepaper less refined than some college essays.  If having seen enough prior ICOs, even the fact that this is only a 18-page thread is a red flag warning for chance of failure at drawing enough community interest for a goal that ambitious.

As a possible would-be investor, I'd be happy to be proven wrong if it means a way for me to make money, but neither the current whitepaper, nor apparently previously unresearched naivety about plausible ICO results, give any confidence that Ascendancy has a well-developed business plan.