Quote from: brifs on September 20, 2017, 12:41:49 AM

Will the scammers bring us all down?
For a time, but this too will pass just like it did after the first dot com bubble.

I can't think of any dot.com IPO bag that became anything significant?

The significant companies were created from the small and grew into the large, e.g. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Google.

I expect the same for ICOs. None of them will end up being anything but speculation pump and dumps. Including Ethereum, NEO, Qtum, EOS, etc..

It's so damn easy to raise funds, that none of these groups has any incentive to actually accomplish anything in terms of real world adoption. It's much more lucrative to go start a new ICO and raise more money. Daniel Larimer is for example on his 4th or 5th fund raising junket with EOS, after Steem, Bitshares, Protoshares, etc.. Come-from-beyond who admitted he was the creator of Next is repeating the ICO scam with IOTA (which can't even reach consensus if they remove the centralized servers) and I think I heard they have another fundraising scam coming.

The dot.com bubble didn't incriminate the public who speculated on the shares on the stock exchanges. Whereas, everyone who is trading ICOs now is incriminating themselves. It's quite an understatement to say that many more people are going to prison.

Many of you are going to be guilty of causing a public mania into ICOs, if the authorities don't crackdown soon enough.

You can see I'm making sure I will not be part of it. I only hold BTC, LTC, and BCH (and a tiny bit of STEEM so I can continue to blog there, but I have clearly articulated that I think Steem is a scam and I'm not promoting nor wishing to be part of any longer than I need to be until my project is launched to replace Steem for blogging and other use cases).

The dot.com analogy is interesting to me because I was offered $1 million in stock options by Homepage.com to buyout my coolpage.com in 2000 (figure roughly $3 million in 2017 dollars). I declined because I was prescient about the coming dot.com bust, so I negotiated a $205,000 non-exclusive license in cash instead. And I continued to milk the income from Coolpage for 7 more years even though I stopped working on it.

I also predicted in an emphatic Steemit blog this recent ICO crash 2 days before it occurred.

Am I going to be prescient again or on the wrong side of history?

I urge more of you to come out and emphatically denounce ICOs, so that newbies who are reading have some alternative perspectives to draw from.

Quote from: Cnut237 on September 20, 2017, 07:15:46 AM

I don't think ICOs are killing crypto, ICOs can be a great way of generating publicity and new money and new entrants to cryptoworld. It is just that there are some bad ones and scam ones out there. So it is really a good thing that these will in time have regulations like other businesses. I am not worried at all and think it will be a positivie once the temporary panic calms down a bit.

Publicity for creating a dot.com bubble in ICOs that leaves the general public holding useless bags and being very angry about it. The kind of publicity we need is an adoption killer app that the public loves and admires, e.g. Facebook, Google, MySpace, etc.. But the problem is that the public has no reason whatsoever to adopt decentralized ledger clones of those popular Internet sites, unless there is some killer features they need which can only be obtained on the decentralized ledger variants.

I already challenged one of your comradres upthread to name one single ICO project that has produced any real world adoption.

All I get is silence in response.

ICOs are going to destroy the reputation and potential of crypto, associating it with scams, speculation bubbles, coupled with the bad aspects of Bitcoin such ransomware, assassination bounties, etc..

What are we building that from the perspective of the mainstream is perceived to be good for society with real world adoption to counter act all the negatives? NOTHING!

So don't be surprised when later the nation-states are forced by public opinion to crackdown not just on ICOs but potentially decentralized ledgers in general.

Smart guys please wake up.

Quote from: WoodySpoon on September 20, 2017, 04:56:34 AM

So your solution is to bring regulators into the scene to keep an eye on the market?

ICO's are minuscule in the world of international finance, stop spreading FUD. More investors = more value, not every business can utilize Bitcoins infrastructure, there's more uses to blockchain technology than a single coin.

You presume that ICOs offer anything but destruction.

Until you have another solution for avoiding mass manias such as the dot.com bubble, the South Seas bubble, the Tulip bubble, etc., then I guess we are stuck with government regulation. Government regulation of speculation manias is a fact of existing law. Do you propose we popularize crypto by violating the law and promoting a mass mania that accomplishes nothing and leaves a wake of destruction?

The real use cases won't be built as long as everyone is more interested in selling empty bags to greater fools. No one has an incentive to actually do the hard work, when so much easy money is dangling in front of them for the taking. Selling empty bags to greater and greater fools is so much more attractive than the slog of repeated failure of trying to discover a killer app.

You may think for example that Ethereum has done useful R&D. But the reality is that in 3+ years they've never solved the consensus algorithm issue. Casper innovates nothing and just an obfuscation of all the drawbacks of Byzantine agreement and proof-of-stake. Whereas, I actually innovated the consensus algorithm to something that is not proof-of-work, not proof-of-stake, and I did it with less than $50,000 of funding over 2 years (just for personal expenses during that timeframe and it would not have taken that long had I not been morbidly ill). Ethereum had $18 million right?

Look what the Altcoin Discussion forum has become:

Quote from: hannahbanana on September 20, 2017, 10:39:48 AM

Looking for ICO ready to moon!

Quote from: johnsm79 on September 18, 2017, 05:10:25 PM

Which ICO would you suggest for October?

Quote from: Ehrhc on September 20, 2017, 08:32:11 AM

Vitalik Buterin networth $100 Million?

You all know that Russian central bank is backing him up as loyalist of Putin ( I am not against it, just mentioning facts)

Quote from: dragonsnapper20 on September 21, 2017, 04:48:52 AM

Did you have a FOMO investment ?