Quote from: jlp on September 29, 2017, 01:38:56 PM

Quote from: nikolaich on September 29, 2017, 07:51:55 AM

Quote from: jlp on September 25, 2017, 08:40:02 PM

Quote from: nikolaich on September 24, 2017, 06:01:38 AM

When it comes to the question of investing crypto into this or that ICO one has to review website, White paper, chat with the team members and advisory board, watch official groups in Telegram, Slack, study smart-contract and Bitcointalk thread.
But this is a huge work for one person, taking into account the amount of ICO that is being held lately.

Except for your own study of the upcoming ICO, which sources of ICO reviews and ratings do you trust and why?

There's no need to do all of that with every ICO.

You can make your search far easier if you filter out the majority of coins. It's easy to do this with 2 simple filters:

1) Does the project have anything built? No? Move on. Forget about their big teams and fancy titles. Most projects have these and they cannot prove that they can build anything. Writing software is much more difficult than creating a one-page website or video. Several projects raised multiple millions and still haven't delivered any software. Let me know if you want examples.

2) Is the team from a corrupt country? Yes? Move on. In corrupt countries, ethics and honesty are more lax, which means that they will have a higher propensity to exaggerate or lie.

https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016

The third filter is harder to implement. You need to be able to do critical thinking. Does the application make sense? Jesus coin is an extreme example of something that doesn't make sense, but most are leaning towards this. Crypto currency is good for some applications (transfer or store of value, save fees, save time, gambling) but not all applications.

Most projects are trying to squeeze square pegs into round holes. There's a project that wants to connect locals with travelers to enhance the travel experience. You have to do mental gymnastics to figure out why an altcoin is needed here.

You have "Tokenizing Rising Tennis Stars: tokenstars.com/ace" in your signature. That sounds like somebody is trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole. Why the hell would you have that in your signature? It's getting close to the Jesus coin.

Yes. Could you please name examples of projects that raised millions and still have no software.

About that transparency index you mentioned. I think there is a very low correlation between country index as a whole and a certain team from the country.

What about the real SCAM projects?
Tithecoin - from USA (rank 18 from the index)
Ascendancy - with anonymous team
EBITZ with anonymous team

There are many projects with Russian teams (rank 131). HMQ, Chronobank, TAAS.fund, SONM and many others.
They are serious working projects even if the teams are from Russia.

I totally agree with the third point that everyone wants its own ICO. And no matter if blockchain is needed in their project.

About TokenStars. The team is mostly from Russia. The project is already working as I see. And they sure need blockchain platform to fulfill all of their plans. If you want, you can dig into it by yourself.

So it`s definitely not a jesus coin )

As requested, here are examples:

EOS raised $230 million and said that they were going to release something by end of summer. Nothing yet. With $230 million, EOS should have solved world hunger by now.

Gnosis raised $12.5 million and their website says that they are releasing their game by first half of 2017. Nothing yet.

Qtum raised $15.6 million. I don't see anything produced on Qtum's website.

After raising $50 million, Cosmos's website is still pitching its white paper. Come on. What have they produced with that $50 million?

MobileGo raised $53 million. Here's the roadmap from their white paper:

Quote

May - June: Gamecredits Mobile Store Public Launch
May - June: Gamecredits accepted for mobile store games and in- game content purchases
July - August: first centralized tournaments on platform

However, I don't see any of that on their website. They're mainly bragging about how their token is on exchanges. What are they doing? Day-trading their own token?

NOTHING MATTERS MORE than proof that they can develop software. EVERYTHING ELSE IS USELESS, including team, fancy pretentious titles, references, roadmap, video, fancy animations, escrow, blogs, Slack, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and white paper.

Andreas Antonopoulos said that 99% of the ICOs are shit or scams. There are some projects who have already built software, albeit a small percentage. A good way to filter out most of the risky projects and reduce your risk is to ignore the projects who have not developed anything yet.

Yes, of course there are going to be some scams from the U.S. and legitimate projects from Russia. But the average is the contrary. If there are an equal number of scams from the U.S. as from Russia, then there would be MANY more successful companies in Russia. But there aren't. Russia has almost twice the population of Germany and has only slightly more than half of Germany's GDP. There is a reason for that. Eastern Europe has pumping out phishing scams to consumers for over a decade now. You can ignore this statistic if you want. But you just need to be cognizant of the risk you're taking.

Putin hosted Vitalik Buterin in Moscow. He wants to grow the crypto industry. He has killed journalists and opponents who criticized him. Facebook just said that they sold $100k of ads to fake accounts from Russia. Don't you think Putin will fund ICO projects through the back door? Don't you think he will fund ICO listing sites and ICO ratings sites to favor Russian projects? One would be naive to think otherwise. The site doesn't even have to be staffed by Russians. If not, all the better to deceive you. They just need to be bought or bribe-able.

TokenStars has no explanation of why the current currency (EUR, GBP, etc.) needs to be replaced by a token. Their site says "you support a promising 14-16 year old player - player spends money". This means the player will sell the token to get EUR to pay for rent and food. What good is the token? Also, who is to say that the player or anyone else will honor any agreement to repay the supporters 2-6 years later? If you're a token holder, are you going to wait that long, only to hope that the player repay token holders?

Also, most people (not all) who give recommendations on Bitcointalk, are doing so because they are getting paid via their signature. Ignore these, especially those comments that sound like they are pushing themselves out to write something.

What do you mean when you use the word scam? Speaking about ICO, it`s when somebody collects money, closes the project and just vanishes in the air with millions in a pocket and a crowd of deceived investors. That`s what is a scam for me.

As an example of a good project, I also forgot to mention Waves as a perspective platform with Russian developers (#17 on coinmarketcap).

Could you please name real scam projects from Russia? I don`t know any.

Do you agree that any project needs in-depth research before making assertions and 5-minute quick glance on the website is not enough?

So what projects have gone through your strict filters and gave profit to you?