After reading the article, I can understand why Alan was invited to present at the World Funding Summit. Victoria Silchenko is clearly aware of both the potential of blockchain technology and the lack of substance offered by many ICO projects. And many of her insightful comments made me think again about why people invest in ICOs.

Then I realised that they probably aren't investing at all. They're just gambling. When you invest  in something, you take some time doing due diligence, then after investing, you expect it to take some time to make a reasonable profit. But when you gamble, you rarely calculate the true odds, and while being ready to lose your bet, you hope for a massive short-term profit.

In the article, Victoria stated, "VC deals are expensive: on average it takes 118 hours for due diligence and 83 days to close". And from the effort required by DNotes Global Inc to find registered PCAOB auditors as just one part of establishing a Reg. A+ mini IPO, it is clear that providing a platform that enables investors to conduct due diligence in scrutinising the offering and risk is neither cheap nor easy. Then, as an investor, understanding the provided information and then making an informed investment requires a level of experience or skill that is not common. So when big quick profits are being offered by ICOs, it is understandable that those without training in fintech are attracted to the quick bet over the long-term investment.

Unfortunately, ICOs don't frame their offering as a quick and risky bet with a slim potential of making lasting high profits. The only thing that indicates investors are playing a lottery or some other high-risk game is the slick and eye-catching graphics. Instead, they do their best to imply stability and genuine milestones that will be achieved by experienced developers. And without providing any reliable market research data, many ICOs imply that there is a huge market potential and their product is a unique fit for all of that available money.

So it is understandable that inexperienced investors don't realise how their actions are much more like gambling than investing. And this is made much worse due to a lack of precedence. The failure of ICOs to provide a return on investment, will take a while to become common knowledge. This is likely to be made worse by the greater-fool effect where the first investors know what they're doing and invest large amounts across very few participants. Then they offload their holdings at peak price to many more investors who are investing much smaller amounts. This may go through a few more one-to-many trades until those left holding the worthless bag are great in number, but only invested a very small amount. And while losing a very small investment isn't news and is unlikely to then become common knowledge, it is even less likely to go public because people are embarrassed by bad financial decisions and tend to keep quiet about them.

Everything I've seen DNotes Glabal Inc. do, aligns with the attitudes and processes necessary to attract informed investors who believe they will make reasonable profits over a longer term. Their cryptocurrency DNotes has clearly attracted a range of people from short-term gamblers to long-term investors as well as some very well informed miners. This puts both the company and the currency in a unique position in the market place. And I won't be at all surprised if the investor mindset who are holding DNotes see the logic of participating in a mini IPO that will go towards developing their financial products further and make DNotes2.0 more functional.