Quote from: bandar on April 10, 2018, 08:56:16 PM

Quote from: Vispilio on April 10, 2018, 07:30:43 PM

very unfair and unrealistic assessment of market forces. You need to understand first of all that it's very hard to invest in crypto currencies with fiat right now. Every day press and politicians are spreading FUD, tax liabilities, scam accusations, all fake news and false propaganda to prolong the eclipsed system of banking and fiat money.

Investors are naturally afraid because of legal repercussions in many parts of the modern world reaching totalitarian levels. IRS, SEC, outright bans in many other countries etc.

So there are extremely good ICO projects in 2018, but people are scared and deliberately deterred from investing. Free enterprise always finds a way to flourish, so don't worry, it's just a temporary hiatus as more and more intellectual people understand that the mainstream "politically correct" establishment has become the enemy of the free people.

I partially agree. For the record: I LOVE the way you can invest in ICO's. I think it's the way of investing of the future. Period. But you simply can not deny the fact that there are A LOT of scams out there. It's not just some fake news spread by scared banksters who see their world/power crumbling down. That's just not true.

I invested in a lot of ico's last summer. Most of them made profits, sometimes huge profits. When the market turned red, I stopped investing money and started investing time. I turned to bounty hunting (mostly translation jobs, some sig). By doing that I read a lot of WP, did a lot of research of teams and websites and then it started to occur to me that there are A LOT of fake teams, fake linkedins, vaporware products that only consist of marketing.

I always wonder: how is it possible that if they present you a team of so called experts with years of relevant experience in IT, financial industry, marketing, etc that in most cases these people are nowhere to be found prior to the ico? You google them: nothing, you search for their pictures: nothing, you google the companies they so called worked for: you can't find them (you can find the companies but you can't find evidence that they worked there). There are only a few ico's that I participated in (with a bounty) that were 100% transparant, where you could actually find the people aboard. Neufund was one of them. Most of the times those icos are the ones with hardly any bonuses, no pre-sales, no months long ico's, no facebook and telegram lemmings who try to shill a product and team they don't know.

I thank you and also kendra1107 for your valuable feedbacks. It's definitely true some con artists tried to piggyback on the crypto craze and came up with completely fake ICO projects; however these are not that difficult to spot, and I would also argue not statistically more prevalent compared to the percentage of scams in traditional venture capital and startup investments.

One obvious litmus test, which you also brushed upon, is the visibility and presence of the team. Prior to participating in an ICO or even Bounty, try to reach out directly to one of the founders of the project. If he responds genuinely and within reasonable time frame, and if his credentials check out, it's a pretty strong indicator that the team is legit and active. 99 % of all scam ICO's have anonymous team or so thinly veiled fabricated stories that it falls apart completely upon even a brief glance into the career / CV of the owners...