I've noticed many ICOs have to spend a lot of money on promotions and advertising.
For example, let's say an ICO raises 10 million dollars but has to spend 9 million on promotion.
Therefore, they only really raised 1 million for the project.
Isn't this unethical?
If you're starting a company and looking for investors the traditional way via stock equity, you would never spend 9 million or even 5 million or even 2 million in order to raise 10 million from investors.
This begs the question, what ratio of promotion cost versus funds raised for ICOs is ethical?
And how do we know if an ICO is using an ethical ratio?
While there could be many arguments that could be made about why promoting a particular ico could be a bad idea, I think you are wrong in your points, most icos do not really spend money at all when it comes to their marketing, they make the promise to bounty hunters to pay them in tokens which have no value yet and in most cases this is only 1% of the total supply of those coins, so an ico gathering 10 millions is in fact only spending 100k in its promotion.