If you're launching one of these, you don't really need investment. You just make sure you own the first batch of currency and get rich if it takes off. If you need investment then you don't really believe in your own stuff do you?

Ponzi Ponzi Ponzi.

That guy on TV keeps telling me how awesome owning gold is... it is so awesome he wants to sell me his...

That guy on TV is a broker. He doesn't want to hold any gold. He wants to sell and buy at the same time and make money off of the spread.

That's not what a broker does. A broker is basically in sales. He takes company research done by analysts and tries to sell you company financial products. He doesn't care which direction you go as long as you do something so he can take his commission, and a little extra if you are buying a company product he might be trying to push.

A market maker is the guy who's tying to capture the spread, but they don't really go around trying to get the public to buy and sell.

Not sure if the answer is obvious here but I don't know much about finance, does 'spread' here mean the difference in the asset price from purchase/sale time (whether by market change or artificial markup) or the brokering fees involved? or both?

#2:

Any vendor will buy a good at say, $9 and sell at $10. In the US there are many pawn shops saying "We buy and sell gold!" - it's never at the same price.

#1: A smart gold trader will buy low, sell high.. they will buy more gold when prices are low and advertise to sell more when the price is high.

Spread is, simply, the difference between the buying price and the selling price. Usually in the context of stocks.

Brokering fees are not calculated in with the base prices, though it would be once it's time to calculate returns.

If they're selling pure gold at less than or equal to $800/oz then it's well worth it at this very moment with gold trading around $1200/oz right now. 50% profit ain't shabby.

Hmm, facts don't seem to be well-tolerated around here.

its all speculation, speculation, speculation, just like the US stock market just less regulated, speculators get a bad rep but do more good than harm in an economy

Not entirely true. Even if you believe in your currency long term you still need money short term so that you can cover your own costs of living and the cost of hiring other people.

I don't know the degree of complexity or technical ambition of the project you were a part of, but it's not unusual for a 23 year old guy to write most of the Ethereum app. In fact, that's probably the reason why most ICOs are a scam, there's an insanely low barrier to building a proof of concept. The boilerplate is like 15 lines.

When it's so easy that any 20 year old backend dev can issue a token, you should already know that no ETH-based app should be worth more than the same business model applied to a fiat currency.

>the same business model applied to a fiat currency

Ding ding ding, winner! So many of these just have no point in being as companies, let alone as a token.

At The STC, we're going to end sex trafficking in just like Apple and Amazon (and now Google and Spotify) ended music piracy. To operate, we must be an extrajurisdictional company which makes cryptocurrencies a useful way to get investment and pay dividends. But we're not going to issue tokens -- only shares. Ethereum will help us keep track of share ownership and allow easy trading, but we're not a "blockchain company".

I hope we see a new wave of post-ICO companies using these technologies as a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. We're probably leaving money on the table by saying that and not hyping up tokens and tech. Oh well, we're going to create a valuable business instead.

I thought this was a joke comment but I clicked on your user profile and now I'm not sure.

Absolutely not a joke. We're very serious about fixing, in many ways, the sex industry. It is rare that one gets to work on a project that will significantly improve many peoples lives, tackle a serious social issue, and actually be profitable. What we're doing may be frowned upon in some countries. But it is morally right, and being ethical is a cornerstone for any successful extrajurisdictional company.

Our main founder has had this idea for a while. But it wasn't until last year that cryptocurrencies showed they're going to be around and usable for non-geek users. This is crucial as it allows us to contract people (marketing, design, photography, transport, security, boarding, and on and on) without having to run risky front businesses to handle money or try to convince people that this strange internet coin money is useful.

The ICO craze annoys us because it blinds people to the real possibilities. It is our belief that within the next few months ICOs will need to measure up to ventures like our own and show true profit potential or at least some commonsense business fundamentals.

Your plan is to stop sex trafficking by building an adult services website? On the off chance this isn't bait, what on Earth are you thinking?

Think more of an app like Uber (without the sexism) than a website. We are not a listing site or a marketplace. We take both sides of the trade, offering full support and customer service. We have direct relationships with providers. This puts us in a position where we have a real chance of detecting coercion and offering assistance. At a minimum this means access to our lawyers. We are aware this is a delicate and complicated matter with human lives on the line. A couple of us have direct experience in this area. We know this is not something that just code or any amount of decentralized blockchain buzzwords will solve.

I can explain more in private (details in profile), or shortly we'll have more public details available and I can send you a link if you like.

But suffice to say that in the cities we operate, we will end up putting a significant dent in coerced sexual services.

PimpCoin.

It is really the opposite of that. Pimps take a huge cut or 100% and generally have a more ownership-like relationship. Our platform is about providing services that empower individuals to decide how/when/etc they want to work.

>23 year old guy to write most of the Ethereum app

The project is a from-scratch smart contract blockchain: including a new contract language

The project is almost certainly Aeternity. They forked Zack's code, used his name to publicize their project and then paid Zack off to join their fork with tokens from his own chain! Zack is a smart guy but the whole thing is a shit show.

I won't comment on who the project is. It's not my goal to bad mouth anyone. I just wanted to share my experience.

And what you described is one of the more "legitimate" ICOs. Many of them are outright scams. This one at least tries to do some token work while pocketing the massive amount of raised money.

Perhaps a stupid question since I haven't followed this too closely, but is it THAT easy to raise money with a project? I have seen some $50-80-100m numbers flying around recently.

yes it is. put up a site, write a white paper (even one that doesn't make any sense), create an ERC20 token and you can raise lots of money.

There's gotta be a catch though. It's that old joke about the economist seeing a $100 bill on the street, but knows it must not be real or someone else would have picked it up already.

Why bring age into the equation? That's quite discriminatory considering the creator of Ethereum is just 19 years old. Aside from that I'm 23 years old and have been developing software professionally in the past 8 years. Age isn't much of a factor anymore.

In the case of Vitalik, he was smart enough to enlist people more knowledgeable than him when organizing the Ethereum project. For example, he enlisted a PhD, Dr. Gavin Wood, to author the real white paper[0] (also known as the yellow paper). while it's possible that at 19 Vitalik could've been studying real CS long enough to work out the truely difficult parts of implementing his vision, it's highly unlikely and, to his credit, he was smart enough to know that. People who think they are the smartest people in the room rarely are. The really smart ones are the ones who realize this and are humble enough to seek the expertise of others.

[0]:https://bravenewcoin.com/assets/Whitepapers/Ethereum-A-Secur...

Because most people haven't been developing software since they were 15.