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A comment on China's Central Bank Bans ICOs. Parent comment

Re:China's Central Bank Bans ICOs by rothbardrand on Monday September 04, 2017 @08:29AM (#15167745)
No. 2013 was a lot of clones of bitcoin with a few parameters changed. Nowadays ICOs I'm seeing involve a lot of very hard work.

The risk is that the teams may way under-estimate how much work it is (And I think that's what's going to cause them to fail)

but they are a lot more ambitious than you are characterizing.

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Re:China's Central Bank Bans ICOs by davidgerard on Monday September 04, 2017 @09:09AM (#15167961)
This doesn't appear to be an accurate description of the ICO market as it exists. The hardest work in ICOs is the marketing. At the back end, they literally put in the fine print that the thing you just bought is worthless.

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/icos-magic-beans-and-bu...

Look up the EOS fine print. They took down the PDF, but I kept a spare:

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/references/EOS%20Token%...

TODO this evening: write up a blog post on the ICO for (I am not making this up) synthetic rhino horn dick pills.

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Re:China's Central Bank Bans ICOs by dingo_bat on Monday September 04, 2017 @01:29PM (#15169607)
It's literally saying "Give us your money and we will give you nothing in return"! WTF?!
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Re:China's Central Bank Bans ICOs by davidgerard on Monday September 04, 2017 @02:02PM (#15169817)
And EOS has been one of the biggest ICOs. Also, despite the "no US citizens" bit, it's been advertising to the general public in the US (and in the UK). They are selling an ERC-20 magic bean to be traded on the bubble machines, and both buyers and sellers are going nod-nod wink-wink.
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Re:China's Central Bank Bans ICOs by prostoalex on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @02:31AM (#15172954)
Offtopic, but I just finished reading your book, and you, sir, are very eloquent.
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Re:China's Central Bank Bans ICOs by richardknop on Monday September 04, 2017 @11:24AM (#15168845)
No it is still the same as Bitcoin clones in 2013.

These days ICOs are cloning the same smart contract template and just making small edits to it.

Most of the time they barely have any other code than just the slightly edited smart contract template and white paper which is also pretty much a copy paste with buzz words relevant to their niche.

And based on that they are raising millions of dollars.

Of course there are couple of exceptions of projects that actually seem to have some tech foundation (like Sia for example) but these are rare. Scam copy cats without any tech are majority of ICOs.

Their reasoning is "we have an idea, let's raise millions of dollars and we will hire bunch of devs to write the software". Mostly founders are non technical "idea people" so I would doubt their ability to even know if their idea is feasible.

Projects which start with strong technical foundations and don't try to raise money to build their tech (putting cart in front of the horse) are the solid ones. Projects which have no tech and raise money first, those are not likely to succeed imho.

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Re:China's Central Bank Bans ICOs by prostoalex on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @02:29AM (#15172947)
> Nowadays ICOs I'm seeing involve a lot of very hard work.

For example? What ICO idea is not a previously failed startup? Distributed file storage that's been built a few times and each time turned out to be painfully slow and impractical? An iOS and Android port of the wallet software? Yet another browser?

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