Statements like this make me question the truthiness of the entire venture. If they chose Malta for specific tax reasons or laws, just say so! Most rational people are going to read this and have their bullshit detector go off (for better or for worse).
This assumption should be strong enough that attaching a famous name to them should not change your position much.
The restriction free rewards for issuing an ICO are nearly unfathomable. Millions to billion dollars of dumb money flowing it based only on tens of thousands of dollars in marketing. Some people find it easy to rationalize.
In a situation like this involved parties might feel it's justified because the money they're defrauding out of the public could be applied to a virtuous cause.
Are they ever not fraud or a scheme to enrich the architects of the scheme?
Moreover, there is a huge lemon market problem: If if an issuer is in the the (say) 1% of honest efforts they are in constant competition with fraud, under pressure to make misleading fraud-like promises and offer fraud-like returns-- prudent parties realize this and exit knowing that they have better options. So investors are left with the honest participants that were too clueless to realize this or not attractive enough to have other alternatives.
The Ethereum ICO is a good, rare example of non-fraudulent ICO.
Note that startups also enrich their founders, although usually not in massive upfront cash payments.
It's yet another example of the misconception that blockchain somehow guarantees data validity. In reality it does the opposite: it reduces tampering, sure, but there are other ways to reduce tampering that don't also forbid validation. A broken meter will put bad data on the blockchain just the same as it will any other database, but because you're using blockchain you now can't go back and fix it when you find the error.
If you are right then I'd hope you'd start an efficiency as a service company that covers upgrade costs up front and collects payments over time. There is a huge lack of providers in the space that are a few thousand dollar or less upgrades with payouts over about two years. You can see the challenge, you have to spend less than a few hundred dollars in overhead/transactions over a multi year relationship!
The vast majority of companies in this space are targeting large facilities with multi million dollar upgrades, because it is hard to make the numbers work otherwise.
At the same time, I fear that he has picked a weird way to address climate change.
It is VERY unclear from the beginning what Efforce actually is. Almost at the bottom, you see it's an ICO.
Perhaps we can describe it as the equivalent of a carbon offsetting marketplace, just for energy?
Well, if that's the case... It doesn't need a blockchain, and it doesn't need a token. It can be done, today, in dollars and euros.
If there's a token, and a token sale, Efforce and its founders will benefit from it, even if their efforts will not positively impact the world. That's unfair.
Why not, instead, reward them in a "normal" way - create an energy efficiency marketplace, earn a commission on the energy "traded" there, voilà. No blockchain, no token sale, no bullshit.
Am I wrong? If so, what did I not understand?
Edit: I see that EFFORCE is listed/tradeable, and apparently worth ~$950M already, which makes me even more suspicious... [0]
[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steve-wozniaks-blockchain-ven...