Ask HN: Are any of you exploiting the ICO hype? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are any of you exploiting the ICO hype?

19 pointsYoung_God13 comments

There are so many ICO's in cryptoworld right now. Someone even started an ICO for a "useless coin" and collected something like $60k.

So, I was wondering, if HNers are taking advantage of that, either by conducting their own ICO or by providing some services around it?

What do you think about this hype? Is it worth doing business in that area?

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Right now ICO combines the legitimacy of seeming like an IPO with the security of code written by strangers on the internet, the virality of Twitter rants, the promises of a budget spent producing concept videos, and the value of snake oil.

Almost none of these ICOs are founded on a concrete product that exists. That's a shame because there is the germ of a good idea here, but it's mostly being exploited by opportunism.

Some will walk away with fortunes, but it won't be the people buying.

And even though I lean pretty far to the libertarian side, I think this space needs some serious regulation to protect people from themselves.

99% of ICO's are scams and bullshit. Get your money if you have an ICO idea, otherwise don't "invest" in them.

But you can still sell the shovels for the ICO gold rush.

Don't forget to prepare pitchforks for after the gold crash ;)

So what you're asking is are we looking for greater fools?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

Forget taxi drivers telling you to invest as a mark of a bubble, questions like this are about as clear as signal as you can get.

My biggest problem is that there's no way to guarantee value of your "tokens" if the product you're delivering is not also built on the Ethereum blockchain.

For example I plan on launching a mobile network - I guess I could make an ICO and whoever owns a token is entitled to X amount of data traffic. Nothing prevents me from saying one day "I changed my mind - your tokens are worthless", so that's why I don't see it ever working.

If I not only don't understand something, but also believe that the people flogging that thing don't understand it, I'm certainly not touching it myself. So, no, skipping ICOs, thanks.

Exploiting the hype, on the other hand, I am entirely comfortable with.

I've flipped a few GPUs on eBay and easily doubled my money, and am currently trying to do the same with a small number of hardware wallets. Further, I'm holding a couple hundred bucks each of ZEC and ETH in anticipation of volatility, potentially from the shakeout of current BTC movement, from ETH moving to Proof of Stake, or from just the nature of these (currently, albeit not by intent) all being speculated investments that I'd be willing to go long on--so if I miss a spike, I'm comfortable waiting a year or two.

What a weird space.

Nice try SEC.

It seems like if you're fast and have good marketing, it's a great way to make some money.

I'm kind of surprised it's not getting regulated as a security.

We found out that ambisafe, tokenmarket and the like receive a huge amount of requests for handling ICOs, but they also charge a vast amount of money.

So, we started working on our own smartcontract and ICO platform. You can give it a try already at https://crowdsale.express/ but it's working on the testnet. We will activate livenet soon and are eager to hear your feedback.

I'm not sure why this is getting down voted, it directly answers the op's question.

Anyone itt committing financial crimes?

The https://uetoken.com example does show there's room to play in this space without deception or crime :)

$67k for probably a week of effort.

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