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Comment by richardknop | Hacker News Reader

Another ICO, another scam. I am not sure I feel bad for people who are gullible enough to send their hard earned money to these "companies". They have one PDF whitepaper and a generic Wordpress template website with some buzzwords, based in Cayman islands or some other tax haven for money laundering. And expecting to get rich from that.

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I am unconvinced that hard earned money is 'invested' in those companies. The target demographic is not hard working class.

CNBC has been talking about Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Lite and a slew of recent ICOs in the last month or so. Whether those viewers count as "hard working class" is up for debate

We're still in the "attract as many rubes as possible phase" which is always followed by the "slam the trap shut phase"

and Fortune is starting a dedicated column to crypto related news called Ledger http://fortune.com/2017/08/22/ledger-blockchain-fintech/

You would be surprised. People know nothing about Bitcoin but have a friend, uncle or acquaintance who has dropped a few thousands in BTC and raves about the price going from 580 usd to 4000 usd in just a year. People lose their minds and they won't even have shitty tulips to show for it.

See, that's the thing with the old tulip story. At the heart of the bubble there were a number of people who just wanted a damn tulip.

and those people got tulips, at normal low prices.

futures traders didn't want a tulip, nobody accepted delivery of a tulip.

no tulips in the spot market were being traded anywhere near the futures month prices.

with that in mind, doesn't this make it one of the worst poster childs of irrational exuberance to cite?

You're relying on one person's summary of the tulip bubble 'facts'.

Other sources give great detail of the tulip purchasing craze. For example, read the tulip chapter in 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds', by Charles Mackay. It cites many sources that detail the crazy high prices people did actually pay for tulips.

Thanks, I've looked into it over the years but I'm always interested in different perspectives.

Between the contract categorization changes, actual shortages, and the bubonic plague, I think there are a lot of things that are unclear. Without the plague abruptly killing all the speculators would we have called it a bubble, or just an uptrend?

The target demographic is gullible, greedy software engineers who have a lot of disposable income but lack experience in conducting due diligence on speculative investments. Basically, Hacker News readers. Why do you think there are so many ICO related posts on this site? It's not accidental.

I'm glad to hear skepticism--I always considered these e-coins to be the perfect scam to attract Millenial technocrats and then fleece them.

I don't have any evidence but I suspect it's technical people who got into Bitcoin early. Have a few million but no partner / no kids so maybe think they are "rich" and "set for life" so don't mind a gamble. Maybe the adrenelin of making all that easy cash is what they want to repeat. This would make sense because to hold Bitcoin for that long and not sell is kind of irrational gambling, even though the results have been good.

People are afraid of missing the next Bitcoin boom and think throwing money at every ICO will turn them into overnight millionaires.

It's unfortunate that the greed and FOMO are dragging the technology through the dirt. If you plan on investing in any ICO please do your due diligence and avoid the hype trains.

I also know a bunch of guys who sit around, smoke cigars and take side bets on the ICO Gambles they are taking. It's just straight gambling to some people.

As far as gambling goes it's probably one of the more fun ways to spend the money - instead of camping out at a blackjack table some would rather watch the 24 price changes.

Which is fine if you have the money to spend (waste). But people are getting sold on it like a penny-stock scheme straight out of Wolf of Wall Street.

Yeah, that's the sad part. I have friends from my rural home town that are trying to get me to buy with them and then they link me articles by cheerleaders that are heavily invested in some company or another. Guys that tell me they've diverted their 401k to bitcoin because it's the new internet. When I remind them that everyone got smoked in the new internet the remind me that it's not the new internet and link me to another opinion piece from another cheerleader.

I'm almost a FOMO MOFO but keep talking myself out of buying coin because I'd rather learn more classic ways of making a lot of money even if it involves the dirty 4 letter word.

The money might not have been that hard earned in the first place.

Last year, the price of one Ether was ca. $10. Now it's 30x as much. That's quite a multiplier.

If you bought some ETH last year, just by the price increase, you have lots of spare cash to throw at stuff that promises to make you even richer.

People throwing hard-earned money at it in the first place is stupid enough. It's speculation, plain and simple. You need to be prepared to lose your investment completely.

Have any of these not been scams?

This one (supposedly) wasn't a scam. They had a real offering coming, but someone wiped out $500k with some basic phishing after stealing an email account. Enigma (the platform) wasn't compromised; Enigma (the company) was.

And mostly, they indeed get rich.

I know several people from crypto community and people who got rich are in a minority. Most people lost their money and are acting as gamblers now, throwing more money into new tokens to double down (which is one factor feeding the current ICO frenzy).

But I agree that there is a small group of people making big bucks from this (people behind ICOs plus a tight group of early bitcoin adopters).

I meant exactly people behind ICOs. Obviously others are just gamblers and most of them lose.

How can they mostly get rich? For every buyer, there's a seller. A rich cryptocoin speculator gained their wealth from poor cryptocoin speculators. Where else did the money come from?

Exactly. For all the winners there are losers. For every one of these crypto millionaires there are dozens of people who lost a lot of money, some of them substantial amounts of their savings, many several paychecks they decided to gamble with.

I meant only those who launch ICOs.

and just look at the list of ongoing ICOs https://www.coingecko.com/ico Not to mentioned those that have secured investments...

This is so crazy. I am increasingly hearing random non tech people talking about buying bitcoins or other tokens and imagining how they will get rich in a year when price keeps multiplying. I wonder how long can this mass frenzy go on.

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