An Ethereum Startup Just Vanished After People Invested $374K | Hacker News Reader

An Ethereum Startup Just Vanished After People Invested $374K

motherboard.vice.com

ICOs are a scam. In other news, that guy selling you the Brooklyn Bridge might not be legit.

ICOs, just like any other investment opportunities, need to be researched properly. Not all ICOs are scams, some are great ideas backed by a reputable team. Just gotta do your homework.

ICOs are worse that over the counter penny stocks at this point being promoted by boiler room call centers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler_room_(business)

The ones that win are those who get the discount prior to ICO and then liquidate during the ICO for a main currency like bitcoin/Etherium. Which is nothing more than the standard boiler room scam, updated for 21 century technology.

Some ICOs are a scam. Others are not.

Some VCs are assholes and will, with bad intent, invest in a company. Others are not.

Can you point me to one non-scam ICO (not Brave) and what investors gained from it?

Filecoin seems to be from a reputable team.

Bitcoin

ICO implies an initial offering

Bitcoin had no ICO. There was no initial offering.

Don't write off an entire transformational technology because bad actors exist.

Does anyone know how many investors this is? What was the average size of the investment that people lost?

Most of the money lost was people who bought post ICO. I've heard it range from 7 dollars to 90k dollars. 90% drop in one day is brutal

Unfortunate for all the early investors of Confido. Ink announced on their blog that they will airdrop Ink tokens for all current Confido token holders (as of 11/20/17 1:30pm PST). https://medium.com/@PayWithInk/ink-airdrop-for-confido-token...

what does airdrop mean in this context?

You get tokens deposited to your address, free. It's one of the cool things about cryptocurrencies, people can just give you random monies without your approval.

if the airdropped token is a security token, then it's illegal. And since this a gray/developing area every token has a high chance of being classified as a security token.

This also may result in unwanted tax and other liabilities on the receiver's side.

It's a flaw in Push payments design. Either receiver need to confirm tx or use a design based on Pull payments.

For cryptocurrency context, it means to deposit tokens into the Ethereum address for free.

For those wondering before clicking the link, yes this was a ICO round.

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