Hacker News Reader

Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

I am sure real, legitimate ICOs must exist, but I have yet to find one. Can anyone point to one that they strongly believe is legitimate?

View on HN

Basic Attention Token

https://basicattentiontoken.org/

sorry -- bat was a scam. https://medium.com/the-bitcoin-podcast-blog/a-look-at-the-ba...

What is your definition of a scam?

Selling a large slice of the tokens to a small group of specific investors, such that they obtain a much larger price when these are listed. Because they were in so few holders from day0, and the 'auction' closed so quickly, price discovery entirely up to small group of 'investors'. Its birthing shark whales to steal from the little people.

This was back before the real real ICO scams, so it looks pure in comparison. 2017, what a year!

By that definition I guess all startups and IPOs are also scams.

The difference is that you can't do a IPO with just little more than a white paper, like most ICOs do.

"IPOs" happening separately from actually listing on an exchanges are always scams. Startups soliciting investment from the public rather than accredited investors are almost always scams.

Wealth is always concentrated in the hands of a few. It's the same story with Bitcoin.

http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-97-are-held-by-4-of-a...

The Black Mirror episode "15 Million Merits" has something like this as its premise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

Some thoughts after going through the whitepaper,

> The BAT will, in early stages, be specifically tied to Brave browsers and Brave servers, along with verified publishers

Before this, they mention that other browsers are free to adopt BAT. However, no mention is made of a way to ensure the user attention data reported is legitimate. Presumably then only the Brave browser will be able to use this token. A novel, trustless/decentralised way to verify user attention would be of a paper on its own.

> Ad fraud will be prevented or reduced by publication of source code and cryptographically secure transactions. Ads served to individual browser/users will also be rate-limited and tied to active windows and tabs.

How will this be ensured without some kind of centralised whitelist of signatures/keys?

If the system is going to be centralised anyway, why use a blockchain? Blockchains are terribly inefficient append only DBs, and are only useful when there is not even a single server on the internet that you can trust. There is no point to using a blockchain if everything that can go on the blockchain is going to be mediated by a company/government/organisation.

> A 300 million endowment is for early adopters of Brave and the BAT at up to 5 BAT/user

followed by

> BATs are meant only for experts in cryptographic tokens and blockchain-based software systems

So they expect to get up to 60 million "experts in cryptographic tokens" to switch to their browser?

> However, no mention is made of a way to ensure the user attention data reported is legitimate.

Exactly. Looks like a race problem, again. Just looking at the diagram on their site (user gets tokens for attention), I immediately thought "Write and deploy attention signaling bots" ...

Not tracking active ones, but participated in Qtum ICO. Has successfully launched and delivered. As a smart contract platform, Qtum itself has launched several dapps which were offered over ICO: https://eco.qtum.org/dapps

MakerDAO (https://makerdao.com/), Status (https://status.im/), BAT (https://basicattentiontoken.org/), many, many others.

It's amazing. are you Chinese boy ? how did you find Qtum ICO :)

Ycombinator has invested in a few, including Request Network: https://request.network

YC is invested in Coinbase, so "YC has invested" doesn't signal quality.

I haven't used Coinbase in years but isn't their only real problem that they don't seem to be hiring support staff as fast as they seem to need to?

Ethereum seems legit.

For modern answers: WTC, SNM are two that I like

Is there anything that it can exclusively do? I mean functionally in the real world, right now.

Why is that question important?

At risk of taking the bait... why wouldn't that question be important?

Everything you need to know about cryptocurrency is right here in this comment.

“What does it do?”

“Why would you ask that? Just BUY BUY BUY”

I once saw a hilarious answer to the question about unique uses of blockchain as a general concept. One user said that it is great for "tracking of diamonds". O.M.G. People expect other to pay money and invest time in development of a tool to enable even more closed-in and tightly controlled global monopoly by De Beers mafia cartel :)

That is the most important question which all these ICOs and tokens can't answer. If they can't be used for anything useful or provide very value that means their price is just a bubble led by naive investors and speculators/scammers.

Decentralized gambling like Augur

That cat-breeding/trading game is honestly the most compelling legitimate use case I've seen for any cryptocurrency.

I put disposable income into a few ICOs where the ideas are amazing and the team looks capable of implementing it. It's like a kickstarter to me. Might not work, but if it does I get something cool. Like if SNM works I effectively get access to really cheap compute power.

So no, they don't work yet... which is why they need the money to build the product.

i've been working on one related to climate change - i have perfected a self-replicating, solar-powered carbon recapture facility. i figure the coin can represent some amount of carbon offset. working on a white paper as we speak.

Sponsor the 64 million trees of The Northern Forest in the UK with the Bitcoin Pine backed by pine trees. Make people get off their arse and visit their trees in person to cash out. Also have Bitcoin Oak, Bitcoin Ash and Bitcoin Rowan etc.

Work with a charity so Bitcoin Oak is fully tax deductible and not gambling.

well yeah, the self-replicating carbon-recapture devices are trees. way to spoil the business secret, Ted. didn't you sign an NDA?

D'oh! I have given the game away! I was just idly speculating about green shoots in the ICO jungle. However, my earlier brain fart is quite funny when described by yourself - 'self replicating carbon recapture device' - have you patented that or is it just a trademark that is protected by copyright law for 70 years?

Other words - 'windfall'. 'Guaranteed windfall every autumn!' 'Growth'. Really all the metaphors for business things work humorously - 'short selling'...

I believe the one for https://cosmos.network/ was legitimate, and that they’re on the verge of launching the platform they promised. Pretty interesting, actually.

Legitimate as in lawful? Maybe https://blockmason.io/? They have been quite keen on justifying that their ICO is lawful by publishing their legal advice. e.g. (PDF) https://blockmason.io/Blockmason_2017_12_19_Supplement.pdf and https://blockmason.io/Ethereum_Opinion_2017-08-14.pdf

Well, PonziCoin did what it said on the tin.

Filecoin.

I'm still undecided on that one.

I have seen the website, whitepapers, and different videos.. from promos to some guy giving a talk.

But the only access you get to actually use it is a waiting list, unless you consider some of the underlying IPFS technology it uses that you can get from other sources (which is a different beast entirely).

It's likely I'm not meeting some prequalification requirement for the access, but this unfortunately means I can't get excited. If I can't test it anywhere and have never made it run myself, I have to withhold judgement.

Filecoin hasn't even been coded yet and no one has access to it. Once something is already developed they wouldn't need an ICO.

The tokens are trading over 10X higher than the ICO price (2.60 in the first hour). https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/filecoin/

I'm undecided too, and that's the only ICO I've seen that I consider possibly legitimate.

IPFS itself is supporting evidence - it shows that those people can create a working and actually useful product. Filecoin seems like a good fit for the "incentive layer" above IPFS, and from what I remember from the ICO, they did their best to make it legally in the clean.

I guess we'll see what happens when (or if) Filecoins get released.

Simple Token, led by Fab.com / Social Median's Jason Goldberg. CTO + team is Germany's most experienced blockchain developers. They are making a Stripe for tokenization.

There are a number of legitimate ICOs, unfortunately there are many more scammy ones. Quantstamp is an example of a legitimate one out of Y Combinator.

Quantstamp appears to be based on a "proof of caring" scheme where basically you get paid in their currency to promote them on sites like Reddit. What about that screams "legitimate" to you?

FunFair, led by Jez San.

I'm biased but I'm running one. I've been a long time member of the hacker/dev community, heck, you can even come to our office and visit with us.

I also run the Crypto Builders meet-up out of Noisebridge here in San Francisco. Come out and hack with us.

If it's Synapse.ai you're talking about, and it's "legitimate", why did you run a time-limited whitelist application process to drive scarcity for the coin you're selling? Are you registered with the SEC? If not, what's an interpretation of what you're doing where you're not promoting an unregistered security to the investing public?

https://imgur.com/a/99K2Y

Reply on news.ycombinator.com