Comment by cdancette | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cdancette | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

There's a thing that bothers me with ICO, it's when people call it an investment. It has nothing to do with an investment, it's basically a presale for the service that the company will provide.

It offers you nothing of what buying shares of the company will (except when explicitly specified in the token sale) : no dividend, no voting power...

Expecting to earn money by buying tokens in an ICO is pure speculation, as you expect the token to go up. But this goes against the real user's will to use the service: they want a fixed price (who wants to use a service which price changes every day?)

To sum up, buy tokens as you would buy presales in Kickstarter, to support the company, but don't expect to earn money with it if you really it to be a real service / product. And avoid ICO that make you the promise of earning quick money.

Agreed 100%. Buying tokens from an ICO is akin to funding a project on kickstarter - and we all know how often kickstarter projects fulfill their promise..

I totally agree with you. I am, however reminded of minecraft, and I wonder if there are any lessons to learn from there. Minecraft was an odd anomaly where Notch made it clear that he was going to keep increasing the game's price as it got more features (largely unheard of at the time, where game's prices tended to only go down). There was a point where I bought a license when it was $10, and I knew it was going to be a hit. It just was the right game at the right time that captured too much of the imagination of everyone who played it. But it never occurred to me to buy lots of licenses at $10 knowing they'd be worth more the next time he ratcheted up his game price. Course, reselling licenses has it's risks, and was painful enough I might not have bothered had it occurred to me.

I wonder if there'd been a marketplace for reselling license tokens and a blockchain to keep track of these tokens, if I might have taken the plunge and purchased a number of these tokens with the expectation to make money from them when license costs went up?

There is a big difference between a Kickstarter and an ICO, namely that ICOs allow you to resell the tokens in open marketplaces. If you decide you're not interested after all the next day you can resell the token.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com