NYT reporter: “81% ICOs were scams” | Hacker News Reader

NYT reporter: “81% ICOs were scams”

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137 pointsfluxic44 comments

To be clear, it's a NYT reporter tweeting the findings found in this blog post by the Satis Group -- not necessarily tweeting this as something that he would himself publish in the NYT under his byline: https://medium.com/satis-group/ico-quality-development-tradi...

From the author of the tweet, "since tweeting this, i've heard that @ccatalini's team at MIT has looked into ICOs and gotten very different numbers: somewhere between 5 and 25% of ICOs are frauds. He hasn't published his full research, but will be interesting to see what accounts for the difference."

“somewhere between 5 and 25% of ICOs are frauds.”

IPOs have a 0% fraud rate historically. Maybe ICO needs to be renamed so as not to be confused with IPO.

In the tech bubble I'm pretty sure there were at least a couple frauds.

Is this meant to be sarcasm? There are tons of fraudulent publicly listed companies.

I'm not sure if it's meant to be sarcasm. One thing that comes to mind is a lot of shady public companies don't have an IPO, but instead do a reverse merger with a public shell or operating company. I don't know if companies with IPOs are always non-fraudulent, but I think the process goes along with a certain amount of scrutiny and conversely there are ways to avoid it.

I think there is a difference between "IPO is fraud/scam" and "the company behind the IPO is fraud/scam".

Most ICO's I've looked at haven't produced anything but fancy blog posts (and in some cases, the DNS registration has expired). I think I've invested into 2 or 3 (didn't invest much, 10 or 50$ at most so it didn't hurt much and I stopped by now).

I've never read of or heard of one. Which ones were fraudulent?

Depends on your definition of fraud: IPO's were once considered a scam on the ignorance of the general public, until the financial market lost its scrupules.

An IPO is an IPO, but let's not forget about the reverse mergers...

There's a huge difference between "fraud" and "scam." It's just not a meaningful difference for the people who buy in.

There are a lot of ICOs as well just with bad ideas run by not very competent people. Again with similar results for investors. It's hard to draw the line between them and scams.

I think ICOs being run by not very competent people is a big problem considering all the problems the company faces with an ICO based on what I read about companies have with successful ICOs.

Even if ICO companies are legitimate, they're stuck in a weird place between the law, taxes and other problems.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2018/03/25/problems...

Seems low tbh.

That was going to be my comment exactly

I think they mistyped "100" as "81"

Maybe it's hex. 129% of ICOs are fraudulent.

If it was a hex percentage it would still be 81/100, or in decimal 129/256 = 50.39%

Would rather store percentages in single bytes, so let 0xFF / 0xFF = 100%.

0x81 / 0xFF = 129 / 255 ~= 50.59%

Makes a lot of sense, but maybe a slightly longer bow to draw given that we would never us xx/99 as a percentage in decimal :)

I think they're indicating that 81% were outright scams

Some of the 19% may be scam like, but not pure scams

Are you telling me TrumpCoin isn't legit? I think I need to talk to my accountant.

8% going on to trade on an exchange seems extremely hard to believe. Assuming most of them were ERC20, they could be traded on DEXs quite easily

I'd be interested to know the percentage weighted by USD notional amount raised.

I am actually surprised by that number, in that I expected it to be a lot closer to 100%.

https://twitter.com/nathanielpopper/status/97838862051082240...

I'd say 100%, but I'll take 81% too. Any ICO from a non-government entity is very close to a scam by definition.

(Heck, money from government entities is close to a scam itself, but at least it has better guarantees than "we're certain this crypto code is OK" and "a 18-year old implemented an Exchange in PHP from his parent's basement, you should really trust your coins (and real money) there").

The problem with ICO is that they are a claim on nothing. People are buying a cryptographic key. They are being sold thin air. My understanding is that some ICO will have a real underlying business and the ICO provides a claim on some of that business somehow (but keeping in mind it is not equity). But most do not.

Ethereum was also a scam, which would have given you 10,000,000% profit?

Whether there would be profit in something or not, is hardly the criterion of it being a scam.

In fact a lot of scams can be hugely profitable -- even ponzi schemes if you're not at the lower layers.

Yes, but a scam is knowingly screwing someone over.

Is it a scam when you invest in promising technology that, yes, could not work out?

>Yes, but a scam is knowingly screwing someone over.

Oh, most of those people do know -- or should know better.

>Is it a scam when you invest in promising technology that, yes, could not work out?

In "technology that might not work out" alone, no.

In "BS application of technology just because it's in fashion, with no business content" yes.

You're making the assumption that crypto will fail 100%, which is arguably not a smart thing to say, because no one knows for sure.

Furthermore, Smart contracts are a business content.

"statistics for 2018 show that of the 74 offerings completed so far this year, around 76% will end up in the red." Are ICOs a fad or are they here to stay? https://www.investing.com/analysis/whats-behind-the-lower-nu...

And what percentage are actually going to deliver a useful product/protocol that delivers significant value that justifies the investment?

"· Gone Dead (pre-trading): Succeeded to raise funding and completed the process, however was not listed on exchanges for trading and has not had a code contribution in Github on a rolling three-month basis from that point in time."

I don't know ICO mechanics well but why is this a criteria? Can anyone explain?

*Edit: I mean the code contribution in Github portion

presumably an inactive repo suggests they arent spending the money on development

counting random posts on bitcointalk that got money? im sure he discovered internet recently

This seems like bs. I would look at ICOs that arent clear scams. Using something like icodrops list.

You mean, you'd look at specifically the place which does some initial filtering on submissions to count how many of them are scams? That's starting with a biased sample. That's not how you get good statistics.

I guess it's a question of who's asking. Practically anyone can whip up an ICO, and there's a finanvial incentive to do o, so obviously the majority of ICOs will be lousy offerings. Knowing how many in total are fraudulent is interesting, but for most people the question is how many of the non-obvious scams are still scams.

It's like if you analyzed every piece of fiction ever written and concluded that nearly 100% of fiction is awful. That's probably true without any prefilter, but most people will get their books from a curated selection of some sort and will not find that conclusion very useful. Instead, they'll likely conclude that just 90% of everything is crap. ;)

The obvious answer to a hungry reader to avoid bad fiction is to read the NYT book review.

The answer to a hungry investor to avoid bad ICOs is to... ?

The obvious answer seems to me to be "avoid ICOs for the time being."

Is there really another obvious answer to that?

Just like with any other investment - unless you know the subject you plan to invest in, simply don't. It's the same for stock exchanges, properties, and so on.

Having said that, there appear sites like IcoDrops (for ICO), and Trivial.co (for post-ICO) that help people make informed decisions.

What is a sound decentralized app that was curated by IcoDrops where the app depended on blockchain-based tokens and could potentially scale up to millions of users based on that same blockchain?

Or that isn't possible, what's a decentralized app that is still valuable technology which doesn't need to scale up like that?

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