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Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

The research in the article was not quite clear. Was their only “sign of life” measured by tweets? What about capitalization, transaction volume...anything?

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Yes, this is a totally trash article but just look at how the hn crowd laps it up because it fits in with their narrative about this tech. What a retrograde place this has become.

It’s almost like... they got busy and started working on what they promised to do.

Or they ran away with the money and don’t want to be as easy to track.

Missing the point. TFA uses a metric which is unable to distinguish between success (working instead of tweeting) and failure (scam). That's beyond wrong...

If they were working on it, though, one would think they'd be delivering updates to show their progress.

As someone who has actually worked on such things, you'd expect updates to drop off to a trickle on an actually productive engineering project. At least compared to the pre-ICO hype. A few regular blog posts every other week, vs. a constant storm of promotional material and hype.

I've actually worked on such things, too, and in my experience, "I'm too busy programming to let you know my company is still around" isn't a particularly good excuse even at tiny two- and three-person shops. When I've seen that happen at cottage software companies in the past, it has never been a sign of health: more often than not, when they finally communicate again, it's to tell us that they're closing shop.

And more to the point, tiny two- and three-person shops probably aren't doing ICOs. If your company is big enough to undertake a public offering of any kind, it's damn well big enough to have someone on staff whose responsibilities explicitly include some kind of community relations work.

That's misrepresenting what I said... the amount of communication pre-ICO will be a lot more than post-ICO, but not nothing.

No, 'the point' is that these ICO's seem to be funding not much at all, and though the metrics may be 'iffy', that's a function of the total lack of transparency of these ICO companies in the first place.

Every regular company that has taken on funding at least has a 'web site' with 'some information' and definitely communicates with investors etc. on what's up.

That it's not really even possible to know 'whats up' with companies that have raked in millions is in of itself very telling. Telling enough to keep me and most others miles away.

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