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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

Not all ICOs are scams.

In some cases people have taken the time to work out a set of incentives that allows a market that previously needed to be operated by a corporate entity to be operated without central control.

Such an incentive scheme has intrinsic value equivalent to the coordinating body it replaces. An ICO for such a scheme is not necessarily a scam.

Certainly the vast majority of ICOs are scams, but not all. The vast majority of beggars sob stories are lies, but not all are. Sometimes someone really is in a tough spot and needs a couple dollars.

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Name one

Augur

The common theme with this and some of the other answers is that they're actually adding value, and in a way that's directly related to cryptocurrency, rather than just providing a "greater fool" securities offering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augur_(software)

too few users to even be considered, in my opinion

>Immediately after the site launched, users had created death pools — or assassination markets — on famous people.

>Augur's user numbers dropped off sharply after launch in 2018: from 265 daily users in early July, to 37 on 8 August.

Maybe not a scam, but this does not convince me of the value of ICO-backed projects

Orchid

Not available to the public, so not really in the same category, right?

This is a joke right...

Ethereum. Also: Stellar.

Or anything where money is raised for a non-profit organization. Preferably as donations. More transparent this organization the better. Non-profit nature is very good in guarding against my expectation of profit by the work of an issuer.

Not sure how non-profits work in USA but in UK whilst charities can't give profits they can give massive wages/bonuses to people through payroll. You can start a charity, take donations, pay yourself a huge bonus and then declare the charity insolvent -- "no profit made, all available funds used for charitable purposes".

I think the major difference is that donors are expected to lose that money any way. Non-profit is not for profit by definition. There can be still fraud and false advertising, but at least there is no expectation of profit.

Ethereum has had it's share of controversies... not least the premine https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2018/10/vitalik-buterin-u...

vectorspace.ai

0x. BAT.

No reason for BAT to be a token, in fact I'm quite confident it accomplishes nothing but making the user experience worse.

There is, though - you need its value to float on the open market so that if ads are underpriced (relative to their annoyance to the user), more users opt out, the supply of BAT on the market declines, advertisers have to pay a higher price, more users opt in, and equilibrium is restored. That's the whole point of having BAT in the first place: correctly price attention via market means.

Similarly, you can't use a regular currency (like just paying users in dollars, AllAdvantage style) because the value of a dollar is more dependent upon other markets like housing or food than on advertising. If attention is mispriced with that system, the only party who can correct that is Brave, and Brave doesn't has neither the information nor the incentive to set a correct market-clearing price.

> BAT

If one of your examples is a charity fraud scheme masquerading as a crypto-currency start-up [0], I'm not sure you have a very good argument.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999

Telling that all respondents so far named something completely different.

Telling in a good or bad way?

I'm in 'they're all scams' camp. All crypto coin backers have their pet crypto that's 'totally not a scam and it's going to the moon' apparently, and they're all different.

I think you're confusing ICOs with market value. You don't back an ICO because its "value will go to the moon", you back an ICO because invents a new way for -- Creators to get paid instead of using advertisements, creative ways to organize some kind of distributed system.

The scam comes from them not completing their promises and leaving with the money and no "product". The coin's value is irrelevant (as long as it isn't 0)

Would you prefer it if everyone replied with the exact same post?

Filecoin?

Blockstack

(Link discussing Harvard endowment investing) https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti...

The truth is there are A LOT of ICOs which are actually developing or have developed some good solutions to certain problems. Yes there are a lot more scams than good projects, but just dismissing the whole field because of those is plain dumb.

Name one

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