MP ICOs experiment for 2018

Investing / Cryptocurrencies
1

Hi there,

So I hope you had fun freaking out about when you should buy or sell or buy or sell or…f*%$@ off all of these cryptocurrenxies :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

As much as I think that cryptocurrencies are too volatile for me, I still strongly believe in the underlying blockchain technology and all the cool things it will bring to the world.
Hence I wanna run another crypto-experiment in 2018: invest CHF 100 each month in one relevant/promising ICO, and keep you posted on how it evolves.
My goal is still the same: get some cash at stake to deep dive into these topics that are gonna shape a world we can’t imagine yet.

As there are plenty of smart people around there who already entered the game, I wanted to ask you the following to be able to kickstart this new serie:

  • What website do you use to get daily/weekly digest emails of most promising ICOs?
  • How do you invest into such ICOs in the most efficient way (tool, method, etc.)?
  • What January’s ICO would you recommend to MP for its first CHF 100 investment?

Looking forward to exchanging with you on this exciting topic.

Cheers,
MP

1 Like
2

I haven’t put in any money on ICOs at all. There are just too many scams in this space, anybody can “write” a whitepaper promising anything they want, make a fancy website, list some advisors (willing or otherwise) and people just FOMO and buy into it. Even “credible” ICOs have really scammy elements (IOTA, Filecoin, etc.). For me, its too time-consuming to identify the promising ICOs.

Still, I’m looking forward to your experiment and the contribution of others. Good luck!

3

Hi, I’m curious now about your opinion why iota is scammy for you. Definitely not the most secure/anonymous but…

4

I wasn’t particularly impressed with how they’ve handled the criticism of their security vulnerabilities, which were serious noob mistakes and they just brushed them off as “academic” and “not relevant”. They also claim to be decentralized yet they have a closed-source central component (the coordinator) which nobody else can run and is critical to the network. When called out for this, they deny that they’re centralized and claim it’s not an important part of the network, which is specially ironic because part of the reason they said the security vulnerabilities were irrelevant was because the coordinator would stop those attacks.

So, take a bunch of ambitious and vacuous promises that sound too good to be true, several technical flaws, add some hubris and lack of humility, a few “misunderstandings”, recurring complaints of a non-functional network, a founder with total contempt for his users, add some premining and you have sufficient red flags for me to stay away.

5

Wow I definitely agree with you now! Quite unprofessional ICO…

Problem is, like most of other ICOs they all seem to be similar… Some leader and developer full of ego and some idea which is not necessarily implemented with best techniques in practice… So what usually remains is a risky bet, especially if you want to invest long!

Not sure what could be a good suggestion for serious ICOs here…

6

That’s exactly why I’ve stayed away so far. It takes too much effort to find the good ones, and the spaces is filled with people that have already invested and just want to talk their choice up to pump and dump it. Anyway, at the rate the main cryptocurrencies are growing lately, why bother?

7

If you have any doubts about ICO projects, you always can appeal to sources with ratings and trackers like this ICO project tracker

8

haha guys go for it!
I’ll apply my investment philosophy to it: I am not the one guy smarter than the rest who knows which one to pick :smiley:

1 Like
9

here a (german) article on one particular way how ppl got scammed:


in summary, they bought manipulated hardware wallets or generated seeds via websites which kept a copy of it. dont do the same mistakes

10

“I stuck my hand in a blender and now it’s all messed up, who can I sue?”

The kind of people that click on “cheap viagra” adds should probably not directly own cryptos.

1 Like
11

I bought my Ledger Nano S at bitConsult.ch

How should I know if I can get scammed or not? Either by the manufacturer or by the distributor.

12

Was there a recovery seed included? If yes then someone has your Key, otherwise you are probably fine (at leas against this attack).

As long as you generated your key yourself you should be fine, this was actually a pretty weak attack, they did not even tamper with the device they just set it up and provided the key to the buyer, if he had just reset it (or even just used the passphrase function) he would have been totally fine. I guess if you miss the setup process you also miss all the warnings about keeping the seed save so that might actually be an attack vector against uneducated people.

On another note, do you want to buy a private key? Only used once, otherwise otherwise in great condition XD.

Edit: Jesus 140chf for a trezor, what a ripoff.

13

Ha! Incredible! I bought my Ledger for 89 CHF and now it’s for 109 :smile:

14

If you don’t have the source code to keys generator you don’t… They could have intentionally weakened it, so that e.g. it only generates a tiny subset of keys that they can easily bruteforce whenever they like it

This is one of the reasons I believe why cryptos won’t replace traditional banking system anytime soon

1 Like
15

You can always generate your own seed with (good) dice or a deck of cards, if you wanted to go full paranoid.

I think it’s kind of unfair to discount cryptos because you may need to trust some party for convenience, specially when the current system requires blind trust.

Anyway, I don’t think bitcoin will replace the traditional banking system, but I think it will transform it and banks will loose a lot of the power they have now. Like what the Internet has done to print journalism: it hasn’t killed it, but newspapers are much less powerful than they used to be.

1 Like
16

if cryptos do to banks what internet did to newspapers, they will practically kill them.

1 Like
17

Hey there. I made a bunch of ico’s last year and about 2/3 of them outperformed ETH and 1/3 is still underperforming comparing to ETH. But i had an ICO-fatigue last autumn and i only do some of the ones that are recommended by friends now. It is so hard to navigate this space and very timeconsuming. Most of them do not outperform the big names, so it’s a questionable venture.

I think there are a lot more ICO comparing platforms out now, but i used:

My criteria for choosing an ico are simple (and stolen from Tim Ferriss), only invest in things you would use yourself (and therefore understand, which is only possible to a certain degree with all the distributed ledger projects). Its more easy to understand if they have a business case and harder if they invent some sort of a new infrastructure. New Infrastructure ICO’s are very interesting though, but hard to judge - so i missed out on EOS, Raiden and others - i guess i would search more in this area today.

Anyway - i bought my first shares in VT today and i am stoked about that :smiley:

18

https://valid.global ITO coming up, looking good.

But as always, do your own research :wink:

19

Short update on this post: as you may have seen, I don’t have much additional time these days to add one more thing to my radar.
I will ping you back if I restart the experiment at some point.

Thanks for all who provided resources and advices, much appreciated.

Cheers,
MP

20

Valid was quite a success in terms of funding, actually. They changed the name to Vetri shortly after, I surmise because of issues with the first one being too generic and difficult to search for. Hopefully they’ll do well!