So a few days ago I went on to a Telegram group of an upcoming ICO to check on whether the airdrop that they were promising was actually going to happen.
At the time the drop was a couple of days overdue and the resale had finished.
I posed the question "if the team organising the ICO couldn't get the airdrop right was this an insight into the performance of the team after the ICO". Obviously this one event shouldn't be taken in isolation as an indicator of the success or failure of the project, a LOT of other research should be conducted as well before investing but I wondered if it might add to the research as a further indicator.
As it turns out the airdrop did happen with the admin citing a few excuses about the cause of the delay.
Now the thing that shocked me was the abuse that I got just for posing the question and wondering if my investment would be safe. I'm not a huge user of Telegram but it seems like the "echo chamber" effect was in play and therefore if you didn't slavishly praise the ICO to the moon then you were a target.
Surely discussion about the positives and negatives of a project should be encouraged. If I am thinking about investing then I want to hear all view points, there may be points that I haven't thought of about the success or failure that would be helpful to everyone in making their decision.
Now that the figures have come out in the last few days that 46% of ICOs launched in 2017 have failed I feel justified in expressing myself in a less than positive way but I feel the pain of those who lost money - to the tune of $233 million by the way.
I just think that some healthy scepticism is required until we are fully happy in what we are about to invest in though I do understand that its tough to hear somebody putting down a project that you have just bought into, even if the put down is relatively gentle.
I just don't want to see people lose money, I have done so in the past with AIM stock market investments in the UK and it's not a nice feeling.
DYOR is an acronym that is used a lot on stock market bulletin boards but one I rarely see in the crypto world, it means Do Your Own Research and I can't recommend it enough.
ICOs are definitely something to not take lightly. I knew when they started popping out from everywhere that a lot of people were going to loose their money. Back in 2014 I mined a lot of useless coins before I realized there was no point in it. I never invested any money luckily, given that 90% of the coins back then are dead by now. And only a few remain somewhere to be noticed. The faith will probably be worse for ICOs given that most of them don't have any reason to exists, not even that of someone mining them for profit.
With $233 million involved it gives a new meaning to the term "altcoin millionaire" (I know the term is usually "Bitcoin Millionaire" but you Know what I mean).
I hope that most failures are down to incompetence rather than outright scamming and theft but I fear not.