
Crypto Coin Graveyard Fills Up Fast as ICOs Meet Their Demise - elsewhen
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-28/crypto-coin-graveyard-fills-up-fast-as-icos-meet-their-demise?srnd=cryptocurriences
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chrisco255
This is disappointing level of journalism by Bloomberg. When did it become
journalistic "research" to just quote a bunch of Medium blog posts on the web?

For one, the "research" quoted by this article is conflating market cap with
actual realized losses. A coin's market cap tells you absolutely nothing about
how much was actually raised in an ICO. If I issue 1 trillion tokens and sell
one for $1, all of a sudden I'm a $1 trillion market cap.

Article's primary source found here: [https://medium.com/satis-group/ico-
quality-development-tradi...](https://medium.com/satis-group/ico-quality-
development-trading-e4fef28df04f) It claims 81% of coins with $50M+ market cap
were scams...but the only data it shows is a bar chart, with no links to
actual data tables driving the chart.

~~~
olivermarks
I agree. I think it's the end of the beginning and putting aside all the
scammy hype stuff Bloomberg and others have been happy to promote, we are now
entering a period where credible crypto business logic will start having an
impact in mainstream financial markets, exchanges and MTF's as the space
matures...

~~~
ucaetano
> where credible crypto business logic will start having an impact in
> mainstream financial markets, exchanges and MTF's as the space matures

Yeah, the only missing part is the "credible crypto business logic". Everyone
is waiting for it...

~~~
tardo99
Agreed. Can grandparent give a couple examples?

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Animats
From the article:

Crypto coins with market cap > $50M

\- Scams: 81%

\- Failed: 6%

\- Gone dead: 5%

\- Dwindling: 2.8%

\- Promising: 1.8%

\- Successful: 3.8%

There's a tracking site for dead coins:
[https://deadcoins.com](https://deadcoins.com)

~~~
sharkmerry
whats the rate of failing for startups with >$50m valuation? Is there a
tracker for that as well?

~~~
Animats
Yes. About 75% of venture-backed companies fail to return cash to
investors.[1] Many of those failures are zombies - the company continues to
operate, can cover its running expenses, but can't pay back its startup costs.
In the ICO world, that would be considered a success.

[1] [https://www.fastcompany.com/3003827/why-most-venture-
backed-...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3003827/why-most-venture-backed-
companies-fail)

~~~
seattle_spring
So many of them are paying people living wages, or at least had been during
their lifetime. Compare that to failed or scam ICOs, which do literally 0
people any good except maybe the "founder."

~~~
munk-a
Well let's not forget about all the productive hosting business this is
drumming up, some poor megacorporation is barely holding on by offering their
cloud hosting services to all these ICOs.

(there isn't a window fallacy we can't broken here :D)

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empath75
This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone since most of them were pump and dump
schemes or Ponzi schemes.

~~~
Drdrdrq
True. And the others mostly couldn't deliver.

Also not surprising is that one of the few news on HN about ICOs compares them
disfavorably to VC founding. A bit predictable, that's all.

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brighton36
A token is a receipt for your donation. :)

~~~
Kinnard
Which a lot of donors are actually completely ok with. The insistance on
seeing this new technology and the opportunities it offers through the lens of
traditional equity/securities is strange.

~~~
pembrook
It's not strange at all, since unfortunately the average person who bought
into these ICO's _thought_ they were similar to IPOs (and that was the dubious
intention behind calling them "ICO's").

You can look through thousands of reddit posts of people thinking they were
"getting in early" on some hot new tech company. You're living in a fantasy
world if you think even a sizable minority gave money to ICOs knowing it was
basically a donation.

~~~
cornoffering
Agreed about the name "ICO" being of dubious intent. That's why we tried to
clear the air with our I<corn>O,
[https://initialcornoffering.com](https://initialcornoffering.com).

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newtothisstuff
There is too many shitcoins. Which means too much speculation. One day it will
all hit a brick wall. coingecko.com has a good list with a little amount of
shitcoins. But when the shit storm starts and people move their money to
cryptocurrencies they will probably go to VDA which I'm guessing institutional
investors use which is on cryptonaire.com

When it happens, it will be good and bad for the market. Real value in good
places but a bad time in history. Due diligence everyone, due diligence.

------
arisAlexis
not much different than SV startups with 90% fail rates

~~~
seattle_spring
Oh, do ICOs give people jobs and living wages?

I'm sure you're going to come up with some esoteric edgecase, but no: it's not
comparable.

~~~
s73v3r_
I mean, they put people to work. Considering many startups, "living wages" can
be quite a stretch.

~~~
seattle_spring
Poor startup employees making $150k+, they can barely afford to eat at Marlowe
3 times a week and take 3 Napa vacations a year :*(

~~~
s73v3r_
Early startups aren't paying that well, and they're usually in very high cost
of living areas.

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RenderToCeaser
A quick alternate analysis of ICO liveness is found by simply checking the
number of tokens currently being traded with volume on idex.market: total of
291 as of todays figures, with 195 over 1 Ether/day, 80 over 10 Ether/day and
22 over 100 Ether/day. This amounts to 35%, 23%, 9.75% and 2.6% rexpectively
of the 821 reported by deadcoins.com. Further to this deadcoins.com only
labels 121 of these as scam coins with the majority (633) being labelled
deceased. Also, a large number of the listed coins have no references to back
up the given assessment.

Seems Bloomberg's reporter neglected solid research in her haste to play the
funeral drum.

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deltateam
This article is a PR piece about an activist investment firm that buys up and
revives dead coins with a new dev team and rebranding. It is masquarading as
the "I told you so" article that you already wanted to read. But thats not
what it is at all

As someone that has led zombie coin revivals multiple times over the last
several years (after spending months buying up a coin from bagholders), hit me
up

just respond to this message and put your email in your hackernews profile

This new firm has got one thing right: Bull market or bear market it doesn't
matter, you can get hockey stick growth.

~~~
deft
Could you bring back flurbo? [http://flurbo.cc](http://flurbo.cc)

~~~
sosuke
If this project is accepted can I be on the mailing list as well?

