Avoid Scam ICOs

It seems to me ICOs have an obsession with numbers. Airdrops, bounties, buying bots, massive inviting,… Recently, we’ve been seeing a tendency to have massive numbers of people in telegram groups. 50k, 60k, 90k, the more, the better, or at least that’s what a lot of projects think. “It doesn’t matter if we have an mvp, or a good incentive to hold the tokens, or even a business model, but we need followers. We need marketing hype” I can feel that’s the mentality; and I think it’s quite understandable, honestly. If your focus is on raising huge amounts of money, and VCs are monitoring telegram channels, you want to move quick, and more important than that, appear to be moving quick. A huge influx of news, partnerships, a large following on telegram, selling hype instead of a product, all those things are the perfect ingredient to exploit the greed of people that saw the crazy returns of ICOs on 2017. Is that wrong? At the end of the day, if the objective is getting a lot of money fast, then one could argue this is the paradise! People giving you money for a whitepaper, an idea. If that’s not the dream of enterpreneurs, I don’t know what is. The problem comes when we start to suffer the consequences of that. A cycle is created: ICO investing becomes almost a massive pump and dump squeme, where angels dump on VCs, VCs dump on retail investors, and retails investors pray to dump on other retail investors. Some people make money, some people lose it. Is it really that important? The answer is no, it isn’t. The real problem is when this dangerous game gets in the way of innovation, game changing ideas, and awesome technology. I’m pretty sure technology is like nature, it always finds a way, and no matter what the government, VCs and us do, it will continue it’s path forward. However, I want to raise the point that by stoping this game, we can start fostering real innovation; not the type that it’s written as bad examples in books, but the one that improves our lifes for the better. By stoping this game I don’t refer to stop investing in ICOs, but start asking real questions: Does this project have a purpose? What incentives do I have to hold the token? What’s the business plan? What technology are you developing? Do you have a product? Step by step. This is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Most people say blockchain is the future and that we are at an early stage. I don’t have a cristal ball to tell that, so I feel it’s better to focus on what we can do.