As just about everyone in crypto knows, there are too many trash ICO's. A few months ago, it was just Craig Grant ads. I thought he was bad enough. Now we have ads for countless bullshit ICO's all over the Internet.
They all use clickbaity titles and phrases to try to sell you a useless token that probably won't be available on any exchanges or just straight up take your coins (usually Ethereum). A large portion of them are from people who found out about cyptocurrencies in just December or November. There is nothing wrong with that, but to call yourself an expert is pushing the lines.
Now the scam ICO's are not what I want to talk about today. What I want people to notice is this:
We see many new tokens trying to solve different problems. The thing is that we do not need a new token for all of these uses. It all seems to be a money grab. I think that these projects should just be made as new applications on say Ethereum, NEO, Cardano or EOS, some big coin that has smart contracts, small transaction fees, and staking. Ethereum does not have staking currently, but the Casper fork will implement that. You can read more about that here: https://blockonomi.com/ethereum-casper/. Anyways, I personally believe that it is a waste of money to spend all these transaction fees to swap between coins just to use it for something else. Most of those coins are not neccasary. One example is this. The Airswap platform is a way that you will be able to trade cryptocurrencies with someone else using smart contracts. The white paper explains it in this way:
This is a good idea. However, there is no need for the Airswap token. If you don't believe me you can read the whole white paper here: https://swap.tech/whitepaper/#peer-protocol. And that's one of the better ones. There are other ways of doing transactions, but I think that they all could be done on a smart contract for NEO or Ethereum. Another one like this is TenX. TenX had a deal with some credit card companies to let them trade bitcoin for fiat currency quickly for using it in the world away from computers. It is great to see a project that does this, but the TenX coin is completely useless because the platform allows Bitcoin and Ether too for payment. The TenX token has no real need to be there. The ICO was just a way of making money. Aren't they getting money from the credit card companies though? And for Airswap, I would prefer that they just ask for donations like services such as Mozilla Firefox do. There are countless more. I bet that if you go to https://coinmarketcap.com/, you will probably see an ad for a useless ICO. I tried it just now and I saw this:
None of these sound useful, and even if they were, the tokens probably don't have any big effects on the blockchain. And what happened to cryptocurrencies being open-sourced. I can't see a thing on any of the ICO's coding, until they are released, and even after that, lots of the wallet downloads use .exe instead of any open source installation. Even bitconnect coin has an open source installation, where as dogecoin core wallet does not. And another thing, if you have not heard of this protocol, I think you should check it out. The ERC223 protocol has some exciting new features that ERC20 does not. It has been around for a few months now, so I would like to see some more adoption. You can find it here: https://github.com/Dexaran/ERC223-token-standard. I would like to see newer ICO's to question if their coin is necessary to perform the function and to please start using ERC223 over ERC20. Out with the old and in with the new.
Please share anything else you may have found that I should have mentioned below. Feel free to share any of your opinions down below and I will try to read them or answer any questions you may have.