What makes a good ICO (Initial Coin Offering)?

I don’t think there’s a way to know if an ICO is truly ‘good’.

I gave an answer on what I think makes a good ICO investment some time ago, but that article would be better titled “How I Avoid Bad ICO’s”.

It’s much easier to spot bad ICO’s that don’t have a chance than the opposite. Some negative traits for me include:

• Teams raising funds that have yet to put significant work into their platforms
• Tokens that are only there to drive fund raising
• Team Members that won’t name themselves or have a history of scams
• Terrible Crypto-economics
• Lying (this includes plagiarism, fake ICO Advisors, stealing content, etc)

Each of these indicators are designed to disqualify a project and make it easy to ignore most ICO’s. But none of these will help you to pick a ‘winner’.

This is due to a profound realization about the history of innovation: truly great products often hide behind seemingly dumb ideas. We’re not creative enough to imagine the future and often discount great ideas because of this. To name a few recent example:

• Uber (why would you get a ride from some random stranger?)
• AirBNB (and then sleep at their house!?!)
• Snapchat (Why ‘snap’ my friends? What’s wrong with Facebook?)
• Twitch (Who’s going to pay me to play pokemon? Gamers would rather play themselves.)

Each of the people who founded these organizations could start a University with the wealth they now possess. All from ideas that seemed too stupid to work by most people’s standards.

Cryptocurrency is no different. There are likely ground breaking ideas right under your nose and you’re not going to be able to recognize it. Not many people can without a giant leap of faith.

So, I take a different approach to investing: I disqualify as much as I reasonably can (“Don’t Be Stupid”), and then go with my gut (Nassim Taleb style). I can’t know with any certainty if a project is truly a great idea. But if I fail, I’d rather fail on something I believe in, rather then fail based on metrics that supposedly leads to success.

Brian Schuster is a developer and writer in the blockchain industry. His content has been viewed over 5 million times since January 2017. You can view more of his content on his pateron page, where he is producing content to help his audience find their place in this emerging industry.

What makes a good ICO (Initial Coin Offering)? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.