The ICO Orgy Has Come And Gone. Long Live the ICO.

A ne'er-do-well with a spotty credit history and a shady business running out of a communal office-share with no employees decides to attend the ICO crypto buying orgy to make himself rich quickly. He shows up at the orgy palace. There're a few bodies passed out on the floor. The sawdust on the floor is what used to be the furniture. It is mopping up the vomitus. A weary bartender is cleaning up. Our shady joneser looks around and has a puzzled look on his face. He turns to the barkeep and says "I've come for the orgy".
The barkeep replies, "Sorry, it's over. Everybody has been screwed."

I tell this story because it's true. My best friend is a medical doctor - Chief of Radiology. He checked in with me last week & asked how I was doing. I told him that I had a few blockchain projects on the go. He replied: ICO=SCAM. My friend is a sophisticated investor with a 7 figure portfolio and that's his perception of ICOs. I had to create a long missive on how I do participate in ICOs, but my primary business is enterprise, data-centric blockchains.

To make an ICO work these days, you have to target real investors, with real value in the niche that you operate. You need business substance. The other orgy is dead.

(originally appeared as a Linked In post: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-bodnar-57b635133/ )

How To Run An ICO And Be Disruptive

I get invitations to participate in ICOs every day. Mostly I get asked if I want to buy crypto tokens. But I do get a lot of requests to join as an advisor or  to create the coins.  I reject > 99% of the requests? Why? Because most people conducting ICOs do not understand disruption and the awesome power of tokenization. And they do not understand that tokenization and conventional economics and commercial activity are immiscible.  Tokenizing something has to be disruptive. If you are trying to tokenize existing processes, you will fail. You have to totally disrupt them.  If you are trying to tokenize something completely different, you are on the right track.  If you are trying to break existing patterns and processes with tokenization, you are on the right track. If you are trying to change paradigms with tokenization, you are on the right track.  If you are trying to solve VERY challenging problems in unconventional ways, you are on the right track. The very last question that you should answer is this: Am I disrupting at the right level? For example, if you are trying to disrupt the buying and selling of widgets, perhaps you are at the wrong level. You should be trying to disrupt the widget industry.   My two cents.

Report ICO, Crypto and Other Scams

In the past few days, I have had LinkedIn connections report people who have conducted ICO scams, or shady characters on LinkedIn.  Some of them connect with me just to spam me.  I've had a connection and immediate request to process anonymous money transfers to the Cayman Islands.    A couple of us have  decided to create a reputation blockchain with query of scams, ICO fakes, charlatans, shady characters, pirates of the Caribbean, swindlers, carpetbaggers etc. If you come across egregious characters, ICOs or anything that gives our blockchain/crypto  industry a bad name, drop an email with particulars to DataPrivacy@mail.com.  Eventually there will be a website with a query input.  If there are no reputation issues, you will get a thumbs-up emoji (with the disclaimer that there are no adverse reports), and if there are reputation issues you will get up to 5 thumbs-down emojis.  Thanks in advance.  (If you would like to contribute a bit of Bitcoin to help the effort along, a wallet address is:   1NfcRwZac5XrYQLkNQtBa8WBpemYpqEiwU  )