[chadbennett]

From the author of the tweet, "since tweeting this, i've heard that @ccatalini's team at MIT has looked into ICOs and gotten very different numbers: somewhere between 5 and 25% of ICOs are frauds. He hasn't published his full research, but will be interesting to see what accounts for the difference."

[dkarl]

There's a huge difference between "fraud" and "scam." It's just not a meaningful difference for the people who buy in.

[tim333]

There are a lot of ICOs as well just with bad ideas run by not very competent people. Again with similar results for investors. It's hard to draw the line between them and scams.

[dasosho]

I think ICOs being run by not very competent people is a big problem considering all the problems the company faces with an ICO based on what I read about companies have with successful ICOs.

Even if ICO companies are legitimate, they're stuck in a weird place between the law, taxes and other problems.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2018/03/25/problems...

[debt]

“somewhere between 5 and 25% of ICOs are frauds.”

IPOs have a 0% fraud rate historically. Maybe ICO needs to be renamed so as not to be confused with IPO.

[conanbatt]

Depends on your definition of fraud: IPO's were once considered a scam on the ignorance of the general public, until the financial market lost its scrupules.

[rajacombinator]

Is this meant to be sarcasm? There are tons of fraudulent publicly listed companies.

[zaarn]

I think there is a difference between "IPO is fraud/scam" and "the company behind the IPO is fraud/scam".

Most ICO's I've looked at haven't produced anything but fancy blog posts (and in some cases, the DNS registration has expired). I think I've invested into 2 or 3 (didn't invest much, 10 or 50$ at most so it didn't hurt much and I stopped by now).

[perl4ever]

I'm not sure if it's meant to be sarcasm. One thing that comes to mind is a lot of shady public companies don't have an IPO, but instead do a reverse merger with a public shell or operating company. I don't know if companies with IPOs are always non-fraudulent, but I think the process goes along with a certain amount of scrutiny and conversely there are ways to avoid it.

[debt]

I've never read of or heard of one. Which ones were fraudulent?

[bhouston]

In the tech bubble I'm pretty sure there were at least a couple frauds.

[TaylorGood]

An IPO is an IPO, but let's not forget about the reverse mergers...