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Ideally the organization itself should: a) be fully built on distributed technologies, if that's not the case, this is a clear red flag as it gives too much con

Ideally the organization itself should: a) be fully built on distributed technologies, if that's not the case, this is a clear red flag as it gives too much control to the founders to screw it. Ether+Web3.js+IPFS is a good combo. Proper voting/execution system for members is also a must IMO but very few actually have it. b) have a clear incentives model in place (built in smart contracts which code you should be able to inspect), meaning both initial users/contributors get increased value from participating and long-term growth can be achieved. c) solve a real problem, obviously. There're some existing models that can be disrupted as well as some of the more futuristic things like prediction markets, distributed clouds, etc. All of that should be explained in their whitepaper. That said, we're in a sort of 1999 situation right now so expect it to correct short-term. Also there's a lot of scammy projects now, so do your due diligence.

mbrock 9y ago
It's very easy to make a "whitepaper" about solving some important problem using Ethereum/Web3/IPFS with whatever interesting kinds of voting schemes and incentives. Whitepapers of all kinds are basically designed to seem impressive and downplay problems, just like any other promotional material. Deciding whether the organization behind that whitepaper is legit, competent, and serious enough to actually make it happen is much more difficult than ticking some bullet points. Front end development is hard to do well, cryptoeconomic mechanism design is really difficult and prone to horrible failure, marketing is hard, profit is hard, etc etc. (As an aside, I'm curious how many people actually understand how IPFS works. Are we all clear that it's not a magic place where you can upload things to make them available everywhere forever? In most important aspects it's equivalent to BitTorrent with Magnet. You still need to seed!) That all said, in the sense of the "Keynesian beauty contest" it doesn't really matter whether a team will actually deliver anything good. If the web presence and whitepaper hype is cool enough to generate a good buzz, that's enough to generate a speculative wave where you hopefully won't be part of the crash!
- livestyle 9y ago
  It's also "very easy" not fall into FOMO token buying.

mbrock 9y ago

It's very easy to make a "whitepaper" about solving some important problem using Ethereum/Web3/IPFS with whatever interesting kinds of voting schemes and incentives. Whitepapers of all kinds are basically designed to seem impressive and downplay problems, just like any other promotional material. Deciding whether the organization behind that whitepaper is legit, competent, and serious enough to actually make it happen is much more difficult than ticking some bullet points. Front end development is hard to do well, cryptoeconomic mechanism design is really difficult and prone to horrible failure, marketing is hard, profit is hard, etc etc. (As an aside, I'm curious how many people actually understand how IPFS works. Are we all clear that it's not a magic place where you can upload things to make them available everywhere forever? In most important aspects it's equivalent to BitTorrent with Magnet. You still need to seed!) That all said, in the sense of the "Keynesian beauty contest" it doesn't really matter whether a team will actually deliver anything good. If the web presence and whitepaper hype is cool enough to generate a good buzz, that's enough to generate a speculative wave where you hopefully won't be part of the crash!

livestyle 9y ago
It's also "very easy" not fall into FOMO token buying.