Exhaustive analysis of ICO white papers shows about 1/4 contain major red flags. The bar the WSJ set is pretty low (as in easy to pass without raising flags). Any white paper that didn't plagiarize long passages, re-use others' headshots or fail to name principals, or fail mention risk basically passes.
It's also worth noting that the multi-billion dollar figure cited for total funds raised through ICOs is about as reliable as the ICOs themselves, since it's based on self-reported figures from ICOs that frequently appear out of thin air with multi-million claims of funds raised so far.
And that’s not even considering the many white papers that are original work, but completely wrong. Many of them propose fundamentally incorrect and exploitable systems. But of course none of the papers are peer reviewed, so if the idea sounds cool to some armchair tech nerds on reddit, off to the races you go!
Want to see something truly scary? Pick a coin, any coin, that has had a major vulnerability discovered by researchers in a peer-reviewed publication. Then go onto that coin’s subreddit and watch in amazement as a bunch of security illiterate redditors bend over backwards to invalidate the paper’s claims with conspiratorial nonsense and cries of spreading FUD.
Blind loyalty is bad enough in meatspace. In the cryptocurrency realm, it’s simply dangerous.
The crazy thing is that any one of these coins could have a double-spending vulnerability, which by its very nature would likely be undiscoverable. There could very well be some clever hacker somewhere exploiting double spends and slowly bleeding money out of exchanges.
By the nature of the technology, there's no double spending on a blockchain.
Because every node has the same database. All and every one of the miners maintain a copy of what's essentially the same DB, the same distributed ledger.
But there are plenty of stolen keys and seeds for wallets and if someone gets your wallet, all your money will be moved to someone else's. This, sadly, happens frequently.
Exhaustive analysis of ICO white papers shows about 1/4 contain major red flags. The bar the WSJ set is pretty low (as in easy to pass without raising flags). Any white paper that didn't plagiarize long passages, re-use others' headshots or fail to name principals, or fail mention risk basically passes.
It's also worth noting that the multi-billion dollar figure cited for total funds raised through ICOs is about as reliable as the ICOs themselves, since it's based on self-reported figures from ICOs that frequently appear out of thin air with multi-million claims of funds raised so far.