Headline April 17, 2018/ ''' CRYPTO - CRUSH '''

''' CRYPTO - CRUSH '''

ALL RISKS ACCOUNTED FOR, - the year in question, 2017 - found the investors appetite ravenous. In every true sense you can imagine.....

A group of programmers in the San Francisco Bay Area this year, 2017, used an I.C.O to raise $35 million for their project, an anonymous web browser called  Brave, in less than 30 seconds.

There have been 140 coin offerings in 2017 that have raised a total of $2.1 billion from investors according to Coinschedule, a website that tracks activity. 

SEPTEMBER 2017 & - JACKSON PALMER no longer thinks it's funny to imitate Doge, the Internet meme about Shiba Inu dog whose awestruck expression and -

Garbled syntax - e.g. ''Wow, So pizza. Much delicious'' made him a viral sensation several years ago.

But if he did, he might channel Doge, to offer a new cautionary words for investors who are falling for cryptocurrency start-ups, the world's and Silicon Valley's just latest moneymaking craze:

Very bubble. Much scam. So avoid.

Mr. Palmer, the creator of Dogecoin, was an early fan of cryptocurrency, a form of encrypted digital money that is traded from person to person.

He saw investors talking about Bitcoin, the oldest and best known cryptocurrency and wanted to find a way to poke fun at the hype surrounding the emerging technology.

So in 2013, he built his own cryptocurrency, a satirical mash-up that combined Bitcoin with the Doge meme he'd seen on social media. Mr. Palmer hoped to use Dogecoin to show the absurdity of wagering huge sums of money on unstable ventures.

But investors didn't get the joke and bought Dogecoin anyway, bringing its market value as high as $400 million.

Along the way, the currency became a magnet for greed and attracted a group of scammers and hackers who defrauded investors, hyped fake products and left many of the currency's original backers empty-handed.

Today, Mr. Palmer, 30, is one of the loudest voices warning that a similar fate might soon befall the entire cryptocurrency industry.

''What's happening to crypto now is what is happened to Dogecoin,'' Mr. Palmer told me in one interview. ''I'm worried that this time, it's on much grander scale.''

Already, there are signs of trouble on the horizon. Last week, after the Chinese authorities announced a crackdown on virtual currencies, the value of Bitcoin briefly tumbled 30 percent before partially recovering.

The value of Dogecoin fell more than 50 percent the week before. Its market value by mid-day Friday was about $100 million.

But there remains no bigger mania among tech investors than cryptocurrency, which some see as an eventual replacement of traditional, government issued money.

Even with the recent declines, the price of Bitcoin has more than tripled in 2017; another cyptocurrency, Ethereum, has gained more than 2,300 percent.  The success of these currencies has minted a new class of ''crypto-millionaires''and spawned hundreds of other digital currencies, called altcoins.

In addition, its has given rise to an entire category start-ups that takes advantage of cryptocurrency's public ledger system, known as the blockchain.

Many cryptocurrency start-ups have raised money through an initial coin offering or I.C.O., a type of fund-raising campaign in which investors buy into a new venture using Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency and receives virtual ''tokens'' instead of stock or voting rights in the company.

These tokens grant investors access to a product or service that will be built with the money raised in the I.C.O., such as Cloud Data Storage or access to new social network.

[IF you're having trouble picturing it : Imagine that a friend is building a casino and asks you to invest. In exchange, you get chips that can be used at the casino's tables once it's finished.

Now imagine that the value of the chips isn't fixed, and will instead fluctuate depending on the popularity of the casino, the number of other gamblers and the regulatory environment, for casinos.

Oh, instead of a friend, imagine it's a stranger on the Internet who might be using a fake name, who might not actually know how to build a casino and whom you probably can't sue for fraud if he steals your money and uses it to buy a Porsche instead. That's an I.C.O]

Despite the obvious risks of these ventures, investors appetite has been ravenous   

I.C.O fever has even infected celebrities. That month, 2017, the actress Paris Hilton tweeted that she was ''looking forward to participating'' in the initial coins offering of  LydianCoin, a cryptocurrency project associated with the digital advertising Gravity4.

The boxing star Floyd Mayweather and the rapper The Game  have also endorsed coin offerings.

Unlike traditional stock offerings, which are carefully supervised and planned months or years in advance, I.C.O's are largely unregulated in the United States, although that could soon change.

The Honor and serving of the latest  Operational Research on World, Markets, and Innovation continues. And The World Students Society thanks researcher and author, Kevin Rose.

With respectful dedication to the Investors all,  Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW! - the World Students Society and Twitter - !E-WOW! - the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Focus & Flames '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless