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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Monkeys with typewriters are currently busy banging out whitepapers for ICOs.

A friend of mine writes and edits ICO whitepapers. He's very skilled and gets paid pretty well for those skills.

The fact alone that writing and editing ICO whitepapers (plural) is something an individual can do as a job makes me trust ICOs significantly less.

You have seen nothing yet https://www.fiverr.com/writer_clara/write-and-proofread-your...

Oh God.

Given the quality of this gig description, at least we know that whitepapers written by that person will be immediately recognizable as scams.

And yet, people will still invest in it.

The "Useless Ethereum Token" [1] subtitles itself as so:

You're going to give some random person on the internet money, and they're going to take it and go buy stuff with it. Probably electronics, to be honest. Maybe even a big-screen television.

Seriously, don't buy these tokens.

And people still invested more than $40.000 in it [2].

[1] https://uetoken.com/

[2] https://qz.com/1023501/ethereum-ico-people-invested-thousand...

Bad example. That's one ICO I would actually buy into myself if I discovered it in time. I'm a believer in timely executed jokes, much like many other people on the Internet.

What's particularly alarming about that is he appears to have had at least three people purchase his service, two of them after the first had commented that it was substandard...

You know a market's full of suckers when even the wannabe scammers aren't discerning enough to avoid being ripped off.

Smart money has always been on selling shovels to the gold diggers.

On the bright side, maybe the cryptoworld is merely investing on better GPUs by metric-tons of cash.

Over last couple of weeks, I received a dozen or so contact requests on LinkedIn from "Blockchain and ICO experts". They don't have any other verifiable jobs on their resumes.

How is that any more objectionable than the existence of professional grant request writers?

Lawyers charge exorbitant amounts for writing contracts. Selling papers is not a new invention.

A whitepaper is not a contract. It's a description of "what does this do and why should you care", i.e. literally the thing you're buying into in an ICO.

If he wrote http://mimblewimble.cash/20160719-OriginalWhitePaper.txt, I'd like to meet him!

Sure it takes skill to be a scam artist, but that doesn't mean such behavior should be tolerated.

No one is denying skills, just measuring skills on a “how many monkeys” scale.

Wow that sounds like a very morally fulfilling occupation.

This made me laugh louder then i should i guess :D

i thought they write the next Hollywood-Blockbuster?

No, they're way too good for _that_.

I think Narwals are the ones responsible for the IOTA white paper.

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