Goktug Yilmaz's Reviews > Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond

Notes:

Large companies struggle around exponential disruptive change, even if they recognize the potential because, new tech:
-Are simpler and cheaper.
-They offer lower margins not higher profits.
-First start from insignificant niche markets.
-Large company customers don't need and can't use these technologies.
-Introducing new product would decrease sales for old product and total revenue.

-By the time the new technology is mature with a market sizable enough to move the needle for big company, its too late. The small company that took time to master the new technology is much more agile and experienced and will outcompete big companies in a fast growing market.

-The average lifespan of SP500 companies dropped from 60 years to 20 years in the last 50 years.

-6 Bitcoin crises happened between 2013-2017; their data clearly shows all these crashes were steep on the price increase, then slow on the decline. While prices spike in a matter of days, the falls go on for weeks.

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Evaluating Cryptoassets:

-Read White Paper: Read at least the intro and conclusion. Overly vague white papers should be a warning sign. Should be able to briefly explain the coin to a friend.

-Decentralization Edge: Does the problem being solved by the coin need to be decentralized? Does an existing centralized solution work as well or better?

-Community, Developers, Track Record: Go through developer social media profiles, subreddit, slack, telegram of coins. Previous market experience.

-Issuance Model: Current and ongoing rate of supply. An oversupply can be healthy for the price stability and potential use of a coin. However, it will naturally hinder the price growth.  

-Distribution Model: Premines and unfair distribution models are bad.  It consolidated power in a small amount of hands, potentially undermining the inherent decentralized nature of cryptoassets. 

-Miners: Need spread of the miners to reduce the chance of a 51% attack. Not having a large percentage in 1 country.

-Hash Rate Growth: Used as measure of the health of the miner network. Have to compare the network value to the cost to produce the hash rate. Different coins use different hashing algorithms which make direct comparison hard. Steady uptrend of hashing power is good.

-Github: Check the project, look for active development, some code forks, etc. Cryptocompare developer star points-code repository points. Openhub activity.

-Social Support: VC support, big company support, big exchange support, trading pair amount.

-Actual Use Cases.

-User Adoption: Number of wallets/users. Number of transactions. Dollar value of transactions.
Valuation Metric: Market Cap / Transaction Volume

Evaluating ICOs:

-White paper
-Roadmap: Breakdown of all appropriate financials along the way?
-Open source? Public blockchain?
-Clear, logical, fair pricing token sale?
-How much of the token has been assigned for the development team and how those tokens will be released? Releasing them over time keeps the developers engaged and protects against centralized control of the token.
-Does the token sale tout itself as an investment? It should instead be promoted for its functionality and use case and include appropriate disclaimers that identify it as a product, not an investment.