Crypto Academy Week 1 - Homework Post for @imagen : ICO (Initial Coin Offering)

Based on my understanding, Initial Coin offering (acronym: ICO) is simply about offering cryptocurrencies as an initial or starting fund for building a certain organization's new project.

ICOs also undergo proper planning before raising funds for a startup such as the details and information about the project; requirements (including money and its type) needed to support the project; and the duration of the ICO campaign.

We already know that ICO stands for "Initial Coin Offering", on the other hand, IEO stands for "Initial Exchange Offering".

Both practice launching in the stock market. The main differences between the two are that: ICO is directly offered to investors while IEO is presenting cryptocurrency through having third-party exchange; and IEO is not as accessible as ICO because it is only available if one is a member of the exchange platform.

IEO is considered safer than ICO but still has the possibility of being a scam or failing, everyone should still be critical of investment opportunities.

Initial Coin Offerings have several known advantages - aside from it is one of many strategies that can support start-ups with their crypto-related projects, the following are its benefits:

1. Accessibility. In terms of accessibility, anyone can purchase tokens as the transactions are private. By "anyone" this means that it can be accessed globally and anyone can invest in a token.

2. Instant. The seller and buyer has direct connection without any hindrances or interruptions in between, this results to swift processes of transactions and is considered ideal for most companies as long as the token has been launched or until it is launched in the market.

However convenient the process of ICOs is, everything has its downsides, the disbenefits of ICOs are:

1. Scams. When people purchase ICOs, obviously most are hopeful that their investments would double later on as promised. However, an investor or a crypto-buyer should always be wise in choosing the right ICOs to invest on. As stated by Reiff (2020), there is no exact way of telling that a token would be launched in the market, but there are points to remember in order to avoid being scammed, such as: looking over and verifying the team or owner of the ICO; being critical about the feasibility of the project; and it is acceptable to be skeptical about it first and research details related to the ICO as much as possible.

2. Chances of being hacked. Anything in the internet or the digital world has a chance of security breach, it is important to secure your investments or bought tokens in a proper digital wallet and trusted websites; passwords of these should be safely kept and as much as possible, have a physical copy instead of instant password saves.

For example, let us take one of the most successful ICOs - most people know Ethereum as it is famous and up on current lists in the cryptomarket.

This before-ICO was launched by Vitalik Buterin and was open for 42 DAYS starting on July 20, 2014.

This Ethereum was said to be a supercomputer that can launch any application in the most sufficient time possible, it made us of Solidity - a programming language capable of transforming great possibilities to a reality.

Thank you so much Professor @imagen for allowing us to do the homework on another language.

This is my first post for Steemit Crypto Academy, I did my best to understand the topic and hopefully I can learn lots of topics about cryptocurrency! I did multiple researches and tried to discuss each question comprehensively.