Historically, a key advantage of successful people has been their insight. As a rule, such a skill is a gift received at birth and is developed throughout their life. For centuries using the opinions of astute people has been a common business practice — in modern times this relationship usually takes the form of hiring professional evaluators; contractors, real estate appraisers and so on.
Innovation projects have always been difficult to evaluate. In the last century, when making decisions regarding technology investments, we had access only to the opinions of local experts. But with the advent of the Information Age, evaluation periods for start-ups and scientific projects have been shortened and the quality of those evaluations have improved dramatically. As a consequence of these improvements, it became possible for the start-ups themselves to become more complex, and their numbers to grow geometrically. This unstoppable growth of innovation projects was fired by the global economy and the accessibility of resources, thanks to global networks.
The successful rise of crowdfunding platforms contributed to the birth of the ICO, which of course is a valuable instrument, despite the fact that 90% of them are doomed to failure, or are scams. In this regard I share the opinion of Andreas Antonopoulos in everything (https://cointelegraph.com/news/andreas-antonopoulos-icos-are-total-shit-right-now-revolutionary-in-15-years) except the date of the revolution, which we hope to accelerate. Undoubtedly, given the abundance of innovation start-ups combined with the wish of the “crowd” to invest their savings into ventures, we need an instrument to conveniently analyze start-ups which are (as a rule) very complex and always unique. Personally, I often caught myself learning about other cryptocurrency projects just by skimming through them. It’s hard to estimate how many important details I may have missed among hundreds and thousands of phonies.
In my opinion, at the current state of development of internet society, we require * smart * organization of the increasing flow of information (something which Google, Facebook and others have been doing in their fields for a long time) and especially around business processes.
For the last two years, we have been working on the Scientificcoin project, which aims to change relationships in the financing of science. Since innovative IT start-ups are roughly comparable to applied science projects, I would like to touch upon the topic of assessing and rating ICOs, and describe the platforms that are available today. 😉
ICOBENCH, ICORATING and others (as far as I know there are at least 10 of them) are platforms for ICO rating. Most of them provide advertising services, which, by definition, contradict the tasks of their platforms. But unfortunately such services cannot exist on a non-commercial basis, and neither can media resources, nor can any service that creates the information background that surrounds us.
A few days ago I received an offer from a stranger through Telegram messenger offering to raise our rating on ICOBENCH to the maximum level for a fee of about $ 2000, all the details of the correspondence can be found here https://scientificcoin.com/screenshots. But the Scientificcoin project is not an ICO, and this fact is described in most references to us. In addition, ironically, in several articles I have described the existing rating platforms as an evil which would eventually be defeated by decentralization of the assessment process.
Every business is concerned with what comes up when Googling their own names. If you google “Scientificcoin”, then on the first page you will see two of our official sites and several rating sites. At the top of the list was ICObench, in which our project has a rating of 3.4 points out of 5 possible. Earlier, I did not pay attention to such assessments, since we are not looking for funding through crowdfunding and a low assessment cannot inconvenience us. This offer offended me with the notion that since there was a proposal, then there must be some demand for these services. Don’t their clients ask themselves on what basis and by whom was their project evaluated? Which investors will listen to this apparently unreliable evaluation?
As an experiment, I spent $ 400 (2 ETH) to raise our rating by 0.2 points. My new friend did not deceive me, and I received laudatory comments from two experts and a rating of +0.2. Obviously, where there are tools for manipulation, there will be people who want to use them.
Both platform moderators and independent experts may succumb to such manipulative tactics, because there is no reliable algorithm for controlling them. The same problems exist on a larger scale in the assessment of state venture funds and grantors, where not only officials build corruption schemes, but also some scientists, knowing that their scientific work cannot be assessed or verified. Compared to the ICO rating, the scale of annual financial losses due to science fraud, especially at the state level, is simply enormous.
Returning to the problem of evaluating scientific projects, it is important to note that money is not always the cause of inefficiency in the existing model. Unfortunately, in the closed scientific community, the opinion of a famous scientist can put an end to the development of a new technology. Fearing to oppose a better-known scientist, the bosses and advisors of young talents may hack at the roots of his venture. People unfamiliar with the scientific community believe that most promising projects should have support and be implemented, but unfortunately science is performed by people subject to the same sins as the rest of us.
For example, the vanity of a famous scientist is often the cause of influence on the creations of young minds. Driven by the power of fame and recognition, many good people do not notice that their actions disallow young people to surpass their own works, and since scientific activities are difficult to assess and the number of experts is limited, there is simply no one to condemn their actions.
We use blockchain technology to create and ensure impartial conditions that will contribute to the development of scientific research. Due to the mathematical algorithm and decentralized expert evaluation, each scientific development will be provided with an unbiased, fair rating.
Capitalizing on the benefits of Internet culture, decentralized evaluation will significantly modify current relationships within the scientific community and their connections to venture businesses. These conditions will guarantee an honest rating to venture investors, on which they can rely when choosing a project for investment. The experts will be academics with academic degrees, some of which can work anonymously, as well as representatives of various professions whose expert opinion can be significant only in large numbers, creating the so-called “wisdom of the crowd”
Using blockchain technology, we will create a database without the possibility of centralized moderation; each user’s comment will be recorded permanently. Not only popular but also appropriate comments will be ranked for users to view. Today, the largest forum about blockchain technology and its derivatives https://bitcointalk.org/ has collided with this crisis, where any commercial project announcement won’t last even 15 minutes on the first page of the forum without the services of expensive PUMPERS to keep it there.
Comments from active users with the status of an expert in a certain scientific area will be displayed in a separate block in order to separate the opinions of professionals from ordinary users. Going to that user’s profile will allow you to read all their comments and view the history of their ratings.
While the user of the platform is reading comments, their typical actions and projects viewed will be recorded by the AI, which in the future will allow the user to receive relevant and interesting topics for him first and foremost. It’s no secret that such technologies are already being used by Google and others, and will continue to be developed, but certainly the decentralization implanted in our algorithms will introduce an element of trust.
The work of improving the algorithm will be endless, and for this we have provided a blockchain vote * where every holder of Scientificcoin will be able to vote and check the results; it’s a pity that such a system will not soon be available to citizens when choosing their own government!