When the ICO wave hit its peak in 2017, there was a mad rush to learn what was going on and how it all worked. Many people followed instructions issued by the company on how to buy into the ICO, but it was a very new and often complicated process. It involved sending bitcoin or ether to a given address that was published on a bitcointalk forum, on a Slack channel, or on the official website.
Take, for example, the Monaco ICO. An investment of one ether would return 150 MCO tokens. Monaco opened the ICO on May 18, 2017, when 1 ether was about $100 USD. This meant that one MCO was the equivalent of $1.50 USD.
The ICO finished on June 17, and about a month later, it listed on exchanges. By the end of August, it had very quickly shot up to $22 USD. The 150 MCO tokens would now be worth $3,300. That is a whopping 1,366% increase.
Figure 10: Monaco price chart showing volatile swings (https://www.worldcoinindex.com/coin/monaco)
The success story being shared was that the tokens would...
