iDice: When is an alleged “scam” not really a scam?

A few weeks ago, I bought tokens in the iDice (aka ICE at idice.io) crowdsale for an Ethereum network dice game for mobile devices. I was impressed by the concept, the white paper and the demo. Shortly afterwards, I discovered postings to Reddit and elsewhere that iDice was a “scam” to be avoided. My heart sank. There was no way to get my ETH back and even worse than Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme there was no one to sue or even complain to about it. In the ICO world, it’s strictly buyer beware.

I watched as the crowdsale continued and prayed. Because I had mistakenly sent some of my investment in the ICO from my Coinbase account, I didn’t get all the tokens I’d paid for – a newbie error. So, I wrote to the email address provided in the promotion pages and to my pleasant surprise I soon got an email from Brandon Schmitz informing me that the tokens due me had been sent to my new MyEtherWallet. I was very pleased to get this and it caused me to question the whole “scam” narrative. Why would a scam have better user support than Coinbase?

Now that the crowdsale has ended, the tokens are tradable on EtherDelta and Mercatox and iDice is listed on CoinMarketCap coming in at a rank of 282 and a market cap of just over 1.5 million US dollars. I can download their app from the Apple app store and play the game on my phone. This is better proof of legitimacy than ICO’s promising services yet to be developed – of which there are many.

The posts asserting that iDice was a scam pointed to the fact that most of the articles appearing in the Cryptocurrency web sites were paid promotional articles. So, what else is a start-up supposed to do? Did iDice steal code from EtherRoll or another start-up? Where are the real complaints? Their code is open source and their data is publicly viewable.

iDice may prove to be a scam in the long run - look at how long it took to expose Madoff. For now, I’m hodling because I believe there’s a pretty good chance that it’s legit and I like their game.

In the ICO scene, your reputation is everything and yet any start-up is highly vulnerable to rumors posted where there is no consequence for publishing a false assertion. Yeah, I know this is the Wild West, but consider the fact that legit businesses can be crushed before they ever get started by malicious or even well-intentioned people expressing a doubt or spreading a rumor. Where’s the balance? Is it also a matter of start-up beware?