The one ICO John McAfee has actually got right
There is one ICO McAfee has endorsed which you should actually pay attention to, and it is called Knowledge.io
Hello Steemit, I've never really shared my own crypto decisions, but today I would like to bring to your attention one ICO which I personally hunted down and bought into 3 weeks ago which I think you should at the very least read up on and check out. Especially so if you appreciate the Steemit platform as there are many similarities between Steemit and Knowledge (KNW). And yes, you read that right, I hunted this project down; I found this project because I was specifically looking around the Internet for a project which utilised blockchain to decentralise advertising.
To describe KNW crudely, it is a platform which rewards users for providing information about the knowledge they have about subjects, products, personal preferences, etc, and uses that collective data to create an information marketplace for advertisers and companies.
Advertising is actually just one facet of the Knowledge platform as they also have plans for the education and employment sectors, but let's focus and use that as an example to illustrate why this ICO is so groundbreaking.
If you understand anything about advertising/Google/Facebook, you'll realise that datasets about the preferences of individuals are extremely valuable to Ad Publishers, and now there is a project that aims to build data that is voluntarily given, accurate to every degree possible (a wide variety and depth of questions are served to individuals to gauge what they know about and how much do they know about what they know) and it will be specific to all the participants in their platform.
What Google and friends do, is largely guesswork, they take note of what you search for and where you spend you time on in the Internet, to try and figure out what you like. With Knowledge.io, participants give that information willingly because they are incentivised to do so. Is it more accurate to guess what the consumer is thinking, or to let the consumer tell you what they are thinking?
In a similar way to how Steemit rewards us for curating and creating content, Knowledge.io rewards its users for providing information about the knowledge that they have. Considering how crazily the community in Steemit has exploded over the past few months, how large do you think a community would get if they don't even need to create content to get rewarded but only need to provide information about what they know? What we have is a platform that is entirely capable of competing against the Ad giants like Facebook, Youtube and Google head on in an industry worth $223.7 billion.
Google and friends took advantage of the Internet to evolve how Ads are targeted and served to consumers, and in doing so succeeded the traditional mediums of advertising (newspapers, radios and televisions) as the preferred choice because of their wider reach, lower cost and targeted demographics. The Knowledge Platform aims to use blockchain to succeed Google and friends in the same fashion by creating a large community through incentive, that is also more cost effective for advertisers because it significantly reduces and potentially eliminates wasted Ads while also eliminating fraud through Bots, and a degree of unprecedented targeted advertising down to the individual which is not achievable by traditional Advertising models on the internet.
What I've written here is a very very crude introduction to Knowledge.io, for further explanation of the intricacies of how the platform works, I encourage all of you to read the whitepaper here:
https://knowledge.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/white_paper_english_22122017-1.pdf
And to read these other articles written by the Knowledge Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer, Steven Englander:
https://medium.com/knowledgeio/knowledge-io-explained-in-7-minutes-84f57f0cec4b
https://medium.com/knowledgeio/blockchain-the-crypto-rewards-model-the-great-decentralizer-10307ff859bb
If you have even more questions, you are more than welcomed to join the telegram group which has admins around 24/7 to attend to you:
https://t.me/Knowledgeio
Finally, if you have actually decided you want to invest into this ICO, feel free to use my referral link so that we both get an extra 8%:
https://tokens.knowledge.io/?ref=4b88add053224f094b9ef282
I'm not in any way a part of the Knowledge.io team, I just really like this project and want to support it and see it succeed by sharing it with as many people as possible. I have a few more thoughts on the platform, but this article is getting pretty long already so I'll continue in a second or third post when I've gathered my thoughts. Cheers for now!