Yes, though usually not by just holding. ICOs with small caps often list on exchanges at a decent % profit in the first few days, while the people that missed out on the ICO buy in. The link the other user posted obviously doesn't take this into account, and only tracks holding the token indefinitely. In all likelihood, a LOT of people profited on the ICOs that ICOStats lists as negative right now.

This sounds like the same dynamic that institutional investors use on IPOs, where only privileged players get to buy in the IPO, and they sell through a pop fueled by hype or an underestimated target. Shares hit the general public and by the time you've got a few quarterly calls in, the true value is set and the long road begins, while the institutionals and earlier investors have already cashed out some good gains.

If democratizing access to ownership offerings for the purpose of quick sell off is the major benefit of ICOs, what does this do for serious businesses? Why would they choose an inherently less stable and less secure (cf. DAO hack on Ethereum) medium if it primarily benefits the investors and not the company?

Beyond that, it remains to be seen what IRL innovations can be enabled by ICO, whether more easily or necessarily vis a vis traditional fundraising vehicles.

I.e. the greater fool theory - buy the ICO so that you can sell it for someone who bought into the hype at a higher price later on.

Well, these statistics take in account only a short period of time in which all coins and tokens were going upward like crazy.

It does speak for itself, in that Victor and many other Mendeley staff stand by their opposition to the Research Works Act. We believe that the SOPA blackout protests (which we participated in), and the Cost of Knowledge boycott have led Elsevier to start addressing the issues people have had with them. Some things will be quick to change, others more slowly.

The morals of our staff haven't changed overnight, and we'll continue to try and push Elsevier towards a future with a greater emphasis on open science. There's no contradiction here, just a huge challenge on our part.

(Full disclosure, I'm a designer at Mendeley)

Might be able to use something like this as a starting point (though it's vote-based, but seems to support decay over time) http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/overheard.html

The HTML/CSS all up is about 34kb, but could be a lot less if minified, and the CSS was made for ease of drawing over optimization :) You could get a PNG down to less than 10kb easily (but of course, that was hardly the point hehe). Cheers for the comments guys!