I Went Through Bancor ICO and Lived to Tell the Tale

Bancor ICO, like most ICOs, was total chaos. In the end, everything seemed to work out, but before, during, and after were an absolute roller-coaster. It started with the announcement of an uncapped 1-hour. There has been so much said online already about the uncapped hour that it is a dead horse so I am not going to beat it. The ICO started with a countdown on Bancor's website to the unholy hour. Next to the countdown was a ticker that was supposed to show the amount of ETH raised and reveal the hidden cap when 80% of the cap was raised. My strategy was to wait until the cap was revealed and then decide whether to throw some ETH at it, hopefully in the final 15 min of the unholy hour. The first problem to arise was that the ticker on the Bancor website did not work. The ICO went live and five minutes in, its showing "--" ETH raised. I'm thinking, "sure, there's probably a lot of people waiting till the end of the hour, but surely some idiot somewhere in the world put money into this thing in the first 5 min." So, I hop over to the slack channel, where people are just spamming fake contract investment addresses. This happened in Tokencard and pretty much happens every damn ICO. I don't know what it will take for the ICO organizers to realize that this will happen every single time and just shut the slack down. There are so many scam spams that you can't get a word in edgewise or see important updates from the founders even if the founders wanted you to see the updates, except in the general thread where everyone was muted except the admins. But, there was nothing in the general thread. So, I hopped onto twitter. I got a hit on twitter. The founders tweeted that they were being attacked, but to stay calm and all would be well. Eventually, the website was updated to show that the tickers did not work and directed people to the twitter account. Then, I check Etherscan. On Etherscan, I can see ETH rolling in, but I can't tell how much. People more savvy than me could probably figure it out. I am seeing lots of small investments like 0.05 ETH. I don't know why, but I somehow got this Leroy Jenkins YOLO vibe and tried to send some ETH to the damn contract address. The transaction went pending for awhile, but then "poof" disappeared. Nowhere to be found on Etherscan or the GUI that I was using. At that point, I should have been like "welp, I tried" and quit, but I am not a quitter. So, I read all the twitter comments (many people having my same problem), but those were not helpful. One person suggested switching nodes, but I couldn't figure out how to do that. I ended up sending the transaction a few more times. The subsequent transactions did not even show pending, they were dead on arrival, as if I hadn't sent them at all. Then, I see the infamous announcement on twitter from the Bancor team that they are extending the unholy hour to 3 hours. I and all else were like "what!?!?" We can't even see how much ETH they raised, but there are more hours being added. Meanwhile, no one's transactions sent during the event are even showing up on Etherscan. At some point, Bancor posts the 250k ETH hidden cap to the website. At one point, Etherscan showed that 37k ETH was in the contract, then 60k ETH, but then it stopped showing how much ETH. So, I don't really know what the F is going on, but it seems like they are well under the cap, which I thought was good, so I sent my transaction a couple more times--same result. Then, I spent what felt like several hours frenetically checking Twitter while I should have been working since I am in my office. I'm not getting much info from Twitter or Etherscan or the Bancor website or the slack. At some point, I think about 2 1/2 hours in, I see that 2 of my transactions are pending. At some point after the 3 hours are up, the transactions finally clear, my BNT tokens are issued, and I check Bancor's website to see that they reportedly raised nearly 400k ETH, way over the cap published to the website. So, that was the experience. It was a heart-pounding, 3-hour thriller. More exciting than the last Hobbit movie. Lots of ups and downs. Lots of things gone wrong. Pretty chaotic. They say that all is well that ends well. I suppose if trading goes live at a decent price, then the ICO participants have nothing to complain about. If trading goes live at a $75m market cap, then people will probably be pretty pissed off. For my part, I'm just thrilled to be a part of this great movement toward a better, more open, fair, and free economy.