Thoughts on Tokens

> The dogetipbot website emphasized that the service was always free. Yet, somehow Mohland believed his creation could support a business model. He tried to get investors, but who would want to invest in dog meme tokens with no path to monetization?"

> “Very lies, such betrayal, WOW.”

> Now, Dogecoin will likely meet the fate of other altcoins, such as Titcoin, Auroracoin, or Namecoin. The greedy holders have no reason to ever divest, so the currency will be kept alive by the weird true believers in some godforsaken corner of the internet, where forgotten botnets and graphics cards mine blocks for the benefit of no one, until all the wallet passwords are finally forgotten. Though the currency began as a spoof of crypto culture, it was the same greed and delusional idiocy that has plagued more serious ventures like Bitcoin that struck the final blow.

these token sales are successful because people who buy into them are selling off their profits from buying Ethereum (from $0.88 in Jan '16 to $193 today >2000% return). Its a diversification play of course. Look how much the DAO raised a year ago.

Its ridiculous that the adults in the room like A16Z, USV, Balaji are falling into hypnosis.

ICO's coming out have no product, no users, just a white paper and a nice website, with an ERC20 contract address for deposits.

If you talk to anyone buying these tokens, they all say the same thing, that they're buying to flip the tokens on Poloniex for a quick buck.

A recent example is Gnosis, which raised $12.5M by selling 4.17% of their tokens at $30 each during the 1st auction round. They started trading at $60-100 a week after the sale and now are trading above $200.

Look at the charts of coins delisted by Poloniex. immediate 50%+ drop. The value of these tokens is their liquidity. Take that away and you won't see these valuations.

For traditional VC's, if companies let their shares float on exchanges, the SEC mandates financials. These tokens are designed around hopes and dreams. Most certainly a bubble but more so a game of musical chairs, make some money while the music is still playing.

Bitcoin at the end of the day grew in price from speculation BUT it had a real use, albeit in the black market. It has grown from that since 2013 but not by much.

P.S. Token sales don't even give up equity. These people are paying millions for API keys they can't yet use? I don't think so.

Markets with low liquidity are terrible at price discovery. Price in a prediction market is (if we believe in the concept) directly tied to how likely a prediction is to be true.