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What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work?

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Re: What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work?

#121

Post by sillysaurus3 »

elif wrote: post #114
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, though it's probably best to go further: Any money into any cyptocoin is pure gambling. Don't put any money in you can't afford to lose. If anyone is saying the word "investment" while talking about a cryptocoin, smile and nod while slowly receding in the other direction. As a gambling vehicle, cryptocoins are one of the finest ever created. But people should at least admit to themselves that it's not investing…

>If anyone is saying the word "investment" while talking about a cryptocoin, smile and nod while slowly receding in the other direction. >EDIT: I think it's possible to invest in cryptocoin smiles about 1000% gains and walks away

Heh. Have I told you about my Sillycoin ICO? Wait, don't go...

I realized that pg has some bitcoins, so it's a stretch to say he's just gambling and not investing. But Bitcoin and Ethereum seem to attract huge numbers of get-rich-quick people that try to convince others the flip is real investing.

Re: What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work?

#124

Post by vocatus_gate »

notadoc wrote: post #122

Surely this is a sort of top indicator. I was at a social event recently and some remarkably non-technical people were talking about bitcoin. It reminded me an awful lot of the wall street adage about the shoeshiner/waiter/driver talking stocks...

Friend of mine is a model in NYC. She PM'd me last week asking about putting money into Ethereum. Now she's not stupid by any means, but she's pretty far from the demographic typically associated with cryptocurrencies. Was kind of eye-opening to me about how far the hype is reaching right now.

Re: What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work?

#125

Post by cslarson »

wyldfire wrote: post #21

Previously, we had a filter screening new altcoins (expletive deleted) in that you had to know enough about bitcoin to at least fork the repo, build it and make some modest changes to create a new namespace. We could see whether those coins are worth anything by looking to see if there was a novel PoW or other network changes, premine, etc. Now, Counterparty and much moreso Ethereum have created an opportunity for an…

Back in the day there was a website where you could fill in a few details and it would create a bitcoin clone including downloadable source. What value do bitcoin alts offer? Hardly anything. Your position is just absurd to say that Ethereum and what is buildable on top of it are valueless. This comment, at the top of a hn thread is a great example of slashdoting of the hn community. It's both weird and educational to watch it happen.

Re: What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work?

#126

Post by simias »

elif wrote: post #114
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, though it's probably best to go further: Any money into any cyptocoin is pure gambling. Don't put any money in you can't afford to lose. If anyone is saying the word "investment" while talking about a cryptocoin, smile and nod while slowly receding in the other direction. As a gambling vehicle, cryptocoins are one of the finest ever created. But people should at least admit to themselves that it's not investing…

>If anyone is saying the word "investment" while talking about a cryptocoin, smile and nod while slowly receding in the other direction. >EDIT: I think it's possible to invest in cryptocoin smiles about 1000% gains and walks away

It's like encouraging people to play the lottery because you won the big prize once. It's an very risky investment and I think it's incredibly irresponsible to encourage people to dump money in it if they don't understand fully what it's about. The "to the moon" memes aren't funny anymore when gullible people start buying bitcoins with money they can't afford to lose.

Bitcoins will have to overcome massive challenges if it's to become something more than a vessel for speculation and black market purchases. It needs to scale to several orders of magnitude more transactions (none of the proposed scaling methods so far come even close). Then you need to convince the broad public to switch to an unregulated currency (not everybody is a crypto-anarchist/libertarian).

Maybe it'll make it, maybe it won't. And if it does we'll be left to wonder if it's fair that a small share of early adopters end up owning a significant share of the world's money (the new 0.1%). At any rate I'd strongly encourage you to diversify your 1000% gains if you haven't done so already...

Re: What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work?

#127

Post by Simon_says »

jonstokes wrote: post #63

I think the cryptocurrency story is real, just like the internet story was real in 1999, but these ICOs show that the market is getting way ahead of the tech, regulations, business models, etc. I have a longer rant about it, here: https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/880806655067291649 (Sadly, twitter's threading model is now so broken that you have to do lots of clicking to get to the good back-and-forth dialogue in…

You want me to go on Twitter to read something longer?

Re: What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work?

#128

Post by hudon »

sktrdie wrote: post #74

Rather than thinking about the businesses that currently are trying to get rich by doing ICOs, I'd like to point out that the idea of creating tokens out of thin-air, and having them obtain value purely by speculation, is an interesting system we should ponder more about. We're now capable, thanks to these consensus systems, of creating tokens that have certain properties. For instance Bitcoin is a specific kind of t…

> We're now capable, thanks to these consensus systems, of creating tokens that have certain properties. For instance Bitcoin is a specific kind of token which is scarce - hence will work more like gold. Other tokens (perhaps Ether or Dogecoin) instead are not scarce at all, and new tokens continue entering the system all the time.

You talk as if we were never able of issuing digital tokens before. All you need is a MySQL database and Apache. World of warcraft has tokens, Counterstrike has tokens (skins), Airmiles has tokens, Microsoft has tokens.

Tokens are not new. Having them on the blockchain is new. And what does that give you? censorship resistance. This is the first time that these tokens can be issued and traded with very little regulatory oversight. This is because in theory, anyone can be a transaction validator, and in theory you can have pretty good privacy on the blockchain.

However, existing financial instruments (and tokens) will always be more efficient on a centralized platform, because it cuts through coordination and communication costs. But when you centralize, now you need to govern and report to authorities. So you cannot do transactions that are great for the blockchain: buying drugs, political donations, capital flight, funding activism, etc.

Re: What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work?

#130

Post by kang »

heliumcraft wrote: post #83
erikb wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum has the right play here though. They go to where the gold rush is and sell the shovels.

Ethereum has no "play" here, it isn't a platform made for token sales (aka "icos"), it's a generalistic platform that happens to have projects that do this sort of token sales.

>happens to have

Sorry but ethereum has no use case, nor is technically ethereum's architecture makes distributed computation possible or even is decentralised. There is not one single dapp that is decentralised and working.

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