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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?

#181

Post by nradov »

jonstokes wrote: post #93
nradov wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need a Kickstarter campaign? Most authors just go ahead and write.

It's not clear to me from this reply that you know very much about authors, advances, and the like. Maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, writing a book is an actual job for some people, and not a hobby, a passion project, a speculative endeavor, a side gig, or a way to boost your leverage in compensation negotiations with potential employers. Seeing as how it's an actual job that entails a bunch of really hard work that I don't…

The only authors who receive significant advances are those who previously wrote books that sold well, plus a few outliers who are already famous for other reasons. Most authors have to find other ways to support themselves prior to getting published (and often afterwards as well).

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

#182

Post by Animats »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #173
Animats wrote: post #161

Mastercoin, mentioned in the article, is now down to 85th place on Coin Market Cap. Despite all this smart contract stuff, few of these "ICO coins" give the holders any authority over anything. It's not like 51% of the coin holders can fire management. Ethereum now has half the market cap of Bitcoin, despite the total failure of the DAO, the one big application of the smart contract technology. See "Use Cases Of Ethe…

Cheers.

Fixed.

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

#183

Post by colecut »

richardknop wrote: post #144
colecut wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please elaborate on what fees are high? I paid $10 for the card. $0.00 annual fee $0.00 Domestic transactions BTC is converted to fiat at the time of purchase, also with no fee, no need to "top up" the shift card..

International fees are high. But also conversion from BTC to USD is not for free. Whoever is doing the conversion is charging a fee. Probably as part of exchange rate where they add a markup. So you don't see an explicit fee in your statement but they use little worse exchange rate and that is their cut. Also whoever is their payment processor (whoever they partnered with to print those debit cards as they don't have…

I could be wrong, but I haven't seen any evidence of these fees.

Coinbase charges a 1.49% fee when transferring to/from my Bank changing between USD and BTC.

GDAX, which is owned by Coinbase, does not appear to charge me this fee.

I don't see evidence of the Shift card charging it either.

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

#184

Post by mtremsal »

fny wrote: post #84

Look at this gem of an ICO: https://humaniq.co/ WARNING: This site has been identified to potentially trigger vomiting for people with morals. Viewer discretion is advised.

So target users are "unbanked and have no identification papers", but what exactly is the product? What problem is humaniq solving? Why are people funding their ICO?

I'm not being facetious; I just had a hard time getting answers from the website.

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

#185

Post by chejazi »

kang wrote: post #165
nicksdjohnson wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is not one single dapp that is decentralised and working. Sure there is. ENS, for one example. Plenty of gambling apps for another (I don't find them particularly _compelling_, but they are there and they do work)

ENS is a great example of a centralised system plus its only about eth based names, no application other than just a method by to collect money by the platform for offering services that are only about the platform and work in the platform.

ENS is implemented as a set of smart contracts with some multisig management. Are you arguing that this is centralized? Also, money that is collected by the ENS contracts is only held as a deposit.

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

#186

Post by gus_massa »

logfromblammo wrote: post #106
ufo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A stock is an ownership share in a real (money-making) company. Criptocoins, on the other hand, have questionable intrinsic value.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Who told you that a company had to make money to issue stock?

Somewhat related: "Blue Apron May Need to Raise More Money Soon After Shrunken IPO" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-29/blue-apro... HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14667364 (144 points, 3 days ago, 152 comments)

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

#187

Post by skewart »

ksahin wrote: post #66
BurningFrog wrote: post #48

So I read half the article and still don't feel like I know what an ICO is . Only the 101 ways it's different from an IPO... I understand that I could create a FrogCoin by cloning Bitcoin or Ethereum. And then I sell investors... what exactly? Individual coins? Are coins not mined in this scenario? Would FrogCoin be tied to some real world asset that makes them inherently valuable and/or practical? Or are ICOs just g…

Several years ago, ICOs were a way to crowdfund and distribute a new crypto currency. With your example you would sell "pre-mined" FrogCoin and there wouldn't be any real world asset that make them valuable, only speculation. Today, most of the ICOs are made on the Ethereum blockchain, it's a way to crowdfund distributed/decentralized application and protocol. It's not about currencies anymore. The tokens that are so…

So, from the token buyer's perspective, how is it different from a company that pre-sold a bunch of regular old API keys without any connection to any cryptocurrency or blockchain?

I get the trustlessness of 'smart contracts', but with tokens-as-API-keys I still have to trust that your company's products will work and that those API keys will continue to work.

Or, is the idea that the code my API key gives me access to is also defined and executed on the blockchain? That would reduce the trust I would need to have in the company pre-selling the API keys. At the same time, buying access to immutable code where functionality can't be enhanced and bugs can't be fixed is kind of lame too.

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

#188

Post by kang »

chejazi wrote: post #185
kang wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ENS is a great example of a centralised system plus its only about eth based names, no application other than just a method by to collect money by the platform for offering services that are only about the platform and work in the platform.

ENS is implemented as a set of smart contracts with some multisig management. Are you arguing that this is centralized? Also, money that is collected by the ENS contracts is only held as a deposit.

Yes, I am arguing it is centralised. Read about the centralised root signature system that is the way to add new TLDs to the system.

Also this is worse than the current system we have in the world because it wastes more energy in doing so!

It claims it is a decentralised naming system, though looking deeper you will find it is just clever marketing and underneath is it is only ethereum-platform based naming for anything like your address etc. will only work in eth browsers, not all etc. which I have already mentioned in my OP.

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

#189

Post by kang »

nicksdjohnson wrote: post #168
kang wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ENS is a great example of a centralised system plus its only about eth based names, no application other than just a method by to collect money by the platform for offering services that are only about the platform and work in the platform.

What's centralised about ENS? Also, it can be used to resolve any resource you want - although you're shifting the goalposts, since that wasn't originally a requirement.

1. the whole blockchain it is based on 2. root signatures in ENS

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

#190

Post by slappy_the_frog »

Animats wrote: post #161

Mastercoin, mentioned in the article, is now down to 85th place on Coin Market Cap. Despite all this smart contract stuff, few of these "ICO coins" give the holders any authority over anything. It's not like 51% of the coin holders can fire management. Ethereum now has half the market cap of Bitcoin, despite the total failure of the DAO, the one big application of the smart contract technology. See "Use Cases Of Ethe…

Why is Rexmls.com on the list? They haven't even had their token sale yet.
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