What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by chejazi » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 10:40 PM UTC

kang wrote: post #188

chejazi wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anyth…

> it is only ethereum-platform based naming for anything like your address etc.

The "etc" is important here, because it refers to richer resources such as content hashes. With this, you could load the entire "frontend" for a website from a decentralized datasource, e.g. Swarm. Meanwhile, the backend could be the Ethereum blockchain/smart contract methods.

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

#192

Post by acdha » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 10:47 PM UTC

colecut wrote: post #91

lumberjack wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Arguably, though, if Bitcoin gains enough traction, it would affect the world too. But even then, the ways in which it would affect the world is unpredictable and any predictions are pure speculation. In 2011 people where thinking that when 1BTC reaches $1000 in value, there would be mass adoption and it will be used as a currency for mundane everyday purchases. Well that didn't happen and it doesn't seem like Bitco…

I bought OJ, milk, eggs, veggies yesterday with BTC via my Shift Card. This hasn't caught on mainstream yet but the infrastructure is there, and it's growing. https://www.shiftpayments.com/card

Did the merchant receive payment in BTC? If not, how does that count as infrastructure? If it looks like a debit card using USD over Visa's network for the real transaction, the Bitcoin part could be replaced at any time and none of the blockchain selling points would appear to be relevant.

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

#193

Post by Animats » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 11:06 PM UTC

slappy_the_frog wrote: post #190

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.

They announced a product in 2016. The list is of Ethereum-powered products announced at least 6 months ago. Following up on how they worked out.

Not seeing any big successes.

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

#194

Post by dandero » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 11:39 PM UTC

wickawic wrote: post #40

jcoffland wrote: post #23

Usually this kind of blatant negativity would be down voted to oblivion but for some reason HN has a special place in it's heart for crypyocurrency haters.

HN doesn't need to be a place where we can "teach the controversy" about stealing people's money. Imagine Amazon raised money by selling people BezoBucks, but promised "BezoBucks are totally safe because their value is tracked through an incorruptible distributed ledger". I think you would probably not be ok with this. I see no difference.

I considered this platform innovative, but I must say like someone stated above that most of the comments here have no clue about what we will see in the next year. The evolution of venture capital. The future of finance. And most of users at HN just see all of this as a scam.

The money raised will be invested and you will see then the result of the investment.

It's funny how people think about the future looking at the past.

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

#195

Post by dandero » Mon, Jul 03, 2017, 11:45 PM UTC

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…

"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 Ethereum In Different Sectors 2016"

It's funny how tech people can't understand that innovation is a trial and error path. Ethereum is doing something that has never been done, trying to disrupt the concept of finance and you are talking here about the DAO failure of one year ago that was already fixed with an hard fork solution. Do you really believe that with the hundreds of millions and the back up of some of the most successful companies in the world they will not be able to take the invention to phase 3? You are a really pessimistic folk man.

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

#196

Post by omarchowdhury » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 12:07 AM UTC

calafrax wrote: post #180

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…

You have to wonder how much insider trading goes into this. I would assume there are some big bitcoin/ether holders from the early days now who are sitting on billions in theoretical worth and the ICOs provide an inflow of cash that allows them to cash out. If you have a big bitcoin/ether position then you can make these ICOs pop and then the momentum ends up pulling more people into ether/bitcoin which allows you to…

This is exactly what has to be happening.

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

#197

Post by acdha » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 12:23 AM UTC

wyldfire wrote: post #178

coolspot wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is nothing that forces such company to actually share the revenue. Tokens are not legally enforcable.

> Tokens are not legally enforcable I think this is not accurate. It's more likely accurate to state that their use is not tested in courts. But if you could show corporate communications indicating "such and such mechanism will be how we track obligations to shareholders or creditors" and establish that the tokens were not paid back per the operations of the token mechanism, then in all likelihood a court would agre…

At that point, what value is all of this infrastructure adding? It seems like the real guarantees come from having access to a stable court system, well-defined contracts, trusted third parties, etc.

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

#198

Post by calafrax » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 12:38 AM UTC

dandero wrote: post #195

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…

"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 Ethereum In Different Sectors 2016" It's funny how tech people can't understand that innovation is a trial and error path. Ethereum is doing something that has never been done, trying to disrupt the concept of finance and you are talking here about the DAO…

I hear this "you just don't understand" claim a lot: from my teenage kids and *coin proponents.

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

#199

Post by kang » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 12:45 AM UTC

chejazi wrote: post #191

kang wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anyth…

> it is only ethereum-platform based naming for anything like your address etc. The "etc" is important here, because it refers to richer resources such as content hashes. With this, you could load the entire "frontend" for a website from a decentralized datasource, e.g. Swarm. Meanwhile, the backend could be the Ethereum blockchain/smart contract methods.

No etc is not important because it is essentially a centralized mapping of a string of text to another, thats all.

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

#200

Post by calafrax » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 12:50 AM UTC

lumberjack wrote: post #85

leovailati wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's different from the sort of value that a startup creates: at least a startup is trying to affect the world in a tangible way that can usually be explained in a couple of sentences. I agree that it is different. Arguably, though, if Bitcoin gains enough traction, it would affect the world too.

>Arguably, though, if Bitcoin gains enough traction, it would affect the world too. But even then, the ways in which it would affect the world is unpredictable and any predictions are pure speculation. In 2011 people where thinking that when 1BTC reaches $1000 in value, there would be mass adoption and it will be used as a currency for mundane everyday purchases. Well that didn't happen and it doesn't seem like Bitco…

Mass adoption can never happen because bitcoin was never designed to be a payment system for mass adoption.

Look at the history: circa 2000 E-Gold was the go-to currency for illegal activity online. In 2008 E-Gold got shut down.

A few months later the bitcoin proposal surfaces and coincidentally solves the "problems" with E-Gold by making it impossible to shut down, impossible to indict the owners, and easier to hide money flows if you are sophisticated enough to write programs to move your money through webs of anonymous proxy accounts.

Bitcoin was designed from the beginning to be ideal for illegal activity and the features that make it good for illegal activity also make it expensive, inefficient, and poorly suited to legitimate commerce (non-repudiation is basically a deal breaker).

Throw in the risk created by price fluctuations and the whole thing is just totally impractical for real world use at scale.

But hey, I was saying the same thing back then too, and I could be a millionaire now, so you probably shouldn't take my advice.