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Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

nytimes.com

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Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#151

Post by phkahler »

cgmg wrote: post #105
phkahler wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny to me that you view any of the crypto currencies as legitimate.

Why is that funny to you? What do you mean by "legitimate"?

It's funny because bitcoin seems designed to fail eventually. The computational cost of mining is going up faster than hardware can keep up. That's a problem because maintaining the whole blockchain is dependent on the continued possibility of mining. When the mining becomes impossible it will be impossible to maintain the distributed ledger. But that won't actually happen. Instead the mining will get increasingly difficult and transaction rates will have to decline accordingly. It will eventually become unusable and of little or no value. At least that's what my (limited) understanding leads me to believe.

I used the word "legitimate" because the parent to my post did. The way I see it there is nothing legitimate about any of these so-called currencies. They are probably all Ponzi schemes in the end.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#152

Post by proofofstake »

SilasX wrote: post #140
blhack wrote: post #110

To put it into perspective, the tezos ICO recently raised a little more than $200,000,000 worth of BTC and ETH. Here's their twitter: https://twitter.com/tez0s?lang=en Here's their subreddit: https://reddit.com/r/tezos Here's their website: https://tezos.com It doesn't look like they have really updated anybody on what they're doing with $200,000,000 since their ICO closed.

Why are people throwing money at these? It makes no sense. You have no guarantee that they won't just run off with the money, except your trust in the operators.

> Why are people throwing money at these?

Futures for Tezos are already trading at 6x the amount people invested during ICO.

> It makes no sense.

In the short term it makes a lot of sense (600% ROI). In the long term: An Ethereum based on OCaml has an interesting potential.

> You have no guarantee that they won't just run off with the money

If the developers are not anonymous, while no guarantee, it makes it less likely. When you cross the road you also have no guarantee that the cars won't run you over. Some amount of trust is needed, whether for money or your entire life. Benefit of crypto is that you don't necessarily need to rely on trust. I doubt Tezos has contractual access to all the money they received, or are allowed to dump their shares as soon as it starts trading for real.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#153

Post by wmf »

blhack wrote: post #150
SilasX wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are people throwing money at these? It makes no sense. You have no guarantee that they won't just run off with the money, except your trust in the operators.

This one is particularly baffling to me. $200,000,000 is a fortune . We're all presumably working on our own startups here. Can you imagine getting $200,000,000 in seed funding without even starting on your project? Just absolutely WTF is going on there?

There's a theory that people with enormous paper ETH gains are just diversifying by buying into all the ICOs. And the ICO "fortunes" are also on paper; I don't know if there's enough liquidity to sell the $500M per month that ICOs are bringing in.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#154

Post by proofofstake »

blhack wrote: post #150
SilasX wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are people throwing money at these? It makes no sense. You have no guarantee that they won't just run off with the money, except your trust in the operators.

This one is particularly baffling to me. $200,000,000 is a fortune . We're all presumably working on our own startups here. Can you imagine getting $200,000,000 in seed funding without even starting on your project? Just absolutely WTF is going on there?

Old vs. new money. It's a lot easier to get money from 15.000 people who got so rich with BTC and ETH, they have money to spare, than to find and convince 15 Venture Capitalists to put up 1.4 million.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#155

Post by [deleted] »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #148
charlesdm wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps a stupid question since I haven't followed this too closely, but is it THAT easy to raise money with a project? I have seen some $50-80-100m numbers flying around recently.

yes it is. put up a site, write a white paper (even one that doesn't make any sense), create an ERC20 token and you can raise lots of money.

[deleted]

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#156

Post by comex »

phkahler wrote: post #151
cgmg wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that funny to you? What do you mean by "legitimate"?

It's funny because bitcoin seems designed to fail eventually. The computational cost of mining is going up faster than hardware can keep up. That's a problem because maintaining the whole blockchain is dependent on the continued possibility of mining. When the mining becomes impossible it will be impossible to maintain the distributed ledger. But that won't actually happen. Instead the mining will get increasingly di…

Bitcoin has a self-adjusting difficulty rate. If blocks are being produced too fast, it increases the difficulty (i.e. average computational cost to produce a block), and if they’re not being produced fast enough it decreases it. Thus, it should never become impossible to mine.

There’s also the block reward halving process, which is separate, but in theory miners will still be incentivized to mine even after it hits 0, due to transaction fees. If not, well, the difficulty will go down until they are.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#157

Post by cinquemb »

suzzer99 wrote: post #146
Radim wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mark my words: this will all come crashing down. I can't tell you when or why, but it's not sustainable. The irony: lots of people feel the same way about the "real" debt-based modern economy. A ridiculous Ponzi scheme, clearly unsustainable in the long run. As always, the time horizon matters when talking about investments and sustainability. Given the right time window, everything works, and everything fails.

Let me know when BTC is backed by tanks and fighter jets.

Only a matter of time until a group like shadowbrokers in some sense has ICO for managing rooted military/civilian infrastructure and occasionally "deploying"/commandeering (and supply chain, because jets and tanks wont work very long without such) around the world…

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#158

Post by kuschku »

ringaroundthetx wrote: post #93
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you know that anything that is super obviously a security can be completely exempt if it matures or expires in less than 270 days? The United States is a common law country [1]. Implicitly stapled to the law are rulings and SEC rules. TL; DR There are more requirements to the commercial paper exemption than just the 270-day tenor. That said, you are generally correct–there are lots of exemptions to registration…

> [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/bankinforeg/regdcg.htm > Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal nor securities advice. Look, we know. Only armchair financial enthusiasts use those disclaimers, and you've made it painfully obvious and its a bit contrived. Federal Reserve regulation D is not the SEC's regulation D that you talked about. Regulation D is not an applicable exemption, neither is Filecoin's u…

> Look, we know. Only armchair financial enthusiasts use those disclaimers

No, anyone that doesn't want to be legally liable.

If the other person could reasonably believe they have gotten legal advice, or a client-attorney relationship was establishes, then you might be liable.

Before you say that this would be ridiculous to assume on an internet forum, be advised that many lawyers nowadays have websites, blogs, allow starting a client-attorney relationship over a public question board, and such situations on Reddit have existed before.

Disclaimer: I am not an attorney, this is not legal advice.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#159

Post by kuschku »

arglebarnacle wrote: post #67
rothbardrand wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my personal indicators that Bitcoin is in a bubble is when Bitcoin articles on hacker news are overrun with people talking about their bitcoin related businesses, instead of being overrun with skeptics and people saying it's in a "bubble". We have gone from %90 negative a couple years ago on HN to about %50 negative today.

To be fair, if bitcoin had improving institutional support, adoption, technology, etc., you would observe the same trend in HN discussion about it. That would seem to make it a problematic indicator of a bubble, at least on its own. Of course, if one rules out the possibility that cryptocurrency is going to be a thing, then it's in a bubble by definition any time it's worth more than zero. This appears to be the unde…

Look at what happened out there.

When Bitcoin first hit $1000, many businesses started accepting bitcoin, even some hosters. Tipping bots became popular on forums, there were tutorials for old people on how to use bitcoin on TV and in the newspapers even, etc.

Now? I don't know a single business I use that offers bitcoin payments. All of them have removed it again. Bitcoin's actual value as currency has gone down massively.

Yes, it is used. A lot, even. But not as day-to-day currency.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#160

Post by flunhat »

proofofstake wrote: post #152
SilasX wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are people throwing money at these? It makes no sense. You have no guarantee that they won't just run off with the money, except your trust in the operators.

> Why are people throwing money at these? Futures for Tezos are already trading at 6x the amount people invested during ICO. > It makes no sense. In the short term it makes a lot of sense (600% ROI). In the long term: An Ethereum based on OCaml has an interesting potential. > You have no guarantee that they won't just run off with the money If the developers are not anonymous, while no guarantee, it makes it less lik…

Can you, in one sentence, explain what Tezos is? Something of the form:

Uber - Order a taxi with your phone

Facebook - Connect with your friends online

Google - Find stuff on the internet

Wikipedia - An encyclopedia that anyone can edit

Amazon - Buy stuff online, without going anywhere

Tezos - ???

(And "Tezos is a new decentralized blockchain that governs itself by establishing a true digital commonwealth" doesn't count as an explanation).

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