Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 215 posts

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

#171

Post by MichaelGG »

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.

There's gotta be a catch though. It's that old joke about the economist seeing a $100 bill on the street, but knows it must not be real or someone else would have picked it up already.

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

#172

Post by api »

utnick wrote: post #137

If you want to really see what the environment is like now, read the bitcointalk ico announcement threads. It's absolutely insane. Very little of that stuff makes its way to hn. People are raising money with 10 page vague 'white papers' with ideas that make no sense or are completely unworkable on the blockchain. There is very little skepticism or research with these icos . Most of the commenters are trying to help t…

How much of the money raised actually exists as liquid and accessible? Is this just a big MMO?

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

#173

Post by tylersmith »

jcfrei wrote: post #139
cgmg wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "this" will all come crashing down and "this" is not sustainable, what exactly are you referring to?

Not OP, but here's a thought that has bugged me for a while: The bitcoin block reward is currently 12.5 BTC which equals to about 42500$. Put differently, this means that the market currently values 1MB of (transaction) data on the bitcoin blockchain at over 40'000 USD and miners will (collectively) spend about as much for mining each block. This is clearly not economically reasonable, unless of course you believe bi…

Mining protects all transactions that have occured not only those in the current block. But yes, long term the block size will need to increase or transactions will need to pay much higher fees (probably as a result of transaction aggregation, e.g. Lightning channels).

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

#174

Post by abrichr »

taysic wrote: post #161
eterm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst of is that early adopters will cash out boat loads of money and use that fact to claim they were right all along, as if somehow the top of the pyramid making money proves it's not a pyramid.

A pyramid scheme works such that if the growth stops, the whole pyramid collapses. It is dependent on newcomers. With crypto, if anyone leaves or growth stops the price simply goes down. It doesn't collapse. It's more like stock.

I haven't heard this perspective before. Can you elaborate? What if the exchange rate were 1 BTC to 0.0000001 USD, wouldn't that effectively be a collapse?

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

#175

Post by mrb »

kuschku wrote: post #159
arglebarnacle wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mas…

"All of them have removed it again"

Completely false. Occasionally you will read a newsstory about a merchant who stopped accepting BTC. But, as of today 160k+ merchants accept it, and there was never any large scale event where "all" of them stopped accepting it.

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

#176

Post by tylersmith »

api wrote: post #172
utnick wrote: post #137

If you want to really see what the environment is like now, read the bitcointalk ico announcement threads. It's absolutely insane. Very little of that stuff makes its way to hn. People are raising money with 10 page vague 'white papers' with ideas that make no sense or are completely unworkable on the blockchain. There is very little skepticism or research with these icos . Most of the commenters are trying to help t…

How much of the money raised actually exists as liquid and accessible? Is this just a big MMO?

According to coinmarketcap.com volumes on gdax for btc and eth and $115mm and $53mm over the past 24hrs. If you didn't want to increase overall volume by more than 10% you could sell out to USD around $12.5mm btc and $5.3mm eth per day.

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

#177

Post by do5 »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #55

I was involved with one of the bigger ICO right at the beginning of the ICO craze. I had pretty regular conversations with the project founder and was in talks to become the dev evangelist. The project had raised ~$5 million in ETH (this is when ETH was trading around $80). Despite the fact that this project had raised a crazy amount of money the whole project was being conceptualized and coded by a single 23 old guy…

Why bring age into the equation? That's quite discriminatory considering the creator of Ethereum is just 19 years old. Aside from that I'm 23 years old and have been developing software professionally in the past 8 years. Age isn't much of a factor anymore.

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

#178

Post by conanbatt »

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…

Its still intense. Tezos would have to become a unicorn to materialized 600% gains on 200 mill. It almost definitely wont, and thus the irrationality dominating this market is bursting the seams.

OTH, the market cap valuations these things are using is kind of ridiculous, since a 200 million sale of eth would crash it into oblivion.

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

#179

Post by unkown-unknowns »

phkahler wrote: post #62
alistproducer2 wrote: post #55

I was involved with one of the bigger ICO right at the beginning of the ICO craze. I had pretty regular conversations with the project founder and was in talks to become the dev evangelist. The project had raised ~$5 million in ETH (this is when ETH was trading around $80). Despite the fact that this project had raised a crazy amount of money the whole project was being conceptualized and coded by a single 23 old guy…

If you're launching one of these, you don't really need investment. You just make sure you own the first batch of currency and get rich if it takes off. If you need investment then you don't really believe in your own stuff do you? Ponzi Ponzi Ponzi.

Not entirely true. Even if you believe in your currency long term you still need money short term so that you can cover your own costs of living and the cost of hiring other people.

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

#180

Post by rb666 »

mrb wrote: post #175
kuschku wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mas…

" All of them have removed it again " Completely false. Occasionally you will read a newsstory about a merchant who stopped accepting BTC. But, as of today 160k+ merchants accept it, and there was never any large scale event where "all" of them stopped accepting it.

The 160k+ is meaningless when no one is actually using BTC to buy things. Also, not far from the truth anyway:

http://www.businessinsider.com/merchants-arent-accepting-bit...

Post reply on HN