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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

#181

Post by mrep »

rothbardrand wrote: post #44
s73ver wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the problem, though? Bitcoin was supposed to be a medium of exchange. Cash for the internet, in other words. Investing means that people really aren't going to be doing that, and it's just going to sit on a dusty flash drive on the shelf.

Not in the least. Bitcoin has many uses, and is a fundamentally new technology. Naturally it's going thru the technology adoption life cycle and every few months/years it catches up to the wider levels of adoption and more mature use cases. It will become a currency when most of it has been mined and it's in widespread use and there aren't billions of people who have never heard of it... the price will stabilize then…

> Bitcoin has many uses, and is a fundamentally new technology. Naturally it's going thru the technology adoption life cycle and every few months/years it catches up to the wider levels of adoption and more mature use cases.

I have literally only seen one use case where it makes more sense to use bitcoin than to use traditional currency exchanges and that is illegal markets.

The downsides (hard to use, one way transactions, high transfer costs due to low block size, super easy to get hacked and lose all your money...) all massively decrease it's value over traditional currencies. Illegal markets only put up with all of those downsides because companies/governments have specifically made it harder for illegal transactions to take place over traditional currencies.

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

#182

Post by doktrin »

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…

> An Ethereum based on OCaml has an interesting potential.

I see this kind of stuff a lot in the "cryptocurrency" space. When I was reading about Waves, for instance, one proponent unironically proclaimed that "It's built on Scala, which is a better architecture than Ethereum".

I'm no Scala hater, but surely stuff like the implementation language isn't the most important variable in evaluating a new altcoin / cryptocurrency platform? This sounds a lot like hand wavy mumbo jumbo that's meant to convince non-technical "investors" to part with their cash / BTC.

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

#183

Post by the_stc »

koolba wrote: post #162
the_stc wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the same business model applied to a fiat currency Ding ding ding, winner! So many of these just have no point in being as companies, let alone as a token. At The STC, we're going to end sex trafficking in just like Apple and Amazon (and now Google and Spotify) ended music piracy. To operate, we must be an extrajurisdictional company which makes cryptocurrencies a useful way to get investment and pay dividends. But…

I thought this was a joke comment but I clicked on your user profile and now I'm not sure.

Absolutely not a joke. We're very serious about fixing, in many ways, the sex industry. It is rare that one gets to work on a project that will significantly improve many peoples lives, tackle a serious social issue, and actually be profitable. What we're doing may be frowned upon in some countries. But it is morally right, and being ethical is a cornerstone for any successful extrajurisdictional company.

Our main founder has had this idea for a while. But it wasn't until last year that cryptocurrencies showed they're going to be around and usable for non-geek users. This is crucial as it allows us to contract people (marketing, design, photography, transport, security, boarding, and on and on) without having to run risky front businesses to handle money or try to convince people that this strange internet coin money is useful.

The ICO craze annoys us because it blinds people to the real possibilities. It is our belief that within the next few months ICOs will need to measure up to ventures like our own and show true profit potential or at least some commonsense business fundamentals.

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

#185

Post by ferbivore »

the_stc wrote: post #141
JSONwebtoken wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the degree of complexity or technical ambition of the project you were a part of, but it's not unusual for a 23 year old guy to write most of the Ethereum app. In fact, that's probably the reason why most ICOs are a scam, there's an insanely low barrier to building a proof of concept. The boilerplate is like 15 lines. When it's so easy that any 20 year old backend dev can issue a token, you should alread…

>the same business model applied to a fiat currency Ding ding ding, winner! So many of these just have no point in being as companies, let alone as a token. At The STC, we're going to end sex trafficking in just like Apple and Amazon (and now Google and Spotify) ended music piracy. To operate, we must be an extrajurisdictional company which makes cryptocurrencies a useful way to get investment and pay dividends. But…

Your plan is to stop sex trafficking by building an adult services website? On the off chance this isn't bait, what on Earth are you thinking?

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

#186

Post by discombobulate »

taysic wrote: post #167
flunhat wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

It's a competitor to ethereum - a place to create more ICOs basically from what I understand. Maybe they're running out of ideas

Token sales may end up being worth a ton of money. There's going to be competition.

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

#187

Post by mrb »

rb666 wrote: post #180
mrb wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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...

Your comment is irrelevant to the point being discussed: it's obviously false that "ALL merchants STOPPED accepting bitcoin".

Also this Morgan Stanley research note, and the reporting on it, is of laughable quality...

1) They don't release data: "Morgan Stanley, which based its usage analysis on the information, didn’t say which companies are using bitcoin."

2) They extrapolate from an insufficient number of data points: 3 companies in the top500 this year, down from 5 last year, accept Bitcoin. It's like saying Ferrari's market share is dropping because only 3 billionaires bought a Ferrari this year, down from 5 last year.

3) They attribute a quote to the analyst ("The disparity between virtually no merchant acceptance and Bitcoin’s rapid appreciation is striking,") when in fact it was a quote from Overstock CEO: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-merchant-shunning-is-...

4) They claim Bitcoin's skyrocketing price is one of the causes of the decrease in payments. They present of course no facts to justify this theory, because it's false. In the past, anecdotal data reported by merchants has shown precisely the opposite: customers spend their newfound riches.

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

#188

Post by the_stc »

ferbivore wrote: post #185
the_stc wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the same business model applied to a fiat currency Ding ding ding, winner! So many of these just have no point in being as companies, let alone as a token. At The STC, we're going to end sex trafficking in just like Apple and Amazon (and now Google and Spotify) ended music piracy. To operate, we must be an extrajurisdictional company which makes cryptocurrencies a useful way to get investment and pay dividends. But…

Your plan is to stop sex trafficking by building an adult services website? On the off chance this isn't bait, what on Earth are you thinking?

Think more of an app like Uber (without the sexism) than a website. We are not a listing site or a marketplace. We take both sides of the trade, offering full support and customer service. We have direct relationships with providers. This puts us in a position where we have a real chance of detecting coercion and offering assistance. At a minimum this means access to our lawyers. We are aware this is a delicate and complicated matter with human lives on the line. A couple of us have direct experience in this area. We know this is not something that just code or any amount of decentralized blockchain buzzwords will solve.

I can explain more in private (details in profile), or shortly we'll have more public details available and I can send you a link if you like.

But suffice to say that in the cities we operate, we will end up putting a significant dent in coerced sexual services.

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

#190

Post by lawless123 »

the_stc wrote: post #188
ferbivore wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your plan is to stop sex trafficking by building an adult services website? On the off chance this isn't bait, what on Earth are you thinking?

Think more of an app like Uber (without the sexism) than a website. We are not a listing site or a marketplace. We take both sides of the trade, offering full support and customer service. We have direct relationships with providers. This puts us in a position where we have a real chance of detecting coercion and offering assistance. At a minimum this means access to our lawyers. We are aware this is a delicate and c…

PimpCoin.
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