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Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

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Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#111

Post by kbody »

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #87
joeblau wrote: post #12

I listened to this YC podcast[1] twice with Juan Benet. Listening to Juan talk about a lot of historical information and the correlations he drew was fascinating. When he tried to explain the need for Filecoin to Dalton, I just didn't hear it. Dalton kept asking him over and over what the point was and he kept giving non-answers (at least in my opinion which doesn't mean much to be honest). I understand the goal of t…

I like what Juan had to say, it's good stuff and IPFS has the potential of being very disruptive. With Filecoin I think what happened in that conversation was that to Juan it wasn't a big deal, it's just one of the things possible in the IPFS paradigm. But since crypto currency is all the rage these days, and this being YC, he was being lead to talk about the money side of it, but I don't think he really gave it much…

Filecoin is a completely different beast than IPFS. Based on the Filecoin whitepaper, it requires the creation of 2 new proof mechanisms "Proof-of-Replication" and "Proof-of-Spacetime" which are not well-defined at all on the whitepaper. It's like saying you achieved Byzantine fault tolerance but not say how, which is a big deal. That's one of the core challenges.

It seems to me that their team has underestimated those challenges and were more busy on designing a big ICO than actually thinking about those problems and the feasibility of their claims. Most probably it will take much more than 6-18 months that they claim or it will be launched with centralized components of the system ("compromises") until they figure things out.

Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#112

Post by simias »

sktrdie wrote: post #77

What's important to note about ICOs is not necessarily whether the idea is actually practical and that it will work. What matters right now is whether the idea can stir our intellect and get the crowds excited. This is because behind the idea there's a new token which value is completely driven by the excitement of the crowds (it's pure speculation). If I invest N amount of money in a token which gets people excited,…

>If our future economies will be driven by these tokens, we might think back at this period of time, looking at perhaps the people who will be the %1 of the future.

I get your point but please don't feed this "fear of missing out" that I'm sure many are feeling (myself included, to a certain extent). Some people are going to invest money they can't afford to lose.

Maybe they'll be the next 1%ers. Or maybe they're just like the folks who bought pets.com shares. There's simply no way to know and at this point it's more akin to gambling than investment.

Play the roulette, bet everything on red. You wouldn't want to miss out, would you? If red does come out and you don't bet you'll feel like a loser.

Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#114

Post by Mahn »

sktrdie wrote: post #77

What's important to note about ICOs is not necessarily whether the idea is actually practical and that it will work. What matters right now is whether the idea can stir our intellect and get the crowds excited. This is because behind the idea there's a new token which value is completely driven by the excitement of the crowds (it's pure speculation). If I invest N amount of money in a token which gets people excited,…

> but it surely looks exciting

Or terrifying, take your pick.

Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#115

Post by [deleted] »

sktrdie wrote: post #77

What's important to note about ICOs is not necessarily whether the idea is actually practical and that it will work. What matters right now is whether the idea can stir our intellect and get the crowds excited. This is because behind the idea there's a new token which value is completely driven by the excitement of the crowds (it's pure speculation). If I invest N amount of money in a token which gets people excited,…

[deleted]

Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#116

Post by adventured »

sktrdie wrote: post #92
dplgk wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ICOs are a new breed of gambling.

I'd argue that most of our current economy is gambling (stock markets).

> I'd argue that most of our current economy is gambling (stock markets).

I think you're confusing economy with speculative investment. Most of the US economy consists of manufacturing and service industry output, not the stray under or over valuation of the stock market (which is derived from non-gambling output in the first place). Since when is $6.3 trillion in gross manufacturing output considered gambling? If there is a major economy anywhere on earth that has been a more sure thing (aka the exact opposite of gambling) on average over the last ~140 years than the US, please point it out.

Whether you value Apple at $500 billion or $800 billion right now, has no substantial impact on their sales or net contribution to the US economy / GDP. The same is true for Facebook, Microsoft, or 3M, Delta Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, GE, Berkshire Hathaway etc. Whether the S&P 500 has a PE ratio of 25 (2017) or 18 (2013), does not dramatically alter the US economy.

There's also nothing "current" about it. The stock market has been important for the US economy for more than a century. It's increasingly less important, not more. The private non-bank market for business capital has expanded dramatically while the public market is contracting - and likely to continue contracting - as fewer companies go public.

Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#117

Post by koolba »

bko wrote: post #106
koolba wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One distinction is that legalized gambling is highly regulated. ICOs, not so much.

Are the gambling regulations actually there to protect consumers? The largest form of gambling in the us is probably lottery, which is exclusively controlled by state and local governments. The regulations don't prevent extremely poor odds (much worse than private gambling) and marketing targeted to low income Americans. At least ICOs require some sophistication

Regulations aren't there to protect against stupidity. They're there to protect against fraud. It's to stop someone from setting up a fly by night lotto, collecting ticket money, then leaving town.

Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#119

Post by nicpottier »

ckastner wrote: post #35

After glancing over the whitepaper, I get the motivation, but I just don't see how this scheme is viable, financially. Participants with little storage to give, have little to earn, but must remain connected to the network. Why bother with that? Participants with large amounts (petabytes) of storage to give are competing with Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, etc. At this scale, it's hard to imagine competing financia…

This is all pretty hand-wavy, but I think the idea is you are creating a wide open market wrapped up in a protocol, in such a way that the network effect becomes your advantage.

I believe the economic model is such that buyers reward nodes that are closer to where the content is being accessed most. I'm not positive, but I'm hoping the protocol actual distributes / moves content accordingly. If so, then you suddenly have something pretty neat, in that you incentivize providers to pop up where they are needed most, across country borders and at cut-throat rates.

Yes, this happens to some extent with CDNs now, but imagine anybody being able to be a CloudFront provider and being able to charge for storage at the same terms as everyone else and I think that is getting closer to what Filecoin is trying to do. (though I fully admit I may be totally wrong given that a lot of these details haven't been worked out yet)

To put it in more concrete terms, when I lived in Rwanda one big problem is that within the country the network is great, they have quite a bit of fiber and very developed mobile networks. But their connection to the outside internet is terrible, they have two pipes coming in and neither is reliable. So there would be great benefits to having local CDNs there, and Facebook and Google do but others don't because it just isn't worth it. You could see something like Filecoin being the economic incentive for someone local to provide that service and greatly increase the speed of internet access for everyone in the country.

Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#120

Post by onli »

beaconstudios wrote: post #110
onli wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only that you do not need a blockchain for that. All you need is a market place, and that works perfectly fine without a blockchain. It's a needless complication imho.

exactly my point. Market dynamics existed long before blockchains.

But maybe we both miss a thing here. Maybe this is less about file storage and market place, but more about having an alternative way to mine cryptocurrency, which has its own value as long as speculation is ongoing. Well, maybe that's a bit obvious given the hype around the IPO.

That would mean filecoin is less about the use of decentral file storage, but more about giving people a different way to create something that looks like bitcoin that does not involve buying sold-out gpus, unlike ethereum, and storing files is more comfortable than having a gpu make noise all the time anyway.

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