121–130 of 382 posts
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ICOs are a new breed of gambling.
Holding $,€,£ etc. is gambling even if you don't realize it.
The euro/USD exchange rate has varied between roughly 1 and 1.6 over the past 10 years. That's including the 2008 crisis.
Meanwhile over the last year alone the BTC/USD exchange rate varied between about 500 to 3400.
My 10 euro bill is extremely unlikely to suddenly massively increase or lose in value. That's the difference.
So much people with much money trying to find new ways to make money out of money. That says much about the current state of the economy.
And making the rich richer. No way to invest unless you have money or you are in the inner circle. Code has also not been released. So much for open source.
I mean, if I sell a plastic cup to someone for 10 cents, and then go produce 100 million of these plastic cups, do I have $10m in plastic cups? Or could it be that I’m unable to find 100 million buyers each willing to pay 10 cents for a cup, even though that’s the last traded price?
As far as I’m concerned, the amount of USD they’ve raised equals what they could earn by executing a limit sell order with a price of zero into the Filecoin/USD market (thus eating up all bids).
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I am starting to worry that this bubble is going to grow until it threatens the world economy.
Depends on whether assets or debt will be leveraged for speculation and whether futures contracts will be used as some kind of meta-currency. Then you have contagions because it will erode trust in other sectors. Economies kinda freeze up without trust or reliable value propositions.
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 Bitcoin's price history is anything to go by, when the prices start to fall, they will fall fast and hard. At least in Bitcoin's case, there's a core value proposition that's actually worthwhile, so it's able to recover. With most of these ICOs, the core value proposition isn't actually valuable. When the price finally starts to collapse, the floor could be very low, and there may not be a recovery. See the old tokens Quarkcoin, Primecoin, and most of the rest of the top 25 altcoins from 2013
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,…
Does that necessarily mean it is worth what it is valued at? No, but comparing the IPFS folks with total snake oil is a bit unfair.
Can anyone tell me how they arrived at the $186m figure? Are they just multiplying the last traded price by total supply, and forgetting about market depth/slippage? I mean, if I sell a plastic cup to someone for 10 cents, and then go produce 100 million of these plastic cups, do I have $10m in plastic cups? Or could it be that I’m unable to find 100 million buyers each willing to pay 10 cents for a cup, even though…
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Crypto currency are the new tulip bulbs[1]. Only some are going to make money. Current buyers are relying on greater fools to take these off their hands. A crash is eminent so hold tight and wait for it. You will have plenty of opportunity. History will repeat itself as new fools arrive on the scene[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_market_crashes_a...
I am starting to worry that this bubble is going to grow until it threatens the world economy.
Most of it has been and is locked up, not touching other aspects of the global economy, and most of the actual bubble value will vaporize without ever touching any part of the 'real' global economy.
It's the specific reason there is nothing to fear about the inevitable implosion of this crypto-coin bubble. Not to mention, after it implodes, the real money will be made as throughout history (whether we're talking the auto bubble or the internet bubble or the oil prospecting bubble).
The dotcom bubble implosion wiped out trillions in moderately liquid value (the US stock market as one example being radically more liquid than the coin market overall), a sum that makes the crypo-coin bubble look hilariously trivial (even if you inflate it up to $500 billion), the global economy kept trucking regardless; US GDP has expanded by ~80% since the year 2000.
Sun Microsystems during the peak of the dotcom bubble, all by itself, was overvalued (peak market cap near $200 billion, probably worth more rationally $60-$80b tops) by more than 2x the total sum of all bitcoins.
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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 tho…