Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by philipov » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 1:48 PM UTC

koolba wrote: post #117

bko wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are tasked with making a better society and you use the opportunity to promote and entrench greater stupidity, is that fraud?

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

#142

Post by HashThis » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 1:48 PM UTC

This is pointing out something profound. Investing is powerful when you can have liquidity right away.

AN ASIDE: The valuation in the ICOs too high. But the following profound point still holds true...

Imaging if an angel investor can invest in a company early, like Dropbox. Then when it grows some, he could sell 10% of his shares on a highly public and liquid market (like Ethereum coin exchange). He then invests that in AirBnB when it was tiny. He may invest in a startup that goes down after the Series A. Oh well, he may sell for 30% the valuation he invested in. The power is there by those who make big gains in the big winners, and that they can then move money out very soon and into new places.

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

#143

Post by beepboopbeep » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 1:49 PM UTC

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,…

>I'm not sure, but it surely looks exciting (even though most projects behind ICOs are complete crap).

Bubbles and fraud are not really exciting per se...

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

#144

Post by detaro » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 1:51 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #49

Not completely thought out, but I believe parasitic storage might be a better approach to scaling out a censorship resistant distributed object store. Some kind of cryptocurrency could help fuel it as well. A parasitic storage approach would leverage existing "free" tiers of services like google drive, onedrive, dropbox, yandex.disk, etc. One of the hard parts of scaling that would be creating the fake accounts to ho…

I think you could use such accounts as the backing store for offered storage in the Filecoin "system"

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

#145

Post by Confiks » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 1:51 PM UTC

Cakez0r wrote: post #136

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,…

> People are not investing hoping for the project to be developed - they're investing because they know others will as well, which will drive the prices up. I found out recently that this is called the Greater Fool Theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

Or, perhaps with a better name, a Keynesian beauty contest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest#Overv...

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

#146

Post by durgiston » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 1:53 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #27

I don't understand why they would do the coin offering now. The network is inoperable and won't be for quite a while. The main advantage to me seems to be a more of a community-driven storage approach. S3 is really cheap and really reliable and really old. A distributed file store would be cool, but as a community/free network like P2P. The $200M seems really high for a community project.

There's 168 million reasons to do the coin offering now. If someone was begging you to take that kind of money for a half-baked side project, would you say no? (to be fair, this is quite a bit further along than half-baked, but still)

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

#147

Post by FireBeyond » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 1:53 PM UTC

jmknoll wrote: post #23

chii wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in this case, developers. i dont think developers are the ones who will profit - after all, developers are the ones who wrote the code for a lot of financial institutions, and none of them gain much more than just a salary.

At the same time though, 3 of the 5 largest companies in the US have CEOs with a background in software development/computer science. 5 years ago, 0 of 10 did. There's definitely a trend toward developers having more power.

Not to be contrary, but "citation"?

This (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...) lists the 5 largest companies in the US as:

1. Walmart

2. Berkshire Hathaway

3. Apple

4. Exxon Mobil

5. McKesson

Walmart's CEO, Doug McMillon, career at Walmart was in distribution and then buying before moving to the executive.

Buffett had a background in business admin, economics and insurance.

Tim Cook has that CS background.

Daren Woods of Exxon Mobil has a degree in Electrical Engineering in the early 80s, which might be at best half a point.

John Hammergren of McKesson has a pure business background, with a Bachelors and Masters in Business Administration.

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

#148

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 1:56 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #122

KillerWhale wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holding $,€,£ etc. is gambling even if you don't realize it.

That's a rather ridiculous reductio ad absurdum. 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.

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by drieddust » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 1:58 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #129

empath75 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am starting to worry that this bubble is going to grow until it threatens the world economy.

An extremely small fraction of the inflated value of these coins is actually part of - interacting with - the global economy. Most of it is not and will never be liquid. 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 a…

>An extremely small fraction of the inflated value of these coins is actually part of - interacting with - the global economy. Most of it is not and will never be liquid.

I am not sure how you arrived at this conclusion? As more money will move into these currencies, won't it create an impact when eventual crash arrives.

> 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.

Don't you think mania has just started? It took a few years for dotcom bubble to reach its bursting stage.

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

#150

Post by JumpCrisscross » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 1:58 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #139

decentralised wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwing money at a business proposition is neither new nor gambling.

It is when the investors throw money at it in the hope they'll get a return on investment. You don't need $250 million to build a distributed Dropbox clone.

> It is when the investors throw money at it in the hope they'll get a return on investment

Traditionally, the gambling-investment line is drawn at the zero-sum boundary. If you're buying these tokens because you think the encrypted storage business is worth that much (i.e. based on profits), it could be investing. If you're buying to avoid missing out on something other people will want to buy because it's cool (i.e. there is no discussion or thought given to profit) it's probably pyramidesque gambling.