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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

#171

Post by Taek »

saimiam wrote: post #155
Taek wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if you intentionally passed over the point, but this kind of circular investing is not sustainable. If something has value only because people buy it, at some point there are going to be more people taking profit than putting new money in. That's when the price starts to fall. 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…

I know very little about ICOs other than what I have read on HN and HN comments so take what I'm saying with a pinch of salt. My understanding is that an ICO is like an IPO minus a century+ of regulation and oversight by the authorities and instead of a share of future earnings, you get a share of a closed economy. The oversight and rules governing stock offerings is fantastic no doubt but when you describe a Coin as…

In 2001 if you said that the Internet was going to be worth $1 trillion dollars, you were correct. But 99% of investments on internet companies in 2001 were bad investments.

That's where we are today with ICOs. Cryptocurrency is going to be absolutely massive, and it has some very intelligent people doing amazing things. But the vast majority of ICOs are going to flop. Look at the rankings in 2013:

http://web.archive.org/web/20131218060943/http://coinmarketc...

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

#172

Post by nicpottier »

krrrh wrote: post #135
nicpottier wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While by and large I agree about most ICOs, I think the value proposition is a lot clearer for something like Filecoin. 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.

Sure, but it's kind of like saying that FTP looked like it would be a useful protocol in 1985, and an early draft of RFC 959 should have been adequate to raise gobs of money. In the end FTP added a lot of value to the internet, but it doesn't mean that the folks who wrote the reference implementations would have known what to do with the equivalent of $1B.

Sure, but there's a weird / interesting aspect to these ICOs here as well, in that the valuation of the coin is also what will drive adoption of the providers. Since miners will be paid in coin to validate providers and providers will also be paid in coins, then there needs to be some value associated with it.

The ICO in this case kind of bootstraps the value of the coin in a way that is needed in order to bring on miners and providers. So in a way the value being raised is a bit like capital costs that the network will "spend" to bootstrap and verify the network.

Don't get me wrong, this is a lot of money to raise, but saying this is totally nuts without taking into account that the model is very different (and interesting!) is not giving credit where its due. Will it work? Who knows and certainly most startups fail, but it isn't a foregone conclusion.

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

#173

Post by api »

richardknop wrote: post #165

Is this a joke? Regardless whether the concept has any merit, at this stage of idea/startup we would normally be talking about seed level funding round so small sums of money to get a small team and build a product. Almost 200 million is obscene as a seed funding. If this isn't the proof this is tullip mania then I don't know what is.

I lived through the late 90s dot.com mania and you saw an MBA out of Harvard and a couple techies raise this kind of money on nothing more than a hair brained idea with .com after it. Russ from Silicon Valley with his "radio. on. internet!" is pretty close to the truth.

This is a bubble. Not FileCoin, but ICOs and block chain.

The vast majority of these ICOs are outright scams or unworkable nonsense. I've read some of these white papers but I stopped when they threatened to give me an eye rolling injury. (Can eyes roll so far back they get stuck?) Some of them read like they were generated by a statistical language model to parody CS papers on distributed systems.

FileCoin is actually one of the best I've seen-- the team behind it has actually shipped distributed/decentralized systems that actually work (IPFS). I have to stress this-- in the ICO space a team that has actually shipped something useful is rare and this places them far above the herd. They might actually do something with this money.

I also hope the honest/good ICOs don't get crushed when this inevitably implodes or gets prosecuted by the SEC. There's so much obvious outright fraud in this space I can't imagine the SEC (and FBI, etc.) aren't watching or even briefing prosecutors.

That being said we (ZeroTier) have looked at an ICO but...

(1) Our system has no built-in scarcity that needs a token. We have no use case for a token. It would be a force fit or an invented case, which would make it scammy.

(2) We have existing investors who are justifiably nervous about taking on an unknown liability of the "potential criminal violation of securities laws" sort. So am I for that matter.

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

#174

Post by bspn »

brianwawok wrote: post #167

So if I am personally bearish on the entire "alt-money" movement, how do I turn this into a potential profitable bet? Any tips on where I go to "short" coins?

I'm not aware of any regulated exchanges that currently have Bitcoin futures contracts, but even if you could find one the volatility + leverage would make for a very interesting ride down (assuming you're not immediately stopped out).

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

#175

Post by igorgue »

beaconstudios wrote: post #80
onli wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit convoluted, but it isn't so bad, is it? Lots of unused storage, bitcoin showed you can use cryptocurrency to create a network of capabilities (there: hashing stuff, here: of storage), additional uses are possible when getting the mechanism right.

I don't see how a new blockchain is necessary in order to utilise unused storage space. Protocols like this work just fine without them, especially if having a centralised orchestrator (filecoin themselves) isn't an issue. Which in this case, I can't see why it would be.

I mean what would motivate you (or a corporation) to put those hard drives that are there with no use to work while you wait for new clients or something, is like renting disk space, I don't know why it doesn't click on HN.

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

#177

Post by [deleted] »

fccc wrote: post #41
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…

> 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 His favorite response was "...and a whole bunch of other things". On a more serious note, it's very early days for the filecoin and related group of projects that they intend to fund, so the answer to Dalton's question is : "we don't have the answers…

[deleted]

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

#178

Post by igorgue »

al2o3cr wrote: post #132
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,…

ICOs are a new breed in economy Pumping up worthless crud with tons of PR to get suckers, er "investors" to "get in now" is an old old old scam. Adding "with cryptocurrency" onto the end of it doesn't make it new.

You get liquidity the next day instead of in 5 or 10 than with regular startups, I don't see a problem with that, investors are here to make money right?

Is not like it doesn't happen with the regular VC cash money right? E.g. Color?

Or with regular stock market. e.g. Enron.

Clueless investors are always gonna be there.

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

#179

Post by sah2ed »

richardknop wrote: post #165

Is this a joke? Regardless whether the concept has any merit, at this stage of idea/startup we would normally be talking about seed level funding round so small sums of money to get a small team and build a product. Almost 200 million is obscene as a seed funding. If this isn't the proof this is tullip mania then I don't know what is.

Agreed. The obscene amounts being raised through ICOs doesn't make any sense for a product or service that doesn't even exist yet.

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

#180

Post by onli »

beaconstudios wrote: post #166
onli wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

so it's yet another way for people to play pretend-stock-market but using a different model of wasting computational resources? That's about what I expect from cryptocoins at this point.

Not really wasting in this case. There is at least that.
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