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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

#181

Post by igorgue »

jondubois wrote: post #10
sschueller wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, only accredited investors could buy Filecoin at the ICO. The rest of us can still buy Siacoin which is similar. I don't think these VC-backed cryptocurrencies will win in the long term. It's the same principle as with stocks, cryptocurrencies are going to work in favour those who understand them the most; in this case, developers. The mission of cryptocurrencies is to take control away from finance people. Hobby…

Finally a voice of reason in this thread... Man so much hate, somebody is jealous. And is not investors they're putting their money here with liquidity in days not years, and no board seats so you can just chill... I love it.

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

#182

Post by beaconstudios »

igorgue wrote: post #175
beaconstudios wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

my question isn't whether utilising under-used hard drives is valuable - it's why on earth blockchains are necessary. You could provide all this functionality with client software connecting to a company's orchestration service. It doesn't add any value.

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

#183

Post by rmorey »

onli wrote: post #78
sharemywin wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it me or is the elephant in the room like "get paid to put pirated movies, games, music, software on the network" Obviously, no one is going to admit it because then your network is tainted but every file sharing outfit ultimately ends up do pirated. I've been mining lbry and it seems lot more ahead of these others. https://lbry.io/

You can't create a business out of pirated content (anymore). You can maybe create such a network, but not gain money or stay out of prison. Filecoin to my knowledge has or will have no capabilities of sharing files. It's dumb end-to-end encrypted decentral storage (which is a good thing!).

Filecoin is being built on top of IPFS (ipfs.io) which, in principle, could be used as a really robust network for sharing pirated content.

However, the IPFS team is aware of this problem, and is building in measures to allow nodes to opt out of storing globally available blacklists of known bad objects (i.e. pirated content or illegal content)

In practice, this is definitely a really hard problem to solve, and very important. But I think doable.

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

#184

Post by davidwparker »

FireBeyond wrote: post #147
jmknoll wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Depends on your definition of "largest company". Revenue is one metric. Market cap is another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...

1. Apple

2. Alphabet

3. Microsoft

4. Amazon

5. Berkshire Hathaway

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

#185

Post by api »

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…

There's a bunch of projects trying to solve the distributed mass storage problem. I am not convinced this problem exists.

(1) Hard drives are dirt f'ing cheap. Buying more than one and putting them at different locations (home and office etc.) is not hard. Storage is still experiencing a Moore's Law type geometric increase in density so this is going to get easier not harder in the future.

(2) Cloud storage is cheap too. S3 is cheap. S3 reduced redundancy is really cheap. Backblaze B2 is stupid cheap. There's no privacy problem here if you encrypt your data on your end. (1) and (2) are not mutually exclusive. They go together nicely. Keep your data local and then back it up encrypted to cheap cloud storage. Many very affordable NAS devices will do this for you.

(3) Enterprise users categorically don't want a system where they don't know who's running their infrastructure. In some cases such a thing would be prohibited by data residency regulations. You will never ever ever convince a CIO to use this. In some cases it might be illegal for them to use this.

(4) The real problem for end users is data handling UX, not actual storage. (1) and (2) are adequate for virtually all users.

(5) The web does have an ephemerality problem but I fail to see how this will solve it.

(6) These systems are mostly too heavy for mobile and don't cope well enough with node ephemerality for laptops. They only work well on desktops and servers and those already have mega-cheap storage and backup options in the form of (1) and (2). Look into how much disk you can cram in a desktop these days for under $500.

(7) The anonymous/uncensorable niche is already filled by Tor, I2P, and Freenet.

This really looks like a solution to a non-existent problem. Am I missing something?

Not trying to hate, just questioning.

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

#186

Post by igorgue »

pmlnr wrote: post #8
raverbashing wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how many computing cycles and kWH are wasted on cryptocoins

To be honest, this is my reason for not jumping mindlessly on the cryptocurrency bandwagon: it's wasting so much resources and power, especially when you take a look at videos of mining farms.

Aww you're such a good person caring about not wasting the resources of the world :)

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

#187

Post by saimiam »

Taek wrote: post #171
saimiam wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If this is true, then VCs spreading their money across any and every ICO makes strategic business sense and should be applauded instead of being pilloried for being scam artists trying to fleece regular folks into buying coins.

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

#188

Post by beaconstudios »

onli wrote: post #180
beaconstudios wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

true, at least it's just storage space instead of spinning thousands of servers at 100% all the time and wasting huge amounts of electricity. At least, assuming that people don't start creating miner farms with huge amounts of space like they do with GPUs at the moment. I don't know how filecoin ties to the storage requirements of the customers though so that might be handled by market forces.

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

#189

Post by sah2ed »

FireBeyond wrote: post #147
jmknoll wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the poster's metric was largest in terms of capitalization and not revenue. The top 5 in terms of capitalization:

1. Apple 2. Alphabet 3. Microsoft 4. Amazon 5. Berkshire Hathaway

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...

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

#190

Post by woobar »

drieddust wrote: post #149
adventured wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Serious question: how much money is moving into these currencies already?

Bitcoin market cap was $9.4B a year ago, now it is at $58.3B. Average daily trade volume is ~$1B over the last few months. I guess trade volume just reported in USD, but includes all bitcoin transactions.

Is there a way to estimate how much money from 'global economy' actually moved into bitcoin and other currencies?

Edit: typo

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