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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

#251

Post by nicpottier »

loceng wrote: post #207
igorgue wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How can you make the claim that that $186M is liquid? Last time someone dumped a large amount - $1-2M worth of Etheruem's Ether? - it tanked.

1) The $186M raised was a mix of Ethereum, Bitcoin and cash. We don't really know how much was of each.

2) They really don't need to sell all at once and who knows, may even have engineers willing to be paid in cryptocurrencies.

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

#252

Post by dpiers »

Can we stop describing ICO raises in USD? They raised ethereum tokens (ETH). The value of those tokens is specious, as there is no liquidity for the volume of ETH raised.

Based on current ETH/USD rates, the USD figure given translates to ~614K ETH. The value of 614K ETH has ranged from 92MM USD to 240MM USD in the last two months, and has been as low as 4.3MM USD since the beginning of the year.

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

#253

Post by dmix »

nicpottier wrote: post #130
kbody wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you are absolutely right, that there are huge problems still left to solve. But even so, then how is this different than a very large VC round that is (slightly) more open to the public? Plenty of businesses get money to build out technology with only the belief that the team raising it have what it takes to make it happen.

That's not quite true. The vast majority of VC money is to scale up a company. Only a small minority of investments, aka a portion of seed rounds, are done with the technology (and subsequent business model) merely in a hypothetical whitepaper stage.

This company might be different because they demonstrated their ability as IPFS is fleshed out but as others pointed out Filecoin is a different beast entirely and they are basically starting from scratch again.

The higher end of 6-18 months of pure dev time is a long risk range to get an untested product out. But I guess they have plenty of runway now to work on it with this massive ICO. Let's just hope they don't spin their wheels forever in research mode and spend their time and money wisely.

It's entirely possible someone else figures it out before them and this play will be a game of scale. I've heard this idea from more than one person well before Filecoin was around.

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

#254

Post by evv »

nerfhammer wrote: post #248
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, It won't. This is zero sum gambling, not investment. Economic growth does not come from this.

I think its pretty short-sighted to say that ICO craze will not result in economic growth. As one early example, take a look at the Ethereum DAO, which allows arbitrary investors to participate in opportunities that may not otherwise exist.

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

#255

Post by GordonS »

raverbashing wrote: post #4
Torai wrote: post #2

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 how many computing cycles and kWH are wasted on cryptocoins

It doesn't look like Filecoin does this. Proof of stake also solves this problem for other crypto currencies. Ethereum is one of the big ones that is planning to move to PoS. I seem to recall reading somewhere that BitShares will too.

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

#256

Post by toss1 »

ada1981 wrote: post #209
philipov wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm always outraged when I see NY Lotto ads on the subway. This is just a way to profit off people who don't understand math and have some sort of addiction. It's a poor tax. I once saw an ad that said something like "if you are putting in your resume to be a door man, it's time to play the lottery"!!!! Not, time to go back to school, time to vote for better income redistribution, not good for you for looking for wor…

I prefer to think if it as an Innumeracy Tax.

A friend once commented on the subway advert that went: "All you need is a dollar and a dream"

His comment was: "We'll keep the dollar and you keep the dream".

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

#257

Post by stale2002 »

api wrote: post #185
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…

Think about all the extra space on all the harddrives in the world that isn't being used.

For example, when you buy a new computer, with a 500 GB drive, 400GB of it isn't going to be used for a while.

Hard drives may be cheap, s3 may be cheap, but that extra 400 GB of hard disk space? That space is literally FREE.

Hard disk space is weird, because there is so much completely unused space out there, that would be literally free to use.

Filecoin will allow this free space to be put on the market.

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

#258

Post by dahdum »

dpiers wrote: post #252

Can we stop describing ICO raises in USD? They raised ethereum tokens (ETH). The value of those tokens is specious, as there is no liquidity for the volume of ETH raised. Based on current ETH/USD rates, the USD figure given translates to ~614K ETH. The value of 614K ETH has ranged from 92MM USD to 240MM USD in the last two months, and has been as low as 4.3MM USD since the beginning of the year.

"as there is no liquidity for the volume of ETH raised"

Volume is over $80 million in the ETH-USD pair over the past 24 hours, on just two exchanges (Coinbase/GDAX, Bitfinex).

Add in CNY, KRW, EUR and the true liquidity is much higher than that.

Edit: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/#USD

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

#259

Post by stale2002 »

raverbashing wrote: post #62
wyldfire wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand why this keeps coming up. Energy consumption is not a waste if it has utility, and the bitcoin network has utility. I suppose you could make this argument for some worthless altcoins, but the difficulty for those is low enough that the amount of energy consumed is negligible.

Bitcoin is as worthy as tulips, in terms of intrinsic value. (Of course the worth of paper currency is the same, still, the backing is stronger) What will happen when bitcoins are worth less than the cost to mine them is anyone's guess

The intrinsic value of bitcoin is that I can transfer money to anyone in the world, very quickly, for a couple cents of transaction fees, in a way that can't be censored.

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

#260

Post by RexetBlell »

loceng wrote: post #207
igorgue wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How can you make the claim that that $186M is liquid? Last time someone dumped a large amount - $1-2M worth of Etheruem's Ether? - it tanked.

In the past 30 days, over 30 Billion dollars worth of Ether has been purchased. 2 million is nothing. Source: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/monthly/
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