Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

financemagnates.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 382 posts

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

#261

Post by beambot »

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

Your traditional bank account balance is stored as 1's and 0's in a database somewhere. What is the intrinsic value of those bits?

Now think of how much energy is "wasted" keeping all those accounts updated, the lights on at all the branch offices, etc.

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

#262

Post by lordCarbonFiber »

stale2002 wrote: post #257
api wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lite…

I think the OP's point is the cost of infrastructure means that this space on the market will never be less than the cost of S3 or local storage. So why buy the "free space", which leads to the bigger question. why sell it.

Because operating a node for File Coin is certainly not free in terms of network costs and requires the opportunity cost of giving up your local storage for the duration.

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

#263

Post by Animats »

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.

I really want to hear the story when someone dumps $100M worth of Etherium. Or Bitcoin.

I wonder what would happen if you went to an Bitcoin exchange and said "I want to sell $100M worth of Bitcoins over the next 30 days. I'll pay your usual fees. After each day's sales, you wire transfer the proceeds to my bank within one business day, and you agree to a sizable penalty if you're late. Any validation of identity you want to do takes place before we do any business."

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

#264

Post by scottLobster »

opportune wrote: post #228
rmorey wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you're hosting something such as a movie, and it's blacklisted, couldn't you just add a small amount of noise to the video file to make it unblacklistable?

For now, but this sounds like a problem machine learning was built to solve. Youtube has issues because with the sheer volume of video they don't have the silicon to transcode/examine every frame, but on a more limited network with less traffic such analysis might be doable. The more "variations" people introduce in response, the larger the training set for the algorithm.

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

#265

Post by 101km »

dahdum wrote: post #258
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

There are no exchanges that will let you withdraw $xx million a day in fiat.

They'll need to spread the ETH to basically all the big exchanges, with multiple bank accounts attached, and liquidate large sums everyday for months and hope none of the accounts get frozen.

Still quite the windfall even if realistically just a fraction of the sums being thrown around.

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

#266

Post by [deleted] »

beaconstudios wrote: post #182
igorgue wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#267

Post by Karunamon »

beaconstudios wrote: post #182
igorgue wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The lack of "a company" (read: censorship, speech codes, political influence, etc) can be considered to be a value. Decentralization is a Good Thing.

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

#268

Post by Karunamon »

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 find this offensive in many ways. The chance of winning the lottery might be minuscule, but minuscule is still infinitely larger than zero.

On top of that, you don't have to hit the jackpot to win life-changing money. Powerball odds for a 10k/250k prize are 1 in 913K, and for a 1M/2M prize, 1 in 11M - much better than the jackpot prize's odds of 1 in 292M.

Many people are totally okay with coughing up $2 every now and then for raising their chances from 0/infinity to 1 in a million or few.

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

#269

Post by QML »

DanBlake wrote: post #128
runeks wrote: post #124

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…

They literally sold 186m worth. As in, Filecoin literally has 186 million in the bank. Its insanity

Is that 186 million in ETH or fiat?

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

#270

Post by darkerside »

mbesto wrote: post #205
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on your post I went and looked up that question/answer portion, and I think the back and forth is illuminating in it's lack of either communication or actual capability: TL;DR: It's a solution in search of a problem, like so much good, early technology. Dalton Caldwell [31:07] – What is the burning, and it’s okay if it’s not consumers, but what is the thing that, with Filecoin, that is gonna make, whether it’s…

> It's a solution in search of a problem, like so much good, early technology. Care to elaborate and share examples of other "good, earl technology"? Typically when I hear "solution in search of a problem", I start thinking "this is going nowhere".

The entire Internet
Post reply on HN