Live data from Hacker News

Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

financemagnates.com

291–300 of 382 posts

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

#291
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.

The flaws in Filecoin’s token sale:

1) Filecoin gave an amazing deal to their buddies, just a few weeks ago

2) Filecoin is being insanely greedy

3) Early clickers are incentivized, price unknown

4) Protocol Labs and Filecoin foundation are keeping 2x the coins that investors will get

Source: https://medium.com/token-economy/the-analysis-filecoin-doesn...

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

#292
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ICOs are a new breed of gambling.

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

But is this really an investment in a company? It looks like they're just buying tokens in the hope that when people start using FileCoin there will be more demand for it.

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

#293
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.

"no liquidity for the volume of ETH raised"

Look again. Poloniex alone exchanges $1 billion dollars, 3M ETH, on the ETH/BTC pair, weekly. https://cryptowat.ch/poloniex/ethbtc/1w Volume on the path ETH→BTC→USD is a lot higher than ETH→USD and that's the path that whales dumping ETH take.

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

#294
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, these guys don't even have a cool name like EndFrame. I'm actually more confident in Sia than Filecoin, despite them flying much more under the radar. Sia devs are more transparent (you can reach the lead dev here or on reddit pretty easily), have software that's in early stages but works, they've been regularly putting out new releases with new features, bug fixes, and polish. But Filecoin does have the fundin…

I tried Sia and it worked. I was able to use it. The tech seems solid and the plan seems straightforward and logical. If there is a good niche for decentralized storage then it already exists and they have it. No wonder nobody has heard of them. /cynicism Edit: Cynicism is not wholly unjustified. A while back I was taking to a big marketing guy about how marketing teams in big companies often get less excited about p…

Yep, Silicon Valley covered that as well. "Don't try to make money with your software! Because there will be solid numbers and it'll never be enough. Have a zero revenue model! That way all they see is the potential!" (paraphrasing)

A startup I worked for actually had exactly this problem when they had a big idea the company was founded for, but wanted to put out a couple small apps first as a warmup for the team. When those ancillary practice apps didn't perform amazingly well, the board of directors got nervous and killed the company before it even got started on the app that the company was founded to do in the first place. I'm pretty convinced in hindsight that if we just worked on the big app in the first place, the company might still be around today.

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

#295
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.

So what?

The point in having currency is a speculation of value between entities?

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

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how many computing cycles and kWH are wasted on cryptocoins

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.

> the bitcoin network has utility

Utility and potential for utility are incredibly different. Bitcoin has no utility. I can't safely store value in it, nor can I use it for quick transactions.

Its only utility is speculative. The energy consumption is fueling a somewhat randomized, opt-in wealth redistribution service. That's not to say I think bitcoin or its ilk are terrible, but rather that the energy, in most cases, could be better used elsewhere (or like, not at all).

It's ok to like bitcoin. But let's not fool ourselves about the bad parts of it.

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

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it is a lot less like Tulip mania and a lot more like the dotcom boom/crash. I say that in the sense that there is significant utility in some cryptocurrency concepts, but not all of them...however there is widespread overheating due to speculation. That is also to imply that some may emerge after a crash in the same way that Amazon, Google, eBay/Paypal, etc., emerged and thrived after the crash.

I do not deny the utility of crypocurrencies there will be winners out of this. But current breed of investors will trigger another bout of golbal meltdown. Even Amazon lost its value during the crash so chances are that most investors sold out everything in panic. Only those who had nerves of iron actually came out alive.

I don't think there's enough money in cryptocurrencies to trigger a global meltdown. It will no doubt have an effect of the economy, but it's still fringe enough that a crash in the near future would be mostly harmless.

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

#298
post #19

This is probably a money laundry/tax evasion operation. I don't believe these "big name Silicon Valley investors" just flush such amounts of money down a toilet without a hidden agenda.

After watching Ozark, I'm actually convinced that software is amazing for money laundering, it's stupid easy to generate huge amounts of fake data. "Look, our food delivery app delivered 10,000,000 meals and everyone paid by cash!" "Wow, we rented 10,000 homes through our short term rental app this month and everyone paid by cash!" "Hey, we have an ATM that lets you convert money into NameCoin, sooo many people are u…

"Uber for X" apps generally don't even accept cash; it's credit card or nothing. Building an app that accepts cash would be a red flag in itself.

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

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on whether assets or debt will be leveraged for speculation and whether futures contracts will be used as some kind of meta-currency. Then you have contagions because it will erode trust in other sectors. Economies kinda freeze up without trust or reliable value propositions.

Speculation sure but I don't see how leverage can get too high with a hard limit to the number of bitcoins floating around. Not like option contracts for example where you create as many as you want out of thin air.

Well the leverage would be in option contracts on Bitcoin. These are already available on some exchanges.

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

#300
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…

Since the content is encrypted, how would you blacklist any content? The nodes don't know what kind of material they are hosting.

You don't blacklist based on content, but on the hashes of the content, which the nodes have to know. At one point or another, the decryption key has to be shared for the encrypted content to be usable for anyone, and if the copyright holders get a hold of that key, they can prove a violation and blacklist the hash of the content.
Post reply on HN