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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

#301

Post by raverbashing »

beambot wrote: post #261
raverbashing wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The way they store the information is irrelevant. They also have regulation and mandatory checks and balances on their ability to repay current account holders.

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

You should do some research before making such uninformed assertion (also banks do more services than just transaction ledgering)

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

#302

Post by uncoder0 »

scottLobster wrote: post #264
opportune wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if I just encrypt the video before I put it on the network and use a side-channel to distribute the key? ML gonna have a tough time with that.

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

#303

Post by matthewbauer »

soneca wrote: post #101
kdelok wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually worried that one of the main things in favour of cryptocurrencies is that they can act as an effective currency for illegal activities, i.e. they'll stay profitable for as long as regulations struggle to keep up with them.

I believe that cryptocurrencies only reached a critical mass to be relevant att all because of the value it delivers to criminals. All that is ever discussed about cryptocurrencies at HN is marginal in comparison.

I think enthusiasts and speculators are actually a significant driver of the high prices. Criminals would much rather have a stable, quick Bitcoin than what we're seeing right now.

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

#304

Post by genon »

darkerside wrote: post #270
mbesto wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I don't know if this just sounded like a zinger to you when you wrote it, but "the Internet" is a prime example of anything but a solution in search of a problem.

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

#305

Post by wmf »

HashThis wrote: post #142

This is pointing out something profound. Investing is powerful when you can have liquidity right away. AN ASIDE: The valuation in the ICOs too high. But the following profound point still holds true... Imaging if an angel investor can invest in a company early, like Dropbox. Then when it grows some, he could sell 10% of his shares on a highly public and liquid market (like Ethereum coin exchange). He then invests tha…

he could sell 10% of his shares on a highly public and liquid market

This is the part that's illegal. If a company's shares trade on a public market then they need to file all the paperwork of a public company with all the costs that entails.

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

#306

Post by gus_massa »

evv wrote: post #254
nerfhammer wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Until it was hacked and no one dare to build the 2.0 version.

Moreover. In The DAO, the "tokens" gave you voting rights so the "curators" couldn't pick up all the money and go to the small island in the Caribe on vacation^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H to write a white paper.

Also, in The DAO you can get (most/hopefully) of your Ethereum back, with a (incredible useful) one month delay.

I.E. someone realize that you can pick all the money without giving any concrete right to the "investors".

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

#307

Post by dahdum »

Animats wrote: post #287
dahdum wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coinbase/GDAX will do exactly this, and your ~$3m of trade volume per day will be There are a ton of complaints about Coinbase support, but they cater to the largest clients like every other financial company.

The question is how much of that volume is the same money going back and forth. Taking sizable amounts of money out of the system is different. See 2010 flash crash".[1] There may be less real liquidity than transaction volume indicates. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash

The majority of the global volume is crypto-crypto, so I agree it's a valid concern, but the volume of fiat trades has gone way up over the past several months. For example, Coinbase added 1 million accounts in June - the vast majority by necessity are putting fiat in vs cashing out.

One flash crash happened on the ETH-USD pair on GDAX like a month ago, when a large dump triggered cascading margin calls. Bitcoin has had a few of those over the years too.

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

#308

Post by problems »

manigandham wrote: post #25

So instead of on-premise SANs or cloud provider block storage, store your files all over random devices protected by a complicated crypto that requires miners and tokens to stay active? Fantastic. I'm sure the enterprise sales are going to go really well. This fallacy that everything needs to be distributed is really getting out of hand.

> This fallacy that everything needs to be distributed is really getting out of hand.

Unlike many other ICOs, I think this is actually a good example of something that can and arguably should be distributed. Cheap storage is much more readily available in a system like this than from cloud providers and there's no real trustworthiness of the cloud providers. No nth time dropbox gets hacked, no EC2 going down, etc.

I've been using client-side encrypted cloud storage for a while, but you either self-host with relatively poor tooling, use fairly untrustworthy proprietary tooling or use a provider that charges an arm and a leg for storage fees.

There's no good compromise right now - and I'm not saying FileCoin will be it, but they have a good backing of developers and have decent chances. Other contenders:

- GridSync - fixes Tahoe-LAFS syncing, making the self-hosted solution much more bearable, but still size limited

- Sia - an already existing cryptocurrency based solution that seems to have done a lot right, but doesn't have the same marketing wank.

I'm really not impressed with the way Filecoin has run their token sale though - but it doesn't rule it out if they can make the best solution in the end.

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

#309

Post by hobofan »

wmf wrote: post #298
jbob2000 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not in Germany (and I think also other european countries). People here love using cash, and so a lot of the startups go with it, or they would lose out on +50% of the market.

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

#310

Post by matthewbauer »

ve55 wrote: post #202
wscott wrote: post #32

I decided not to invest after reading this: https://medium.com/token-economy/the-analysis-filecoin-doesn...

I wouldn't want to invest in it either, but the truth is is that these investors will likely all make a lot of money. Just because a project is terrible in various ways doesn't mean the investors in the ICO won't get rich, and the founders won't get rich. Especially the special ones that got in early at a fraction of the price.

Yes some will. But you should look at it like gambling for those that do. They lucked in to FileCoin and will probably make money, but perhaps they've also lost money on other ICOs. If they get out now, they might end up ahead but for each one of them, there has to be someone that loses equal money (assuming it truly is a bubble).
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