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Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

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191–200 of 249 posts

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, that's the thing with the old tulip story. At the heart of the bubble there were a number of people who just wanted a damn tulip.

and those people got tulips, at normal low prices. futures traders didn't want a tulip, nobody accepted delivery of a tulip. no tulips in the spot market were being traded anywhere near the futures month prices. with that in mind, doesn't this make it one of the worst poster childs of irrational exuberance to cite?

You're relying on one person's summary of the tulip bubble 'facts'.

Other sources give great detail of the tulip purchasing craze. For example, read the tulip chapter in 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds', by Charles Mackay. It cites many sources that detail the crazy high prices people did actually pay for tulips.

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#192

Another ICO, another scam. I am not sure I feel bad for people who are gullible enough to send their hard earned money to these "companies". They have one PDF whitepaper and a generic Wordpress template website with some buzzwords, based in Cayman islands or some other tax haven for money laundering. And expecting to get rich from that.

And mostly, they indeed get rich.

How can they mostly get rich? For every buyer, there's a seller. A rich cryptocoin speculator gained their wealth from poor cryptocoin speculators. Where else did the money come from?

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and those people got tulips, at normal low prices. futures traders didn't want a tulip, nobody accepted delivery of a tulip. no tulips in the spot market were being traded anywhere near the futures month prices. with that in mind, doesn't this make it one of the worst poster childs of irrational exuberance to cite?

You're relying on one person's summary of the tulip bubble 'facts'. Other sources give great detail of the tulip purchasing craze. For example, read the tulip chapter in 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds', by Charles Mackay. It cites many sources that detail the crazy high prices people did actually pay for tulips.

Thanks, I've looked into it over the years but I'm always interested in different perspectives.

Between the contract categorization changes, actual shortages, and the bubonic plague, I think there are a lot of things that are unclear. Without the plague abruptly killing all the speculators would we have called it a bubble, or just an uptrend?

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#194
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the economic promise of the nascent Internet objectively more plausible than the promises of ~1000 altcoins.

And just like I said, I'm sure all the neckbeards from the 70's and 80's felt the same way about the Internet and shit like Geocities and pets.com. But hey, I'm sure it's "different" this time, right? You're right and everyone in the crypto space is wrong.

> And just like I said, I'm sure all the neckbeards from the 70's and 80's felt the same way about the Internet and shit like Geocities and pets.com.

But they weren't wrong. Geocities and Pets.com died without making very much money.

The giants of the Internet were Search Engines, Online Shopping, Video Sharing, and Social Networks. The giants of "Blockchain" probably either in awful, primodial form (ie: Pets.com was online shopping, but a terrible experience. Geocities was also a social network... albeit a bad one by today's standards).

So today's coins probably will fail to some new coin made 3 or 4 years from now which really figures out the "killer app" of Blockchain.

------------

I think its fair to say that "Blockchain" as a technology will exist in the future. Back in the 90s, one could reasonably expect that "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" was going to be the primary methodology of looking for new websites... before the Search Engine was perfected.

So many people lost their life savings chasing after fad technologies of the 90s, Webvan being one of the most notable. Billions of dollars invested and lost into just... awful ideas that no one understood.

Frankly, the neckbeards of the 80s were right. The vast majority of 90s webpages were utter crap without a business model.

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#195

I'm not sure I buy the premise that every service needs its own coin. Surely in most cases it would be better to just use the most widely used, most stable coin? If the concept of cryptocurrency is going to survive I think there needs to be one or two clear winners to eventually bring some stability to their value. Of course, not issuing your own coin doesn't leave as much opportunity to get rich quick off a bit of h…

In the case of ethereum backed coins, every service does not really have its own coin, but rather a derivative of ethereum. As long as the coin is tradeable for general ETH tokens, it must fundamentally be pegged to the price of ethereum, even if it's traded separately on exchanges. There are obvious downsides to that, but it's a tradeoff for ease of development. You can create your own "coin" -- really just a (set o…

The technical details don't matter, all that's important is that coin X can't be spent on product Y without going through an exchange and paying conversion costs. It's plainly inconvenient and dumb. There's a reason why all real-world shops accept the local currency and not their own made up one.

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And mostly, they indeed get rich.

How can they mostly get rich? For every buyer, there's a seller. A rich cryptocoin speculator gained their wealth from poor cryptocoin speculators. Where else did the money come from?

Exactly. For all the winners there are losers. For every one of these crypto millionaires there are dozens of people who lost a lot of money, some of them substantial amounts of their savings, many several paychecks they decided to gamble with.

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#197
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can compromise the iCloud account of an iOS user (pretty sure iOS 2fa is only SMS based), then you can install google authenticator on your own device. I'm sure it's more complicated than that in reality, but if you have SMS access, you only need to find one weak link in the chain including iCloud/google, email provider, app provider, etc.

> install google authenticator on your own device. You sure can, but will you then have the requisite TOTP secrets?

No. iCloud backups don't contain keychains, where the Google authenticator stores its seeds.

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#198

How to make money in ethereum, from high to low risk: 1. Dump the leftovers of your bi-weekly software engineering paycheck into buying ETH, BTC, or whichever altcoin is popular this week. It went up 5000% in the past, it's got to keep growing right? 2. Participate in an ICO and stock up on whatever platform token they're hawking. It's more profitable if you get in early due to some presale mechanism (hopefully here…

I wonder if this is what the curmudgeons from the 70's and 80's sounded like during the web 1.0 boom of the mid-to-late 90's

Here you go, from 1995: http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva... Note that most of his predictions did come true for a while and then were later falsified; many dotcoms learned that "being early is the same as wrong" the hard way.

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#199
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do the work _before_ getting paid? Take out an ICO and let them "preorder" your course!

While you say this in jest, it is actually a good idea. The pre-sale part. Get a sense of a market need before you dive in. Caveat being you've done the work to be able to add authentic value to the people you're selling too. (which is where most ico's break down)

The value is that the course itself is hosted on the blockchain. It's distributed and decentralized. /s

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And just like I said, I'm sure all the neckbeards from the 70's and 80's felt the same way about the Internet and shit like Geocities and pets.com. But hey, I'm sure it's "different" this time, right? You're right and everyone in the crypto space is wrong.

> And just like I said, I'm sure all the neckbeards from the 70's and 80's felt the same way about the Internet and shit like Geocities and pets.com. But they weren't wrong. Geocities and Pets.com died without making very much money. The giants of the Internet were Search Engines, Online Shopping, Video Sharing, and Social Networks. The giants of "Blockchain" probably either in awful, primodial form (ie: Pets.com was…

Yes but they gave rise to the Internet economy we exist in now. Of course there's going to be chaff that needs to be separated from the wheat. That doesn't mean that it's all going to fail.
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