> Let's think about that for a minute. Would you buy stock in a business whose business plan was a giant marketing campaign to promote the value of the stock? This is a beautiful summary of the ICO ecosphere.
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Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting
31–40 of 92 posts
Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting
#32"What else ticks me off about this, is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with issuing stock in your company as tokens on a block chain instead of through brokers on a standard exchange. Just do it legally, for Pete's sake! Go to the SEC, or whoever the appropriate regulatory authority in your jurisdiction is, and get authorization to issue stock! Hire somebody to implement shareholder voting as block chain trans…
Apparently such a system has been developed by the Toronto Stock Exchange: http://business.financialpost.com/g00/news/fp-street/tmx-dev... > TMX’s new proxy voting system prototype still needs regulatory approval before it can be tested live, the company said. Anyone have an idea of how long this might take?
Don’t know, but I can tell you Blackberry used to trade there before packing up their bags for greener pastures and switching to NYSE.
Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting
#33Who is Ray Dillinger? Why should we trust him with this post?
A cursory search reveals guy who was involved in BitCoin from the very start. For example, here's an exchange he had in 2008 with Satoshi over the design of Bitcoin: http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/5/
Wow, Satoshi was incredibly naive, dishonest, or just didn't have any idea how quickly it would get out of control.
Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting
#34I hate to even imagine how many billions of dollars of scams and failures and thefts have been perpetrated by abusing people's faith in and enthusiasm for that technology by now. And I have no idea how we could possibly have prevented it. If Bitcoin had stable value instead of a built-in boom-bust cycle then we wouldn't have crypto scam mania today. Dillinger praises Satoshi's honesty, but Bitcoin's monetary policy i…
How would you propose making bitcoin "have stable value"?
Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting
#35> He wasn't trying to line his own pockets at the expense of others. In fact I don't think I've ever encountered someone so completely uninterested in personal wealth. You know the old saw about being able to get a lot done if you don't care who gets the credit? Satoshi doesn't want the credit. Two years later he walked away and left the pseudonym behind. And hard as this may be to believe, it looks like he doesn't even want to be paid for it. As far as we can tell he mined approximately a million Bitcoins and has never sold a single one of them.
That's rank speculation. Satoshi also didn't provably burn those millions of coins by sending them to a bunk address-- i.e. whatever the Bitcoin address equivalent is for "IF-I-HAVE-THE-KEY-TO-THIS-ADDRESS-THEN-THIS-HASHING-ALGORITHM-IS-BROKEN".
Unless Ray is one of the authors of Bitcoin he has no idea whether Satoshi was interested in personal wealth, or died, or was tracked down by a security service, or something else entirely.
Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting
#36"What else ticks me off about this, is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with issuing stock in your company as tokens on a block chain instead of through brokers on a standard exchange. Just do it legally, for Pete's sake! Go to the SEC, or whoever the appropriate regulatory authority in your jurisdiction is, and get authorization to issue stock! Hire somebody to implement shareholder voting as block chain trans…
I can't imagine blockchains ever satisfying all legal requirements. At some point I expect some court to say "X shares were illegally transferred from person A, give them back". If we don't know where they went, it's impossible on block-chain to give them back, unless we assume the existence of someone who has the rights to make arbitrary changes, at which point there is no point having a blockchain.
This happens surprisingly often when reasoning about blockchains: you start with some concern and follow the trail of logic to some form of necessary centralization.
For example, when someone on Twitter raised the problem of collaterizing smart contracts (no one is going to lock capital away in extended escrow, which creates an obvious enforceability problem), Naval Ravikant argued in response that a third party guarantor would be necessary. As far as I can tell, he didn't recognize the irony in his own statement.
Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting
#37On a more day to day level, a few years ago a lot of e-commerce pay-by-bitcoin options existed. You would not put this on the checkout next to PayPal because nobody was doing bitcoin then. What I don't understand is why this never took off. People know bitcoin through the news, it is not new. In this time Apple Pay has come along nicely but not bitcoin. Bitcoin has gone off on a tulips tangent. This seems at odds wit…
I'll take a stab at guessing. I think in order for merchants to be paid in BTC or other crypto, it needs to be instantly converted to cash. Why? Because the value of BTC can swing wildly and retailers can't afford that risk when their margins are low. Also, BTC transactions can take 20 minutes to an hour to confirm sometimes, so that matters too at some level. I think something like Tether, which pegs its value to th…
USD fluctuates wildly from my position in the GBP currency zone. But you don't get out of it - for the same reason you don't feel the 18.5 miles per second you're travelling through space.
BTC isn't taken as a currency because you can't live in its zone. Everybody swaps it into the currency of the zone they are living in - unless they are speculating.
You use the currency of the zone you are living in because everything you need is priced in that currency, and everything is priced in that currency because there is a strong taxation authority that demands payment in that currency.
Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting
#38> Let's think about that for a minute. Would you buy stock in a business whose business plan was a giant marketing campaign to promote the value of the stock? This is a beautiful summary of the ICO ecosphere.
I think he was alluding to Multi-Level Marketing as well, which seems like an even more apt comparison.
Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting
#39I hate to even imagine how many billions of dollars of scams and failures and thefts have been perpetrated by abusing people's faith in and enthusiasm for that technology by now. And I have no idea how we could possibly have prevented it. If Bitcoin had stable value instead of a built-in boom-bust cycle then we wouldn't have crypto scam mania today. Dillinger praises Satoshi's honesty, but Bitcoin's monetary policy i…
How would you propose making bitcoin "have stable value"?
Re: Ray Dillinger: If I'd Known What We Were Starting
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why can't you require that each wallet be signed by a party that identifies the person behind it? Then you find where the money went and you force them to give it back. But I think really the statement of interest is here: > ... at which point there is no point having a blockchain. Lots of people have different reasons for liking block chains. Their reasons may disagree with yours.
> Why can't you require that each wallet be signed by a party that identifies the person behind it? Then you find where the money went and you force them to give it back. And what if they refuse [despite consequences]? > Lots of people have different reasons for liking block chains. Their reasons may disagree with yours. I'd say the common/paramount feature is "decentralized, trustless ledger w/distributed consensus.…
> And what if they refuse [despite consequences]?
I feel like this is a problem that is pretty commonly exercised in our legal system and incarceration is usually a strong last resort motivator.