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Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

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Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#101

Post by baddox »

santoshalper wrote: post #46
mtgx wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does one painting sell for $10 and another for $100 million? People can put value in whatever they want. I don't think there's a real objective way to say "oh yeah, it's mathematically proven that a diamond ring should cost $10,000...or a $1,000,000 if it's say Marilyn Monroe's ring, and that a single Bitcoin should have a value of no more than $10."

True, but I think we all can say with some certainty that "a token intended to be used as currency should not regularly increase or decrease in value by 20% or more in a matter of days or weeks". Who on earth would actually spend any Bitcoins right now? If you'd bought a Pizza with BTC back in 2010, you could have bought a car (or house?) instead only several years later. This type of volatility makes it totally unsu…

> Who on earth would actually spend any Bitcoins right now?

Huh? Every bitcoin bought is a bitcoin sold.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#102

Post by keymone »

superbrama wrote: post #89
keymone wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) the point is, we’ve just started 2) How is it not assured that bitcoin will evolve? It evolves all the time. Are you even following the project? Energy spent correlates with incentive, incentive is based on price, price is based on demand/value. Where is demand/perceived value derived from is debatable. The rest of your message equally applies to all other endeavors where early movers have profited. Yes it’s a bub…

1) Yes, and bitcoin isn’t the only player in town. 2) It’s not assured that major breakthroughs will occur within the bitcoin ecosystem, nor that they will fold back into it. I’m pretty familiar with bitcoin’s current technology developments. There are opinions, theories, and experiments flying around about how to build that rocket ship. Very very early and unclear. The energy usage is not sustainable; we don’t have…

It’s energy producing companies that worry about sustainability, not energy spending. Energy spending endeavors only worry about profitability. So it’s absolutely misguided to scold bitcoin over it’s use of energy and not do the same for instance to people heating up their apartments or driving cars or insert your energy spending activity.

Increasing efficiency of bitcoins proof of work will simply bump the difficulty so energy use will remain the same.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#103

Post by thinkloop »

mads wrote: post #94

Heh.. Yes, probably is now. I dont know if the founders started out to make a Ponzi, but once the dollars started rolling in, I can imagine, they probably got "different ideas". Who am I to judge, but if I was a founder of this, I would be driving my Ferrari in Thailand instead of slaving away trying to build some stupid file system. Who the hell cares about file systems :P

Driving ferraris gets old, I'd much prefer to be inventing decentralized file storage.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#104

Post by whyrusleeping »

saas_co_de wrote: post #22
jstanley wrote: post #2

Filecoin is a huge disappointment to me. IPFS is fantastic technology, but the main developers getting sidetracked with yet another scammy ICO is the last thing we need.

I see two drawbacks to the technology: 1) data storage with trusted centrally controlled infrastructure will always be cheaper (probably much cheaper) because you need far more redundancy in an untrusted network and the centralized infrastructure has superior economies of scale. 2) Your (encrypted) data is public so you are relying on the platform having zero exploitable bugs ever, which is just not a smart assumptio…

Hey, ipfs dev here.

In filecoin (as in sia, and most other decentralized storage networks) the client who is storing data has control over who stores their data. It's a market. So for example, if a well known company decides to offer storage through filecoin, they can publicly attest to their miner IDs, and you can choose to make deals with them for data storage (even at a slightly higher price if they want to charge it).

Separately, we are working on schemes to allow miners to only serve a clients data in situations they approve of (authorization/authentication). This would address the problem of the data being 'public'. If you can control who stores your data and who can access it, it has the same attack surface as any traditional cloud storage provider.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#105

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

soneca wrote: post #3

edit: Weird, I thought I was commenting on another thread, about Nobel laureates criticizing Bitcoin. I saw it on my phone, then opened HN at my notebook to comment. I misread the title and commented here, but now I can't find the correct thread (was it flagged?). I am growing this idea that Bitcoin (and any cryptocurrency that is affected by aggressive price growth) is an anti-fragile indirect multilevel marketing s…

You're comparing Bitcoin to diamond, but there are many more asset classes that are actually more similar to Bitcoin, which actually work.

I think a lot of people make the mistake of using pattern matching to judge Bitcoin when they don't have enough patterns to work with. There are and were many financial products that could have worked (but failed because of corruption) or are working currently that most people who don't do a lot of financial investment aren't aware of.

That said, let me go through each of the comparisons you made:

> Its original bump in value come from a marketing campaign (even if with Diamond it was centralized and offline, and with BTC is decentralized and viral)

Diamond has a centralized cartel that does the marketing. Who do you think is doing the marketing for Bitcoin?

> Its scarcity is artificially controlled

Diamond's artificial scarcity is controlled by the cartel, just like OPEC controls oil.

Who do you think "controls" Bitcoin's scarcity?

> Its main use case is black market commerce (for one side of the argument) or money laundry (for the other side).

Nope. That's what you probably read a few years ago from some mainstream media.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#106

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

api wrote: post #50
soneca wrote: post #3

edit: Weird, I thought I was commenting on another thread, about Nobel laureates criticizing Bitcoin. I saw it on my phone, then opened HN at my notebook to comment. I misread the title and commented here, but now I can't find the correct thread (was it flagged?). I am growing this idea that Bitcoin (and any cryptocurrency that is affected by aggressive price growth) is an anti-fragile indirect multilevel marketing s…

Bikeshedding this some more because HN is for bikeshedding... I am toying around with the wacky heresy that Karl Marx (not Lenin) was right. Capitalism will evolve into socialism. It would be a form of socialism we haven't seen yet and that would have been technologically impossible in the past. Capitalism's role is to develop the technology, wealth, and infrastructure to enable it... as Marx said. Tech titans, start…

USSR implemented socialism, and all countries that ever called themselves "communist" were socialists.

There's a big difference between communism and socialism. And I think cryptocurrency will enable communism and not socialism. Socialism was a compromise path to get to communism, but failed because of its centralized nature.

With decentralized currency you don't need to go through socialism, you jump straight to communism.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#107

Post by zevyoura »

api wrote: post #50
soneca wrote: post #3

edit: Weird, I thought I was commenting on another thread, about Nobel laureates criticizing Bitcoin. I saw it on my phone, then opened HN at my notebook to comment. I misread the title and commented here, but now I can't find the correct thread (was it flagged?). I am growing this idea that Bitcoin (and any cryptocurrency that is affected by aggressive price growth) is an anti-fragile indirect multilevel marketing s…

Bikeshedding this some more because HN is for bikeshedding... I am toying around with the wacky heresy that Karl Marx (not Lenin) was right. Capitalism will evolve into socialism. It would be a form of socialism we haven't seen yet and that would have been technologically impossible in the past. Capitalism's role is to develop the technology, wealth, and infrastructure to enable it... as Marx said. Tech titans, start…

Sounds kind of like this article: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-24/are-index...

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#108

Post by erubin »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #105
soneca wrote: post #3

edit: Weird, I thought I was commenting on another thread, about Nobel laureates criticizing Bitcoin. I saw it on my phone, then opened HN at my notebook to comment. I misread the title and commented here, but now I can't find the correct thread (was it flagged?). I am growing this idea that Bitcoin (and any cryptocurrency that is affected by aggressive price growth) is an anti-fragile indirect multilevel marketing s…

You're comparing Bitcoin to diamond, but there are many more asset classes that are actually more similar to Bitcoin, which actually work. I think a lot of people make the mistake of using pattern matching to judge Bitcoin when they don't have enough patterns to work with. There are and were many financial products that could have worked (but failed because of corruption) or are working currently that most people who…

Could you tell us what financial products you think bear a closer similarity to bitcoin?

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#109

Post by synctext »

nemo1618 wrote: post #84
shepardrtc wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Sia team has really impressed me with their approach. They're the type of devs that keep quiet and just get the work done. No hype, no grandiose promises, just hard work and solving hard problems. I think that in the end they'll be the ones that come out ahead when it comes to decentralized storage.

Hey, Sia core dev here. From the beginning, we've prided ourselves writing code instead of pushing PR pieces and designing flashy websites. So I'm glad that you (and others) picked up on those values. By keeping our heads down, we've built the only truly distributed and decentralized marketplace for storage, and we did it with a team and a budget far smaller than our competitors. Thanks for your support -- posts like…

Hi, Tribler dev here. awesome to see everybody here.. Do Sia and Filecoin take into account the "oversupply problem"? Filecoin devs nicely explain their sybil-attack strategy with growing your identity. However, how can you earn credits if nobody likes you and you happen to have a low-performance node? Is this a real problem or are we missing something? For details, see our journal article on a macroeconomic sharing model from 2012, https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/files/1517977/Meulpolder_...
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