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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]

#161

Post by alexasmyths »

baddox wrote: post #122
alexasmyths wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Bitcoin was designed as a scheme, but it's effectively been turned into an MLM scheme and a brilliant one at that. I'm trying to hire a PR firm for a project and I've come across a handful of firms that have been hired to promote BTC. Think about that for a minute: if BTC is distributed - then who on earth is paying massive $$$ for PR firms to be hustling BTC in the press? Massive BTC owners - that's wh…

I don’t think that the existence of marketing firms involved in decentralized technologies is anywhere near as significant or mind-blowing of a point as you portray it. There is no reason to expect or desire that, because Bitcoin is decentralized, there will never be any private for-profit organizations involved with Bitcoin. Surely you wouldn’t say the same thing about, say, email. I’m sure marketing firms have work…

It's a fair point ... but ...

Making an email product and hiring PR to promote email I think is a little bit different than 'owning a stock and hiring PR to promote that stock'.

BTC is purely a speculative thing right now - and so hiring PR to pump up a purely speculative thing? "It's going to $10K and it's only going up, up, up!"

If they were promoting BTC as a medium of exchange and as currency, sure ... but as a purely speculative asset it's smells like a pump and dump.

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

#162

Post by runeks »

jacquesm wrote: post #82
dumbfounder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this idea a few weeks ago. I think it would sell, but how do you tie the ring to the bitcoin effectively?

Engrave the key on the inside of the ring.

The key is information. One glance at it, by the wrong person, and it becomes worthless.

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

#163

Post by superbrama »

keymone wrote: post #151
superbrama wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a difference between scolding energy usage and pointing out that the design itself, even if efficiency of that design is increased, is what leads to this spiraling energy expenditure that powers massive computational hashing power only to support that currency and nothing else (no other social or technical goals). There are better ways to design such a system to do more than perform endless hashing that is me…

You seem to be convinced there are better ways to implement a distributed consensus mechanism that doesn’t depend on proof of work. Feel free to present it to the world and become the next satoshi. Meanwhile - face the reality. PoW will consume as much energy as is profitable and only market decides that.

I’m convinced people are searching for it. I’m convinced there’s a huge nouveau academic interest in this area. This just helps to estimate likelihood of bitcoin’s longevity.

Yes, precisely, you always need buyers to push price further. Market decides up or down, miners play along as it makes sense to them. Kind of like the swap over to bcash about a month ago, because it made sense financially.

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

#164

Post by mads »

aij wrote: post #154
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... vs. Writing distributed file systems... One of these sounds much more fun than the other. Hint: It is not driving Ferraris. ;)

In the long run, I think driving Ferraris would get old much quicker than writing file systems, so yes, I tend to agreee, but in the short run, I doubt it.. Hell, park a Ferrari in my drive way and I would abandon my customers here for at least 3 days.. :D ... But thats just me..

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

#165

Post by mads »

thinkloop wrote: post #103
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.

I agree, but those cars and the attention is just so tempting. And then in Thailand. Imagine kite surfing, drinks, anything you want for small cash. Hell, you could even contract someone to write that damn file system people are whining about.

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

#166

Post by hobofan »

rightos wrote: post #136
hobofan wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess because it's by the IPFS developers And is intended to run on an IPFS network. After reading the replies to this comment, I started looking into Sia, and wanted to try it out, but it seems that I first have to buy some Sia before even being able to become a host (!), which is an instant turnoff. At the same time, I am already able to try out IPFS and have been able to develop apps using it for quite some ti…

The reason you need to buy some Siacoin in order to become a host is simple - you need collateral in case you fail to fulfill your hosting contracts - collateral of more than the value of those hosting contacts themselves. Turn off or not, that seems to be the only reasonable way to achieve private hosting contracts to me

Sure, I realize that it is for collateral. Nonetheless, that is why I spend my time doing stuff with IPFS rather than Siacoin.

I tried to answer your question about why people are hyped for IPFS/Filecoin (some only for one of the two) rather than the alternatives. It is not only because IPFS/Filecoin are "flashy", but because contrary to your claim developers _did_ have something working to play with from the same developers for quite some time which is also superior in some regards (public hosting).

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

#167

Post by otoburb »

ringaroundthetx wrote: post #129
brndnmtthws wrote: post #5

Filecoin is one of the ones I'd stay far away from. VCs got in before anyone else with special preferences, which taints the whole project. There are alternatives which don't come with the VC problem attached to them.

Most token sales are like this. There is no difference from the equity markets in this regard, except its WAY more liquid, WAY faster route to liquidity, AND there is no dilution. Sorry private equity, step to the left. Sorry egalitarian peons, take what you can get.

>>AND there is no dilution.

There's no dilution unless token stewards (usually structured as non-profit foundations) decide to increase the overall supply of tokens.

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

#168

Post by notheguyouthink »

I'm so lost, there are so many conversations here talking about IPFS compared to things like Dropbox and S3. Why?

To me, IPFS aims to solve a completely different problem. IPFS does not exist because we don't have means to host and distribute files - that is a problem solved by a hundred different entities. IPFS, as advertised in many mediums (video/etc), is a platform to distribute data from a local-first P2P medium. Like Bittorrent, but without ever leaving the local network/etc. Eg, transferring a file/video/site to someone next to you would not download the data from across the world twice.

Has the marketing changed? Because all of the videos I watched on it from months ago were all about reducing global bandwidth usage, utilizing local and distributed sources of the data as much possible.

Why is everyone acting like IPFS is trying to solve file hosting?

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

#169

Post by detaro »

notheguyouthink wrote: post #168

I'm so lost, there are so many conversations here talking about IPFS compared to things like Dropbox and S3. Why? To me, IPFS aims to solve a completely different problem. IPFS does not exist because we don't have means to host and distribute files - that is a problem solved by a hundred different entities. IPFS, as advertised in many mediums (video/etc), is a platform to distribute data from a local-first P2P medium…

Filecoin is trying to solve (paying for) file hosting through IPFS. Many of the existing projects around IPFS are "host X, but on IPFS".

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

#170

Post by kodablah »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #114

I think the top comment for this should be about Filecoin, instead of just another uninformed comments about Bitcoin that we see here every day. That said, one thing most people don't talk about is: I think most people think IPFS is disruptive, but I think IPFS itself is susceptible to disruption. The main reason why IPFS is useful is because there's not an easy way to do NAT traversal therefore it's super hard for p…

> Which means, if there's a new type of technology that lets people do just that--set up their own server anywhere and make it accessible via HTTP--then I don't see why we really need IPFS

I have a ton to say here, but I'll keep it to a few point. Tor onion services solve the setup-your-own-server issues, it's just not super easy yet. IPFS is needed regardless, because there is a need to distribute things when your machine isn't up and to solve discovery. What IPFS doesn't have natively is anonymity (tho there are onion transports conforming to libp2p transport iface) and distributed compute, but neither is that important.

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