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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]

#181

Post by wellboy »

alexasmyths wrote: post #39
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…

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…

No one is paying bitcoin to be hustled in the press except advertisers indirectly, since writint $10,000 barrier broken gains lots and lots of clicks --> more ad money earned.

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

#182

Post by posterboy »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #156
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…

Blog-ish websites are unreliable even when they have real hosting. If you put it on someone's laptop it gets so much worse. To me, the reliability boost is the killer feature of IPFS. > You don't really need a globally addressable immutable file storage, because unless you're dealing with static images, a lot of files DO change all the time, and people want to store and share files privately. While it boosts reliabil…

you can just store an encrypted file or archive

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

#183

Post by XR0CSWV3h3kZWg »

hobofan wrote: post #178
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you just want enough siacoin to become a host I can probably send some over. I already have some and haven't gotten around to hosting yet.

Thanks for the offer, but from what I've read over the last hours I'm not really too eager to try it out anymore.

Fair enough, I'd like to hear what you think/read if you'd like to share.

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

#184

Post by Dylan16807 »

posterboy wrote: post #182
Dylan16807 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blog-ish websites are unreliable even when they have real hosting. If you put it on someone's laptop it gets so much worse. To me, the reliability boost is the killer feature of IPFS. > You don't really need a globally addressable immutable file storage, because unless you're dealing with static images, a lot of files DO change all the time, and people want to store and share files privately. While it boosts reliabil…

you can just store an encrypted file or archive

You can, but the whole thing is built on ease of use, and you don't get ease of use if you have to manually encrypt your selfies.

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

#185

Post by thaumasiotes »

chockZ wrote: post #52
pavlov wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same risk with a $10k diamond ring, right? Yet people buy those from Tiffany's.

Doesn't a diamond ring lose value once it is sold, though, in terms of re-sell value? A ring worth one bitcoin is not going to lose value once it is sold (aside from market volatility).

Yes, a diamond ring cannot be resold, since the price of diamonds has been decoupled from the difficulty of getting them. You're not paying that jeweler for the diamond on the ring; you're paying him a special fee for being a De Beers recognized diamond merchant. A bitcoin doesn't have that problem.

However, a ring inscribed with a private key controlling one bitcoin will lose its value immediately, because whoever comes into possession of (or ever sees) the ring will move the bitcoin.

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

#186

Post by AVTizzle »

qubex wrote: post #177
loceng wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should we say instead that it has benefit all sellers, no benefit simply for holding? That misappropriation or mischaracterization will of course comfort everyone holding - until everyone tries to liquidate too quickly or investor money runs out. The scary part is that because it is global and decentralized, it could take a long time for investor money to run out - allowing enough time for manipulation through market…

As an economist, I am much more comfortable with that statement It is somewhat a worse situation than you describe, as though bitcoin is legal tender nowhere, it is assuming many of the features of a component of broad money supply (somewhere in the neighbourhood of M3 or thereabouts, so it can self-perpetuate for a long time indeed). Also, as a consequence of its construction and finite supply of bitcoins, it does n…

Hi Qubex, I appreciate your thinking here.

I’m fascinated by the topics of economics and currency controls here and would would love to discuss some of these issues with you (relevant to a current project).

Can we email? My contact is in my bio.

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

#187

Post by quickthrower2 »

marcofiset wrote: post #153
jcoffland wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a load of BS. Of course you can sell off a large Bitcoin holding. People do it all the time. That you think otherwise is ignorance and bias.

You can sell as long as people are buying.

That also applies to shares, real estate, apples, Teslas, ...

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

#188

Post by cmars »

kodablah wrote: post #170
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 m…

> Tor onion services solve the setup-your-own-server issues, it's just not super easy yet.

Lately I've been trying to make this easier. I developed ormesh (https://github.com/cmars/ormesh) in an attempt to simplify setting up hidden services for private use.

I think both Tor and IPFS are both awesome and useful decentralization projects, they just have different use cases & characteristics. AIUI IPFS lacks fine-grained access controls. Last time I looked, it seemed like I either had to run all my own infrastructure of IPFS nodes with pre-shared private keys, or open everything to the public and encrypt on top of that... I prefer the Tor hidden service model, where I can decide on a per-service basis how I want to share it, revoke client access if necessary, and have my traffic securely routed on existing infrastructure.

Edit: fixed link

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

#189

Post by cmars »

posterboy wrote: post #182
Dylan16807 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blog-ish websites are unreliable even when they have real hosting. If you put it on someone's laptop it gets so much worse. To me, the reliability boost is the killer feature of IPFS. > You don't really need a globally addressable immutable file storage, because unless you're dealing with static images, a lot of files DO change all the time, and people want to store and share files privately. While it boosts reliabil…

you can just store an encrypted file or archive

In a forward-secure manner?

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

#190

Post by loceng »

qubex wrote: post #177
loceng wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should we say instead that it has benefit all sellers, no benefit simply for holding? That misappropriation or mischaracterization will of course comfort everyone holding - until everyone tries to liquidate too quickly or investor money runs out. The scary part is that because it is global and decentralized, it could take a long time for investor money to run out - allowing enough time for manipulation through market…

As an economist, I am much more comfortable with that statement It is somewhat a worse situation than you describe, as though bitcoin is legal tender nowhere, it is assuming many of the features of a component of broad money supply (somewhere in the neighbourhood of M3 or thereabouts, so it can self-perpetuate for a long time indeed). Also, as a consequence of its construction and finite supply of bitcoins, it does n…

Just a few days ago the thought came to me that a government mandated crypto-currency in Canada might be well-named as the Loonie.

Also, I am wondering how hard it would be to create a model - interactive online - that has different models of comparing a Ponzi scheme scale operation vs. a Bitcoin-like operation.. Is there software or online platforms for economists to run these kinds of analysis?

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