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Tezos founders push for legal bailout from Swiss foundation

reuters.com

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Re: Tezos founders push for legal bailout from Swiss foundation

#81

Post by Hermel »

nivertech wrote: post #67
paulsutter wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum was the first cryptocurrency to form a foundation in Zug, and its a popular structure. Generally the code and system are open sourced, and a nonprofit foundation controls the money raised in the ICO. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/500-million-business_crypto-pig...

All those Zug-incorporated ICOs exploiting loopholes in civil law: 1. Tokenizing non-profit foundations (stiftungs), while traditional "stiftung foundation has no shares or members" [1] 2. Pretending that token allocations are unrelated to donations/contributions. 3. Using nonprofit foundations for clearly for-profit speculative activity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung

It's not so clear. For Ethereum, it worked well. The foundation is non-profit, financing the creation of an open-source system. And those who donated get to use one instance that system. The rights to use the system come in the firm of transferrable coins, and can turn out to be valuable.

It is not an ideal construction, but can make sense. The foundation is used as a funding vehicle for a common prpject, but it is still non-profit.

Re: Tezos founders push for legal bailout from Swiss foundation

#82

Post by Hermel »

microtherion wrote: post #78
nivertech wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All those Zug-incorporated ICOs exploiting loopholes in civil law: 1. Tokenizing non-profit foundations (stiftungs), while traditional "stiftung foundation has no shares or members" [1] 2. Pretending that token allocations are unrelated to donations/contributions. 3. Using nonprofit foundations for clearly for-profit speculative activity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung

As a Swiss, I'm saddened that my country seems to have found yet another way to get involved in shady financial dealings.

The problem is not that setting up such a structure is possible, the problem is the lack of suitable alternative legal structures that are better suited for the job. For that, regulation needs to be relaxed.

Re: Tezos founders push for legal bailout from Swiss foundation

#83

Post by mrschwabe »

nivertech wrote: post #67
paulsutter wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum was the first cryptocurrency to form a foundation in Zug, and its a popular structure. Generally the code and system are open sourced, and a nonprofit foundation controls the money raised in the ICO. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/500-million-business_crypto-pig...

All those Zug-incorporated ICOs exploiting loopholes in civil law: 1. Tokenizing non-profit foundations (stiftungs), while traditional "stiftung foundation has no shares or members" [1] 2. Pretending that token allocations are unrelated to donations/contributions. 3. Using nonprofit foundations for clearly for-profit speculative activity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung

Are they 'exploiting loopholes' or are they simply looking for a hole from which to escape exploitation?

Re: Tezos founders push for legal bailout from Swiss foundation

#84

Post by Pyxl101 »

pavlov wrote: post #2

Tezos, the Theranos of ICOs. When you know enough rich people, you can raise a lot of money on a PDF of promises. With all the money Tezos has, they're probably going to do what Theranos did with Walgreens: pay their way into a fancy big partnership that gives the impression that there's something actually going on.

You know what's ironic? Tim Draper, the first investor in Theranos, is also an investor in Tezos (according to the article).

Re: Tezos founders push for legal bailout from Swiss foundation

#85

Post by keypusher »

Matt_Mickiewicz wrote: post #71
pdog wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say if you want to master something, teach it. Looking forward to more crypto-focused podcasts. It's always preferable to hear from more technical guests who aren't just trying to sell something.

Unchained is probably the best crypto podcast currently, but would love other recommendations.

CoinMastery is quite good, although more focused on market analysis. I think Unchained gets great guests but I cannot stand the interviewer's style.

Re: Tezos founders push for legal bailout from Swiss foundation

#86

Post by Expeditus419 »

xorcist wrote: post #80
berberous wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to on-chain governance you mention (i.e. the built-in voting features to decide protocol changes and avoid the civil war that's going on in Bitcoin world), they use a functional programming language that is supposed to be much safer and easier to code than the Ethereum language.

The idea of non developers voting on protocol changes fascinates me. I wonder if the early adopters of the car would vote for it to have four legs and combust hay? Taking the risk to appeal to some developer elitism here, it is still important to realize the different needs of those who will build future products on the technology as opposed to those about to turn a quick buck on a use case that already exists. I gue…

Well said. What you describe is not well understood by both those leading these projects and the coin flippers looking for a quick buck.

Re: Tezos founders push for legal bailout from Swiss foundation

#87

Post by corford »

jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #54

1. ICO founders are getting a quick education in the fact that "anyone can sue anyone at any time" -- no matter what paperwork you have folks sign. 2. What are the damages if they just give the money/coins back? That's the easiest solution for these ICOs: a 100 days buy back/escrow period? 3. Another easy solution is to have these ICOs hold the proceeds in escrow and release of funds quarterly for five years to the s…

>3. Another easy solution is to have these ICOs hold the proceeds in escrow and release of funds quarterly for five years to the startups/projects and giving the investors the ability to refund half or 75% of their remaining commitment (i.e. a 25-50% penalty for leaving the project early).

I've seen something similar to this in another ICO. They set up an ethereum smart contract that would distribute 90% of funds raised to the project over 4 years. If an investor wanted out, they could send their tokens to the contract and (iirc) it would burn them and refund the investor with ETH at a 10% haircut to the original buy price. Alas can't quite remember the ICO or the exact details (it was in a random whitepaper I read).

Re: Tezos founders push for legal bailout from Swiss foundation

#88

Post by runeks »

xorcist wrote: post #79
MichaelAO wrote: post #73

The Bitcoin Uncensored interview with Arthur Breitman is interesting to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsY5wXj4Xm8

It was a very interesting interview, mostly for the parts that weren't about Tezos. Breitman explains the use case for Turing complete smart contracts: Spending limits. Everything else can be implemented by m-of-n multisig and off-chain oracles. This is something anyone about to invest in smart contract technology should think long and hard about.

> Breitman explains the use case for Turing complete smart contracts: Spending limits.

Does he have a good explanation for this? Because I fail to see how something as simple as spending limits requires Turing completeness.

Re: Tezos founders push for legal bailout from Swiss foundation

#89

Post by flunhat »

igorgue wrote: post #44
flunhat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just write a compiler for that functional language (I think OCaml) that outputs EVM bytecode? Seems very doable from afar...

Tezos itself is written in OCaml: https://github.com/tezos/tezos So what you say is exactly what they did but to their chain not EVM.

I know, I was referring to that in my post. My question is why it required their own chain. Ethereum's is open source, so more bytecodes and functionality could be added to the EVM to make it appropriate for safer languages to compile down to it. I suspect the reason Tezos didn't do that is because they wanted to cash in on the hype.

Re: Tezos founders push for legal bailout from Swiss foundation

#90

Post by ddon »

corv wrote: post #14
fiatjaf wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't remember a single ICO that has brought anything useful to the market yet. You can say Ethereum, but it wasn't an ICO properly speaking. Even if it was, a single good example in hundreds isn't enough. Ripple didn't have an ICO, Bitcoin Cash didn't, Zcash didn't, Monero didn't, Stellar didn't.

Why wasn't Ethereum an ICO? Arguably that was the model for all other ICOs and the platform for the vast majority.

Ethereum had an ICO, back in 2014:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sal...

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