Live data from Hacker News

Half of ICOs Die Within Four Months After Token Sales Finalized

bloomberg.com

61–70 of 433 posts

Re: Half of ICOs Die Within Four Months After Token Sales Finalized

#61
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eventually someone will realize that the smarter move is to create sustainable value over time. Most ICO's - if not all of them - are powered by the greater fool theory, sustainable value isn't really on the table. I see value in the blockchain and some in BTC (but not as much as others apparently do), but the whole ICO concept seems to be just a way to transfer wealth from greedy suckers to even greedier suckers.

One promising example is SpankChain. It's a cryptocurrency specifically designed for the porn market. Traditionally, it's hard to make money in porn due to fraud and chargebacks. Most payment processors also won't touch you. But crypto has no chargebacks, so it's a natural fit. One could argue that if you have to dip down to the level of porn just to find some value, ICOs are worth dismissing. But I would say that it…

If it is just payments, why have a special cryptocurrency? Or does it do something more clever?

Re: Half of ICOs Die Within Four Months After Token Sales Finalized

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>It's weird because people compare it to the early days of the Internet... but the early Internet was useful from its beginning Exactly why so much wealth was created by the Internet boom. The wealth came from utility that already existed, just needed to be harnessed to its fullest potential. ICO scams are based on generating wealth first and hoping that utility follows at some undetermined time in the future. It's…

Snake oil is actually very useful: https://www.organicfacts.net/health-benefits/oils/snake-oil.... My superpower: Taking things literally. Still more useful than the last 10 ICOs. And my bad jokes aren't as bad for the environment. 10k joke-coins pre-ICO and 2 downvotes for that one for me! We had three innovative ideas in the financial sector - certificate of debt, compounded interest and book money. And now the fou…

Can we offer an ICO for tokenized "taking things literally" jokes?

Re: Half of ICOs Die Within Four Months After Token Sales Finalized

#63

I'm so surprised that smart contracts aren't being used to release the funds over some set of time, with the ability for community to vote to block it if they feel team has stalled. Nobody needs $20 or $50m on day 1.

This exact idea is actually something Vitalik (founder of Ethereum) has proposed recently: https://ethresear.ch/t/explanation-of-daicos/465

It is important to remember that what we are seeing is a v1 of the ICO model - it is likely that future versions will be able to implement more controls and governance mechanisms like the kind you described.

Re: Half of ICOs Die Within Four Months After Token Sales Finalized

#64
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's weird because people compare it to the early days of the Internet... but the early Internet was useful from its beginning: you could at least send messages and files across the network, which was incredibly useful to academia and the military and was orders of magnitude more efficient than any alternative. How is running an ICO not useful to people? Get lot of money with only doing a lousy whitepaper, drive fe…

If you consider being the beneficiary of a boom in what is effectively fraud a "good thing," sure. I can driver a Ferrari if I literally rob people, too, but most people would consider the people I've hurt in the process when evaluating the merits of my actions.

I think that's the joke; that there are at least enough of those unethical people that they can make money off it.

Re: Half of ICOs Die Within Four Months After Token Sales Finalized

#65
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a serious question as I want to make sure I'm reading this right: CryptoKitties really had only 274 users in the past 24 hours? The USV/Andreessen company?

Yes, another source is here: http://www.rolldice.club/cryptokitties/ It's worth noting that at its peak when CryptoKitties transactions hogged the Ethereum network and made it barely useable, CryptoKitties had only 14k users.

Some things scale horizontally, some things scale vertically. But some things scale diagonally.

If I would build a system that gets DoS'd with 14k users I would get fired faster than the latest startup burns through VC money.

Re: Half of ICOs Die Within Four Months After Token Sales Finalized

#66
post #23

You can see the state (volume, # daily users) of some of these promised "dapps" here: https://dappradar.com . It is indeed a barren wasteland. And when a new popular ICO comes along, the Ethereum network struggles and fees skyrocket. It's weird because people compare it to the early days of the Internet... but the early Internet was useful from its beginning: you could at least send messages and files across the netw…

DAPP Radar is not the authoritative source for all Ethereum applications. There are many like Augur, Golem, MakerDAI, etc that aren't even included on that list. Depends on when "early days of internet" is defined? The internet could be seen as an evolution of ARPAnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET which was defined in the mid-1960s and took years to deploy and probably decades to evolve to the usefulness you…

As per your citation, ARPAnet came online in 1969 and emails were being exchanged by 1972, barely 3 years later.

Blockchains have been around for 10 years now and every year they cause bigger problems without actually solving any.

Re: Half of ICOs Die Within Four Months After Token Sales Finalized

#67
post #23

You can see the state (volume, # daily users) of some of these promised "dapps" here: https://dappradar.com . It is indeed a barren wasteland. And when a new popular ICO comes along, the Ethereum network struggles and fees skyrocket. It's weird because people compare it to the early days of the Internet... but the early Internet was useful from its beginning: you could at least send messages and files across the netw…

The early internet I used was just as barely usable as the Ethereum network is now. I remember being in the college computer lab and begging on simple things like a page to load. Just a few years later and I was able to watch videos on the computers streaming from the internet. Technology rapidly advances. I still realized back in those computer labs how revolutionary the internet was going to be, I feel the same way about crypto now.

Re: Half of ICOs Die Within Four Months After Token Sales Finalized

#68
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eventually someone will realize that the smarter move is to create sustainable value over time. Most ICO's - if not all of them - are powered by the greater fool theory, sustainable value isn't really on the table. I see value in the blockchain and some in BTC (but not as much as others apparently do), but the whole ICO concept seems to be just a way to transfer wealth from greedy suckers to even greedier suckers.

One promising example is SpankChain. It's a cryptocurrency specifically designed for the porn market. Traditionally, it's hard to make money in porn due to fraud and chargebacks. Most payment processors also won't touch you. But crypto has no chargebacks, so it's a natural fit. One could argue that if you have to dip down to the level of porn just to find some value, ICOs are worth dismissing. But I would say that it…

> Traditionally, it's hard to make money in porn due to fraud and chargebacks.

Is that so?

Tell me more...

Re: Half of ICOs Die Within Four Months After Token Sales Finalized

#69
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the facade must be maintained long enough for the checks to irrevocably clear, which can actually take a while. The big bad evil fiat government money system has the advantage and disadvantage of being able to claw back transactions for quite a while, since it's basically the fundamental primitive of the system that ensures integrity of the system. (That is, at the foundation, the money system tends not to…

> fiat government money system has the advantage and disadvantage of being able to claw back transactions for quite a while Recently helped a friend extract his company from a wire fraud scam. Wires, particularly international wires, are surprisingly irrevocable. You basically have to get the receiving bank to agree to send the money back.

Now that is the thing that should be fixed, instead of taking it to absurdity (i.e. immutability).

Re: Half of ICOs Die Within Four Months After Token Sales Finalized

#70
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snake oil is actually very useful: https://www.organicfacts.net/health-benefits/oils/snake-oil.... My superpower: Taking things literally. Still more useful than the last 10 ICOs. And my bad jokes aren't as bad for the environment. 10k joke-coins pre-ICO and 2 downvotes for that one for me! We had three innovative ideas in the financial sector - certificate of debt, compounded interest and book money. And now the fou…

Can we offer an ICO for tokenized "taking things literally" jokes?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN