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Half of ICOs Die Within Four Months After Token Sales Finalized

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

#81

Post by JumpCrisscross »

xur17 wrote: post #75
hudon wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Blockchains have been around for 10 years now and every year they cause bigger problems without actually solving any. Being able to transfer value between two parties without having to trust anyone has value. We can argue about how much value, but it's non-zero.

> without having to trust anyone has value

There is a lot of trust involved in a cryptocurrency transfer. You have to trust your technical competence to securely mount your wallet. You have to trust the wallet you're sending money to is the wallet it's supposed to go to. You have to trust the person you're sending money todo what you're paying them to. You have to trust the network to maintain the value and convertibility of the currency you're sending and receiving. Et cetera, et cetera

In practice, nobody wants to do these things. So we see centralization at exchanges. Precisely in the way people not wanting to handle cash use banks.

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

#83

Post by Captain_Usher »

tiglionabbit wrote: post #48

Do you all have any idea what this is talking about? I've never heard of ICO and you're all using it as if it's some familiar and obvious thing with no explanation.

An ICO is an "Initial Coin Offering", it's supposed to be like an IPO except instead of offering shares, you're selling cryptocurrency coins. ICOs are usually framed as a way to fund a project or business, usually related to cryptocurrencies or blockchain technology in some way. The idea is that the project's success will increase the value of the coins you bought and you'll be able to sell them for more later.

The main difference is that the coin is just a coin, buying it won't make you a shareholder and you aren't subject to the regulation that IPOs and shareholders are. That regulation makes it difficult to scam investors by starting a dummy company, pretending it's a valuable operation, selling shares in an IPO, and then running away with the money. Doing this with an ICO is much easier, and there's a lot of concern about how many ICOs are frauds.

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

#84

Post by starshadowx2 »

tiglionabbit wrote: post #48

Do you all have any idea what this is talking about? I've never heard of ICO and you're all using it as if it's some familiar and obvious thing with no explanation.

Initial Coin Offering - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/initial-coin-offering-i...

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

#85

Post by shawn »

detaro wrote: post #61
shawn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A good question. And the answer is a bit surprising: community.

If you search for spankchain, you'll likely end up on their discord. There are friendly people to help answer your questions and set you up.

It's the same advantage YC has: by being a meta-layer, you end up attracting everyone who's trying to do anything in the space, rather than one specific aspect. Eventually, the network effects are most of the value.

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

#86

Post by SkyMarshal »

hudon wrote: 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…

>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.

I don't think the ICO's are being compared to the Internet itself, but to the many early attempts at building webapps on it that ultimately collapsed in the dot com crash. That's what most ICOs are.

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

#89

Post by drcode »

mockingbirdy wrote: post #65
hudon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair, there's a known solution to the cryptokitty scalability problem (a particular type of "plasma chain" tuned for nonfungible tokens) and this is being worked on and will likely see the light of day pretty soon. This of course does not solve the bigger problem: the small user base.

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

#90

Post by darawk »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #81
xur17 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blockchains have been around for 10 years now and every year they cause bigger problems without actually solving any. Being able to transfer value between two parties without having to trust anyone has value. We can argue about how much value, but it's non-zero.

> without having to trust anyone has value There is a lot of trust involved in a cryptocurrency transfer. You have to trust your technical competence to securely mount your wallet. You have to trust the wallet you're sending money to is the wallet it's supposed to go to. You have to trust the person you're sending money todo what you're paying them to. You have to trust the network to maintain the value and convertib…

> There is a lot of trust involved in a cryptocurrency transfer. You have to trust your technical competence to have securely mounted your wallet. You have to trust the wallet you're sending money to is the wallet it's supposed to go to. You have to trust the person you're sending money to will do what you're paying them to do. You have to trust the network to maintain the value of the currency you're sending and receiving. Et cetera, et cetera

That's clearly not the point. The transfer itself does not require trust. That's the value.

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