Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Half of ICOs Die Within Four Months After Token Sales Finalized

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 433 posts

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

#91

Post by maxencecornet »

ashishb wrote: post #44

Are there any ICOs which resulted in a successful product? Please exclude crypto-exchanges like Binance.

Brave Browser / Basic attention Token is very successful although in it's early days

But Brendan Eich, the founder of the project, is much more experienced then any random ICO project founder in this space

I'm not sure he will succeed where Flattr failed, but we'll see !

Check out how many websites are already Brave/BAT publishers: https://batgrowth.com/publishers

Vice - freeCodeCamp - BitTorrent - xhamster - The Guardian - Washington Post - TinyUrl - JS Bin - Sitepoint - Smashing Magazine and much more are already verified publishers...

Even dappradar.com that was quoted in this thread !

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

#92

Post by [deleted] »

bendavis381 wrote: post #39
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…

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?

[deleted]

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

#93

Post by JumpCrisscross »

darawk wrote: post #90
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 rec…

> The transfer itself does not require trust

Cash transfers and barters are trustless. Wires are trustless (in being reasonably irrevocable) in a manner similar to cryptocurrencies (i.e. if we ignore the plumbing). Cryptocurrencies solve for trust in the most reliable part of the trust chain while exacerbating every other element of transaction risk.

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

#94

Post by lreeves »

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.

That's not really accurate though. Only in a perfect, unhackable world would you not have to trust anyone. People have their local wallets attacked and stolen through an incredibly diverse set of attacks, people fell for "mental wallet" concepts that were then easily stolen, and people have lost an enormous amount of value by trusting storage mechanisms and memory for passwords and wallets. Then on the flipside at least what, 80% of exchanges now have had compromises? Do you think this technology has really moved the bar forward around trust as a concept?

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

#95

Post by vkou »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #28
chollida1 wrote: post #12

So I've been doing alot of thinking lately about traditional VC and PE vs ICO's for work. Its pretty rare for VC and PE firms to just be blatantly ripped off like a good portion of ICO investors are. As far as I can this is due to 3 things. 1) Geography, Most VC/PE firms only invest in a particular country and know the laws as they relate to the contracts they sign with companies. This ensures that they can atleast t…

Right, but at that point, what's the difference between an ICO and a security? If I was an investor, why would I want to go into an ICO vs traditional means?

A non-security ICO coin is not a share, it's a pre-order for a product that may or may not ever exist.

It's like a Kickstarter project[1], except most of the backers don't actually want the backed product, they want to resell their pre-order to someone who does.

At least, that's how it's supposed to work, in theory. In practice, it's a hotbed for scams. Most of the re-sales happen from one speculator to another, until some fool is left holding a bag of worthless pre-orders.

[1] Which is also incredibly constrained, because it needs to do something useful with a cryptocurrency, and all the overhead and complexity associated with that. [2]

[2] Building a file-hosting service is not good enough - you have to make it a file-hosting service with a crypto-coin bolted on to it for some weird reason.

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

#96

Post by Lerc »

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. Like selling shares to raise capital but instead of shares, you get cryptocurrency tokens. Without regulation, it has a much lower barrier to entry, but some barriers are safety barriers.

There are people getting into crypto currencies purely because they hear about others making money doing so. This means there are also predators taking advantage of the lack of barriers. A crypto might not be a scam but when scams are easier to make than real things, the scams will be more numerous.

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

#97

Post by [deleted] »

darawk wrote: post #90
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 rec…

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by darawk »

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

That really depends on where you put 'beginning'. But more to the point, blockchains are useful now, just like the internet was. They're just not useful for all the things that are being promised (yet). Also, just like the internet wasn't.

> Now, all we see is rampant fraud and a complete disregard for the environment [0] with no gain in efficiency.

People never tire of pointing this out. Yet it completely ignores the fact that there are solutions to this problem that are in the works, and have been planned for a long time.

There are lots of problems with the crypto space. Fraud is rampant. Energy consumption is wasteful, temporarily. It's also not clear that dis-intermediating human institutions is actually what we want to do. But if you think it's all a fraud, or that there is no value, then you're just not thinking very hard.

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

#99

Post by mockingbirdy »

drcode wrote: post #89
mockingbirdy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Great. Now we just need enough spoiled rich 12yo girls and some get-rich-quick guys that bid on some imaginary kitties.

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

#100

Post by darawk »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #93
darawk wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 rec…

> The transfer itself does not require trust Cash transfers and barters are trustless. Wires are trustless (in being reasonably irrevocable) in a manner similar to cryptocurrencies ( i.e. if we ignore the plumbing). Cryptocurrencies solve for trust in the most reliable part of the trust chain while exacerbating every other element of transaction risk.

> Cash transfers and barters are trustless

Yes, but they require physical presence.

> Wires are trustless (in being reasonably irrevocable) in a manner similar to cryptocurrencies (i.e. if we ignore the plumbing).

Irrevocability is not the same as trustlessness. Your transaction is still being intermediated by an entity that can choose to appropriate your funds otherwise.

> Cryptocurrencies solve for trust in the most reliable part of the trust chain while exacerbating every other element of transaction risk.

I think I agree with this statement literally. The question is what price are we paying for that reliability? And does blockchain offer an alternative tradeoff that we might like better?

Post reply on HN