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Half of ICOs Die Within Four Months After Token Sales Finalized

bloomberg.com

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

#151

Post by craigc »

Haha what do you know. Another day, another anti-crypto article on the top of Hacker News.

In this case, I agree with the overall sentiment. I don’t think these companies are actually “dying” though, but rather they were probably created as get rich quick schemes, so they took the millions of dollars they raised and then sailed off to some island somewhere.

From the report

> We use intensity of tweets from the cryptocurrency official Twitter account after the ICO to estimate that the survival rate for startups after 120 days (from the end of the ICO) is only 44.2%, assuming that all firms inactive on Twitter in the fifth month did not survive.

Not sure how I feel about that methodology, but probably many of these companies never planned to actually issue a product in the first place so it may very well be accurate.

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

#152

Post by cslarson »

ashishb wrote: post #44

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

Golem is live. Augur is going live today. MakerDAO has a very interesting stablecoin called Dai that's live. Status' mobile app is now mainnet by default. DigixDAO is live. And many more in testnet phases. But don't let reality mess with the cynical perception that the hn crowd wants to portray!

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

#153

Post by darawk »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #137
darawk wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The frequency of each of coins being stolen from wallets, being lost by exchanges or pilfered by ICO frauds is far, far higher than anything happening at proper banks. What does that have to do with what we're talking about?

> What does that have to do with what we're talking about? Generally speaking, if my things get stolen, "it was stolen by X and not Y" is not a value-adding rebuttal. It is actually counterproductive if X ( e.g. , a cryptocurrency thief) is harder to gain recourse against than Y ( e.g. an FDIC-insured bank).

> Generally speaking, if my things get stolen, "it was stolen by X and not Y" is not a value-adding rebuttal. It is actually counterproductive if X (e.g., a cryptocurrency thief) is harder to gain recourse against than Y (e.g. an FDIC-insured bank).

That's certainly true. But the issues around people losing their coins and having their keys stolen can be solved by better UX and application security. Essentially crypto transmutes the problem domain, from a people problem to an application design problem. It's still a problem. It still needs to be solved, but the domain-transfer allows it to be solved cheaply at scale in a way that the human one can't be.

In other words, i'm making the claim that the issues you cited are not essential properties of blockchains, merely transient properties of their present implementations and UX. If you want to make the case that they are in fact central, i'd be happy to listen to that though.

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

#154

Post by cslarson »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #6

The research in the article was not quite clear. Was their only “sign of life” measured by tweets? What about capitalization, transaction volume...anything?

Yes, this is a totally trash article but just look at how the hn crowd laps it up because it fits in with their narrative about this tech. What a retrograde place this has become.

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

#155

Post by this_user »

chrisco255 wrote: post #130
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.

Emails were being exchanged, to what extent? Could you email anyone in the world in 1972? No, like two people could e-mail each other. It's not like you had Gmail or even AOL in 1972. Yes, email was used for business purposes in the 80s...but it took a long, long time for the internet to reach mass adoption and maturity. Decades. Meanwhile, Ethereum was launched in 2015. Unless you think the tech has hit an evolution…

The rate of adoption of new technologies has sped up almost exponentially over time. You cannot compare email with Ethereum because of that. If you want to compare it to something, compare it to Docker which was introduced in 2013, and now containers are everywhere, because they are actually useful.

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

#156

Post by distances »

blocked_again wrote: post #109

Like it or not blockhains are here to stay. Nobody is going to run behind VCs looking for elite money in 20 years from now. Isnt it obvious? Blockhains are going to redistribute the wealth from the wealthy elite few to the masses. More and more wealth is being generated from nowhere. Just because there are some spammy ICOs now doesn't mean it's the end of the blockhain and ICO. This is going to be another rare instan…

As so often with blockchain topics, I have hard time reading if comments are satire or not. I'm assuming this was satirical?

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

#157

Post by ThomPete »

Most companies built on the TCP/IP protocol dies.

I really don't think this is very meaningful metric for anything.

Sure where there is a lot of money there is a lot of people trying to weasel their way in. But so far the usage has grown.

Much more companies will fail just like on "the internet" but the blockchain just like the TCP/IP protocol is here to stay and the coming generations will adopt it as if it's the most natural thing in the world just like we did with the internet.

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

#158

Post by darawk »

hudon wrote: post #150
darawk wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if we put "beginning" as in "before it was even called the Internet"? Indeed, ARPANET, which came online in 1969, saw fast growth in the United States in the 70s. Nodes came online to use it, not to make a quick buck. People use cryptocurrency too. For value transfer, and to a more limited extent, for dapps like Augur. You seem to be criticizing the delta between the lofty hopes for it and it's actual usage. T…

> People use cryptocurrency too. For value transfer, and to a more limited extent, for dapps like Augur. Soooo, buying drugs and illegal gambling? Sure, I'll give you that one. My argument rephrased: "Because cryptocurrency investors have repeatedly made claims that don't pan out, we can be reasonably skeptical and concerned about their energy consumption until they actually fix it or at the very least provide peer-r…

> Soooo, buying drugs and illegal gambling? Sure, I'll give you that one.

Yes, although also remittance payments, and some usage in places with unstable currencies like Venezuela. Hard to gauge how much, though.

> My argument rephrased: "Because cryptocurrency investors have repeatedly made claims that don't pan out, we can be reasonably skeptical and concerned about their energy consumption until they actually fix it or at the very least provide peer-reviewed scientific analysis on how it will be fixed."

While that is, in the abstract, a fair argument I don't think there are actually that many examples of it in practice. Vitalik didn't claim Ethereum would be a world computer right away. He's always been clear and explicit about the scaling roadmap. I don't think the promises of the core devs of Ethereum or Bitcoin have been overstated or unmet. If you believe otherwise though, i'd be happy to listen to your argument.

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

#159

Post by ENGNR »

empath75 wrote: post #145
ENGNR wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Securities deregulation. On the one hand, investors deserve protections. On the other, has the regulation gone too far by design, locking out the middle class it used to serve so well. Why do companies wait until most of the value is already realized before they IPO these days Crypto could be Uber for securities, ignoring the regulator and using technology to self regulate, or by operating out of countries with light…

This is one of the most naive, starry-eyed posts I’ve ever seen here. If you deregulate securities you’re just going to see a whole bunch of senior citizens fleeced by high tech boiler rooms.

Geez sorry for outlining both sides of an argument in response to a question, hivemind downvotes are strong today

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

#160

Post by CaptainZapp »

darawk wrote: post #100
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mos…

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

Personally I trust those entities much more than some shlocky fly-by-night crypto exchange.

To each his own, I guess.

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