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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

#181

Post by anyfoo »

darawk wrote: post #140
hudon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. 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. The government subsidized it because its potential use was obvious. Email started being used in 1972, FTP in 1973. To compare these world-changing technologies that were invented and used merel…

> 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…

> The early internet did not have such lofty hopes, so its growth was more organic.

People forget that in the early days of the Internet and its predecessors, most computers were still bigger than a washing machine, mostly available only to universities and big or specialized corporations, and data lines were limited to bandwidths many orders of magnitudes narrower than today.

The Internet had an inherent hard limit on scale and availability simply by the technology that was available at the time. Not only did the Internet then grow with the available technology, filling it out, its very nature provided a great lever to all research and development, leading to the exponential advancement of information technology that we live in today.

There is no comparison, at all.

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

#182

Post by sonnyblarney »

garmaine wrote: post #20
MBCook wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they ran away with the money and don’t want to be as easy to track.

Missing the point. TFA uses a metric which is unable to distinguish between success (working instead of tweeting) and failure (scam). That's beyond wrong...

No, 'the point' is that these ICO's seem to be funding not much at all, and though the metrics may be 'iffy', that's a function of the total lack of transparency of these ICO companies in the first place.

Every regular company that has taken on funding at least has a 'web site' with 'some information' and definitely communicates with investors etc. on what's up.

That it's not really even possible to know 'whats up' with companies that have raked in millions is in of itself very telling. Telling enough to keep me and most others miles away.

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

#183

Post by mehrdadn »

darawk wrote: post #177
mehrdadn wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the same with credit cards, wires, etc.? They make money from your transactions too.

That's true, but the degrees of freedom are different. The node processing your transaction cannot steal your money in crypto. It can only choose not to broadcast your transaction, and they are also in perfect competition with all the other nodes. Which means that if one node chooses not to process your tx, another will soon.

> That's true, but the degrees of freedom are different. The node processing your transaction cannot steal your money in crypto. It can only choose not to broadcast your transaction, and they are also in perfect competition with all the other nodes. Which means that if one node chooses not to process your tx, another will soon.

Hence we circle back to exactly what I said in the last line of my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17493508

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

#184

Post by tim333 »

NathanCH wrote: post #51
matte_black wrote: post #29

Is there legit money to be made in ICOs without running a fraud?

Forget money, I would like to know of one legit ICO. One single ICO that has a product. One.

Ethereum? It was basically the first ICO.

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

#185

Post by agotterer »

How is this possible? Most of these ICOs are raising way more money than a tradition VC backed seed/series A round. Shouldn’t they have enough funding to limp along for few years? I wonder if it takes 4 months to give up on the idea or steal the funds?

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

#186

Post by bduerst »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #112
darawk wrote: post #98

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 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 d…

yep. the internet was around for years before it was viable. So were computers.

Segway has been around for years and still isn't viable for more than tour rentals.

Just because it's a technology doesn't guarantee it will be as successful as other technologies.

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

#187

Post by notahacker »

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 fairer comparison might be between services intended and hyped for mass public use. In that respect the nine year old Bitcoin protocol and its much hyped offspring and first nine years of the "information superhighway" world wide web are, to put it mildly, not comparable in a manner remotely flattering to crypto. And crypto had the web as a vector to push adoption and didn't require a high proportion of users to buy their first personal computer.

Sure, Ethereum will definitely have more things built on it, and attract new users and in all likelihood become more user friendly. But if you can write or evaluate bulletproof code, resolve oracle problems and trust the token's value to remain stable you can automate some transactions without third parties isn't a proposition as obviously universally appealing once bandwidth and adoption is there as anyone can be given access to anything that can be shared on a computer anywhere, any time.

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

#188

Post by jopsen »

chrisco255 wrote: post #139
confiscate wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What attributes about crypto, makes you feel the same way? i.e. that it is going to be revolutionary Because the example you said about the internet (from loading webpage to video streaming) does sound amazing. What's the "parallel" for crypto that you see?

Streaming money. What if you were paid by the second instead of by the hour? Or your bank account filled up live as you worked or performed services? Or companies that provided services to other companies were compensated in the same way? Businesses live and die by cash flow. What if cash flows instantly 24/7? What if you were able to do micropayments efficiently on the web? What if many contractual agreements betwee…

None of the what the crypto-currencies promise is impossible to do with a few independent central vendors implementing that same standards for payments and contracts.

And centralized solutions will always be faster.

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

#189

Post by themagician »

Captain_Usher wrote: post #83
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 m…

Is the company required to buy back the coins?

I’m not sure I get the point of an ICO. It seems like a company issuing monopoly money. It even seems like this would have been possible before crypto—literally just Monopoly money to people and let them trade amongst themselves.

I guess Monopoly money is easy to duplicate… but so is crypto in a way because you can just start your own currency that uses the same block chain to create more tokens.

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

#190

Post by jopsen »

agotterer wrote: post #185

How is this possible? Most of these ICOs are raising way more money than a tradition VC backed seed/series A round. Shouldn’t they have enough funding to limp along for few years? I wonder if it takes 4 months to give up on the idea or steal the funds?

Isn't it mostly the valuations that are high?
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