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

391–400 of 433 posts

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

#391

Post by tehabe »

"Still, all investors should probably sell their coins within the first six months, the study found."

This is a baffling statement, mostly because if you sell your "coins" to someone and they keep them too long, they will lose everything. Which could lead to liability questions.

I mean, you buy those coins and sell them as fast as you can, because you know that they won't be worth anything within in days or weeks, it could be argued that you committed security fraud. Well it could also argued that the ICO itself is already fraud, because of the huge risk involved.

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

#393

Post by confiscate »

aclsid wrote: post #323
confiscate wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If crypto, being "not controlled by a central authority", solves inflation, surely it would already have replaced the default currency in Venezuela by now? "Authorities have .. permitted trading of bitcoin in Venezuela, though they have heavily fined and detained people who use computers to earn bitcoins by auditing online cryptocurrency transactions. Such “mining” operations use immense amounts of electricity, which…

They have a national registry that you need to subscribe to if you are a miner. That and you also need to keep in handy your customs paperwork to prove that you paid entry duties for the equipment. Otherwise you open yourself to police extortion.

does extortion happen regardless? Because the article seems to imply that the miners were mining legally, but where extorted by police anyways

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

#394

Post by aiCeivi9 »

shawn wrote: post #56
jacquesm wrote: post #22

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…

Does it actually solve the problem or just move it by one step/layer? Payment processors are already blocking cryptocurrency exchanges since best way to use stolen credit card is to buy cryptocurrency.

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

#395

Post by plttn »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #138
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?

https://i.redd.it/l5y9p9nqwu811.png This sums it up better than I could. The wrenching of power away from centralized authorities and organizations (which we have seen abuse us and our privacy mercilessly for their gain) to decentralized applications with no middlemen, that are free of censorship, and can not be "stopped."

I'd hire a lawyer because I trust their legal knowledge.

So without a bank, who's going to loan you money? Because unless you're donating pennies from hundreds of thousands of people, it's going to be an entity with a fair amount of $CURRENCY, so basically a bank.

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

#396

Post by aiCeivi9 »

mikeschmatz wrote: post #274
RIMR wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you understand the concept of a stock share? Well, just remove the company, the product, and the regulation, and that's an ICO. The issuer of the coins/tokens do not have to buy anything back. The idea is that they will increase in value and function, and others will want to buy them from you. It goes like this: 1. "RichCoin" is created and the creators begin selling them at 5,000 Richcoins for 1 Bitcoin. Ads are…

> 6. The creators of RichCoin, who long ago converted their 1000 Bitcoins to $5,000,000 USD, move to a private island and never work again. Is it that easy to turn BTC to cash? I heard most exchanges have no way to withdraw real dollars.

Shouldn't be a problem with coinbase or other large exchanges. Getting the cash out of bank might be actually harder, AML systems will flag huge transfers from known crypt-exchanges.

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

#397

Post by darawk »

wpietri wrote: post #356
darawk wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's your evidence for this? I've used it for that. People use it on darknet markets for value transfer. I have seen many people claim to use it in Venezuela, though I can't confirm that (one of them posted in this thread [1]). > Bitcoin's total TPS is circa 2-3. [1] And presumably a small fraction of that is actual money transfer. In contrast, M-Pesa, a digital money system that started about the same time and h…

I appreciate your willingness to at least contemplate that Bitcoin might have flaws, which is better than most Bitcoin advocates. But you share one of the habits that makes these discussions so frustrating. You substitute marginal examples and handwaves at the future when asked for clear present evidence. The Lightning network might possibly one day increase capacity to infinite TPS. It doesn't yet, and reasonable pe…

> You substitute marginal examples and handwaves at the future when asked for clear present evidence.

Such is unfortunately the nature of all predictive discussion. I don't think i'm being any more speculative than anyone discussing say, autonomous cars, or similarly 'somewhere on the horizon' technologies.

> It doesn't yet, and reasonable people think it never will. E.g.: https://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/175418385308/why-the-lig....

There's a decent bit going on in that link, but point by point:

> 1. it doesn’t work. the software is absolute dogshit. buggy as hell.

This is just saying the current iteration is buggy. That's no counter-argument to the concept.

> 1.5. it can’t work. the mesh network problem

The difficulty of this problem depends on the number of relevant nodes, and the way you structure the network itself. He even cites a good example - BGP. He claims that BGP works because the nodes trust each other, but regardless of them trusting each other, they solve the mesh network problem. That trust is not integral to the solving of the mesh network problem.

> 2. the whole idea is dumb. nobody wants a network of prepaid channels.

Now this sounds like a decent argument. Except that, one could argue that your bank account and credit card are simply prepaid channels. If the LN gets up to scale, and if it achieves sufficient node liquidity that you can pay essentially anyone...then I don't see how this prepaid channel differs in any way from a traditional bank account.

> 3. the LN solves a problem that doesn’t exist. the idea is to make transactions fast again

The LN may or may not cause merchants to adopt Bitcoin for payments. But it definitely solves the more narrow "Bitcoin doesn't scale" problem.

> 4. the LN is coin-agnostic - so it isn’t an excuse for bitcoin’s unscalability

This doesn't even logically follow. It's just a complete non-sequitur. The LN is an excuse for Bitcoins not scaling yet. The LN can also be used to scale other coins. It may be that people prefer those other coins once they've achieved scale.

> Do you have clear evidence otherwise? Not anecdote, not what it possibly does, but actual evidence?

It's extremely hard to get data for something like that. But the clearest cut case is darknet markets. Cryptocurrencies are definitely actually used there for real commerce.

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

#398

Post by pwinnski »

darawk wrote: post #235
pwinnski wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The statement you are defending was "Being able to transfer value between two parties without having to trust anyone has value." Compared to wire transfers, one is required to trust the intermediary in that case. I think at that point it becomes fair to ask: what is the likelihood that I am going to lose money unexpectedly to my credit union, or my recipient to her bank? And then by comparison, what is the likelihood…

> Compared to wire transfers, one is required to trust the intermediary in that case. You're totally right. But let me flip the question around a little bit. What would our financial system look like if we didn't have to place so much trust in our intermediaries? It's not that banks aren't trustworthy. They are. They're extremely good stewards of the public trust, for the most part. But the fact that we place so much…

I hear what you're saying about banks stifling innovation. I think current blockchain alternatives highlight the tradeoffs, though.

I think risk is associated with stores of value. "I rob banks because that's where the money is." So we move the stores of value from banks to blockchain exchanges and hot wallets, and the risk moves accordingly. Now, instead of the risk being borne by organizations with decades or centuries of experience mitigating it, backed by the Fed, it's borne by people who barely understand the wallet software they downloaded, and Magic: The Gathering card traders who aren't as smart as they thought they were, and people who are absolutely definitely sure that smart contra--oops, let's just "fix" that.

So what you describe as centralized stores of trust stifling innovation can also be described as centralized stores of risk mitigating loss. And I think that's pretty much what we've seen so far.

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

#399

Post by darawk »

jonhendry18 wrote: post #369
darawk wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compared to wire transfers, one is required to trust the intermediary in that case. You're totally right. But let me flip the question around a little bit. What would our financial system look like if we didn't have to place so much trust in our intermediaries? It's not that banks aren't trustworthy. They are. They're extremely good stewards of the public trust, for the most part. But the fact that we place so much…

"But the fact that we place so much trust in them has systemic effects that are stifling to innovation" Large banks have a lot of money to buy influence; that's the source of their systemic risk. But you can do wire transfers at small banks and credit unions.

Yes, but even those small institutions are enormously careful with what they do, and are regulated heavily.

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

#400

Post by darawk »

kvakva wrote: post #364
darawk wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compared to wire transfers, one is required to trust the intermediary in that case. You're totally right. But let me flip the question around a little bit. What would our financial system look like if we didn't have to place so much trust in our intermediaries? It's not that banks aren't trustworthy. They are. They're extremely good stewards of the public trust, for the most part. But the fact that we place so much…

How exactly blockchains helps with that? It's open protocol which helps but most of the people interact with it through centralized points wallets providers, exchanges etc and we already see classic centralization. It seems to me similar as it is with Facebook which interacts with open protocols but is many people have to go through it and solutions seem to be legislatively rather than technological(although I hope p…

I think the main point is having an open protocol built on top of decentralized, trusted infrastructure. In that way, anyone can start a bank, and get to 'trust scale' immediately.
Post reply on HN