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As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back

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Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back

#201

Post by root_axis »

zik wrote: post #198
mindfulplay wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are conflating greed with innovation. We did not rally optimism and childlike curiosoty from the general public for HTTP or TCP/IP. You are shilling based on the popular Bitcoin playbook of Quotes and Comments. If it's really about the technology then people shouldn't care about the USD value of this crapshitcoins era... But no you folks not only took on the technologically inclined people but dragged the unaware…

Not everyone's who's interested in decentralized trustless payment technology is a "shill". You're dismissing innovation and tarring it with greed.

While the term "shill" is somewhat inflammatory, I don't think it's entirely inaccurate here; specifically the grandiose rhetoric used to hype up his own personal cryptocurrency projects.

Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back

#202

Post by illumin8 »

twblalock wrote: post #112
jMyles wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you insinuating that there have been no breakthroughs in the past 2 years? How do you respond to the ones I have listed in the comment to which you're replying?

How have those so-called breakthroughs had an effect on the world outside the cryptocurrency bubble? Who has used them in industry?

This comment is similar to looking at the Netscape browser in 1994 and asking who has successfully used a browser in industry. Or, like insisting in 2001-2002 that all dot-coms were like WebVan or pets.com and the Internet was just a fad and didn't provide any real value.

If you have any understanding of the way technology is developed and becomes commercialized (hint: google "gartner hype cycle") you'll probably realize that we've passed the peak of inflated expectations and are firmly in the trough of disillusionment when it comes to crypto. Not every technology makes it to the plateau of productivity, but crypto has a pretty damn good chance of doing so, considering how much innovation and research is currently taking place.

Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back

#203

Post by illumin8 »

twblalock wrote: post #141
jMyles wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh, yes, in that sense you're right. But I'm not sure that it's a meaningful standard. We've seen "the bubble" being poked sharply from the inside with relative trivialities like cryptokitties. We've also seen the more blunt effect of undermining prohibition policies - access to a wide variety of (psychoactive and other) forbidden medicines has been difficult to achieve since the garden of eden; this seems like a br…

How much longer are you personally willing to wait for blockchain tech to succeed before you would give up on it?

Tim Berners-Lee created the first hypertext database called Enquire that was similar to a wiki in 1980. How many years did it take before e-commerce on the web was successful?

Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back

#204

Post by askmike »

dustingetz wrote: post #197
seibelj wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Circle Trade and Cumberland do OTC trades of large amounts. Nothing is magical about this. https://www.circle.com/en/trade

Sure OTC services exist (I believe Coinbase has one) but I think the whales spending $10m on BTC might have an inkling about buy low and sell high – aka they are decidedly not buying during the period between August 2017 and today, which is exactly the period they would need to be buying at scale for all these startups to unload their disintegrating assets.

You are very wrong, OTC markets are very liquid right now.

Also $10 million in BTC isn't very much, you can trade this on the public markets without slipping very much if you really want to.

Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back

#205

Post by jMyles »

amvalo wrote: post #191
mindfulplay wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are conflating greed with innovation. We did not rally optimism and childlike curiosoty from the general public for HTTP or TCP/IP. You are shilling based on the popular Bitcoin playbook of Quotes and Comments. If it's really about the technology then people shouldn't care about the USD value of this crapshitcoins era... But no you folks not only took on the technologically inclined people but dragged the unaware…

Hey now... don't drag Signal into this.

I use Signal every day; I have turned something like 10 family members on to it, including literally my Grandmother.

That said, I do kinda feel like Open Whisper prioritizes a more centralized vision of the future than is reasonable for truly secure communications, and I suspect that it does this in order to maintain control and relationships with donors.

Again, I love Signal (and moxie, if you're reading this, I think you've done a bang-up job).

But I also think that it's important that we start to talk about viable alternatives which fix a lot of what's wrong with Signal, and I think that the first place to look for that is matrix / Riot chat.

Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back

#206

Post by cageface »

2018 is the year that we learned that complex social problems can not be solved by technology. From the political weaponization of social media to the collapse of the ICO market we've seen that the techno-utopian dream is largely just that, a dream. Social change takes hard work and the slow building of consensus, not just clever code. We have seen, however, that we can do a lot of damage to the social fabric with poorly thought out technology so I think the era of the unregulated internet is sadly coming to a close. We really have nobody to blame but ourselves.

The next generation of internet startups is going to have to be a lot more savvy about how technology interacts with society.

Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back

#207

Post by black-tea »

atiffany wrote: post #200

When I first invested in Bitcoin several years back, I tried to imagine ways that it could one day be deterred from becoming increasingly adopted and valuable. Government regulation and hacking were obvious possibilities, but I never considered “death by fragmentation” at the time. I think Bitcoin would be a lot more valuable today if it had not been for the explosion of largely greed-motivated shitcoins (and later I…

It was the scalability problem that killed Bitcoin and it probably would have happened a lot sooner without the fragmentation.

Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back

#208

Post by a13n »

jklepatch wrote: post #96

What puzzled me is how comes blockchain startups did not sell their crypto for fiat just after their ICOs. I recommended this to several of my blockchain customers but none of them listened. I dont know if that was motivated by greed or something else. According to Game theory there is no benefit in not selling the crypto for fiat: if you raise lets say 10million during an ico (typical amount raised 6m ago), there is…

> if you raise lets say 10million during an ico (typical amount raised 6m ago), there isnt much you can do with 20M (i.e you keep the crypto and it doubles) that you cant do with “just” 10M.

By that logic, why invest in anything ever?

Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back

#209

Post by [deleted] »

jMyles wrote: post #196
mindfulplay wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please at least add a HUGE disclaimer that all the NuCoin things are your own products and not some childlike curiosity. It's important that people understand that because HN doesn't allow ads without disclaimers.

I am unable to edit my comment at this time, but reading it, I think it's very, very obvious from my language ("If I am permitted to send one of my recent talks[0] back with this message about our progress at NuCypher...") that I work at NuCypher. It's not like I mentioned it in passing; I mentioned it specifically to talk about my own experience. And what are "NuCoin things"? What are you talking about? Do you even…

[deleted]

Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back

#210

Post by yodsanklai »

seanwilson wrote: post #123
jklepatch wrote: post #96

What puzzled me is how comes blockchain startups did not sell their crypto for fiat just after their ICOs. I recommended this to several of my blockchain customers but none of them listened. I dont know if that was motivated by greed or something else. According to Game theory there is no benefit in not selling the crypto for fiat: if you raise lets say 10million during an ico (typical amount raised 6m ago), there is…

> What puzzled me is how comes blockchain startups did not sell their crypto for fiat just after their ICOs. I'm not sure what's puzzling: The startups who base their business around crypto believe crypto will rise in price. A crypto startup selling all their crypto because they think there's a high risk crypto will crash in value is also sending out a very bad signal to potential investors.

> The startups who base their business around crypto believe crypto will rise in price

A startup may very well work on some blockchain technology while not believing that a particular cryptocurrency will rise in price.

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