Official Response to “Bancor Is Flawed” • Hacker News Board

Re: Official Response to “Bancor Is Flawed”

#101

Post by xorcist » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 10:08 AM UTC

davidgerard wrote: post #98

xorcist wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are non-bogus ICOs Where?

The Civic ICO struck me as a sincere attempt at using an ICO for actual not-intrinsically-fraudulent fundraising. Their product is still a weird misapplied but-with-blockchain idea that I can't see how it'll work, but the ICO itself didn't make me go "wtf".

Fraudulent doesn't mean there is no product. It means that the founders are well aware that the token is useless but sold it to the general public anyway, under some sort of pretense of an investment while at the same time it is clearly not a security.

I can not speak for every jurisdiction of the world, but I believe any lawyer would advise against marketing non-securities as investment if you want to stay out of jail.

Civic specifically has absolutely no use for a token. The service they offer would look completely identical without the token. I believe the official explanation why they did anyway it was to "harness the enthusiasm of the community" or something like it.

Since the Civic token is completely dysfunctional without Civic the company providing the underlying service, it is also unnecessarily expensive and complicated to use a blockchain for storage. That they have a procedure where they can restore your keys should you lose them should be enough to raise questions.

While the public blockchain is an innovation that I believe will have important use cases going forward, it is absolutely clear to me that this is a golddigger era for scams, and the shift from altcoins to tokens have lowered the signal-to-noise ratio even further. I have yet to see an ICO that was not useless, bordering on fraudulent (which is a word that should not get used too lightly), so I would be genuinely curious to see one that is not.

Re: Official Response to “Bancor Is Flawed”

#102

Post by Flenser » Mon, Jun 26, 2017, 10:05 AM UTC

grenoire wrote: post #12

I went through it, and I can't say that it's any better than what your average corporate response is like. It brushes over Sirer's points by making note of irrelevant 'achievements' they have managed. The format also reads like a high school teacher nitpicking your paper, where most of his arguments boil down to 'yeah but that doesn't really matter, because...' I read the whitepaper (a cryptocurrency-fanatic friend p…

When they started off by saying it was going to be a "line by line response" I knew they weren't going to be applying the principle of charity[0] and addressing the most persuasive form of Sirer's argument and would be dismissing and—as you say—nitpicing his argument or side stepping the real issues.

[0] http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html

Re: Official Response to “Bancor Is Flawed”

#103

Post by Bartweiss » Mon, Jun 26, 2017, 1:54 PM UTC

davidgerard wrote: post #99

Bartweiss wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's often wrong on the market (infamously told people to sell Bitcoin at like $100), but that mostly seems to be about underestimating optimism. On tech critiques like this... well, he predicted the DAO attack in such detail that people accused him of being the one behind it. Seeing a non-response to Sirer here seems very, very bad for Bancor.

yeah, when a computer science professor calls you out for rolling your own math routines ...

Yeah... they had a partial defense there - the simple functions like add and subtract called existing functions with some wrappers for overflow issues, which they claim is standard practice for Ether (I wouldn't know). But the defense of exponentiation was just "there isn't a good one yet, so we built our own, and according to some tests we didn't show anyone it looks fine".