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Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

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Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#111
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think something that makes even less sense is that in theory this is to protect people from making high risk investments yet there's nothing stopping any random person who cares to do so from opening an account with a brokerage and spending their life's savings on far out of the money call options.

The idea isn't to stop people from doing something stupid but to stop people from trying to get people who aren't in a position to weather risk to do something risky to increase their own likelihood of profiting.

Forex does exactly that and it's completely legal. Somdoes gambling.

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In-app purchases are a decent alternative. Give a mule some BTC, mule buys premium currency in your shitty game, your shitty game company sells the BTC it "acquired" on the open market. Either way, you've got income from selling digital goods for cryptocurrency, rather than cryptocurrency with no socially accepted narrative for possessing it.

Can you explain a bit more on how does it work? I heard this two times in past week here. Thx.

The more traditional route converts dirty USD into game company revenue.

Step one is recruiting some people to be a "customer" of your game. You give them $500 of dirty money, they go visit various retail establishments and buy $450 worth of pre-paid cards, then spend the balances on those pre-paid cards buying stuff from your game. Various banking institutions and app marketplace owners take their cuts, you wind up with clean money earned from selling premium coins to your "customers", which you then report as taxable income and use for whatever legal-market purposes you want.

So, the short of it is that it's a two-part scheme. Part 1 converts undocumented cash into pre-paid debit cards. Part 2 converts the balance of those cards into business income from selling digital goods. The receipt of cash gets offloaded to retail establishments that routinely handle such transactions. The delivery of goods is cheap and verifiable, and the payment for those goods goes through legitimate channels.

Compare to laundering money through a literal laundromat. If you double the sales through putting dirty money into the laundromat's cash deposits, you ought to be using twice as much power and water. Auditors can find that out. Selling twice as many virtual battleships, though? You've got customer accounts you've "delivered goods" to.

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>an overbought token market fueled by Asian countries for the most part Chinese capital controls has a huge amount of blame here. Because the Chinese government prevents the foreign exchange market from clearing at a lower price, there's tons of unmet demand for converting Renminbi to anything that isn't subject to such restraints. Similarly, on the demand side - there's folks that would be induced to sell their fore…

so doesn't this validate the usefulness of cryptocurrency? if people are using it to store and move value around the world in spite of government controls and fiat manipulations that is exactly why it was invented.

Move? Yes. Store? As little as possible. Chinese capital controls just means that the USD/Renminbi trade gets split into USD/BTC and BTC/Renminbi with an "arbitrage opportunity" against the official exchange rate that fairly compensates people for eluding capital controls.

With this process, it doesn't matter if BTC is trading at $1 or $1000. Chinese citizens can convert the maximum allowed from Renminbi to USD, buy bitcoins in USD, sell those bitcoins for Renminbi, and pocket the spread.

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea isn't to stop people from doing something stupid but to stop people from trying to get people who aren't in a position to weather risk to do something risky to increase their own likelihood of profiting.

Forex does exactly that and it's completely legal. Somdoes gambling.

Forex has regulations for unsophisticated investors in the US.

Gambling is different in that the user goes into it knowing that they have a negative EV. Lots of people lose everything gambling no doubt but while they may hope to win they know the likelihood is that they will lose.

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It isn't discriminatory, it's protective. I think it is both. The regulation is removing the upside risk as well as the downside risk. Many professional investors are investing to real stupid things and losing their money, it is not that difficult to find examples.

Is it easy to find examples of ones who have lost so much that they are literally poor?

Some people lost a lot of money on prosper.com, and at least in some cases, it was known that it was money they couldn't really afford to lose. See e.g. this (and be sure to read the last comment): http://www.bloggingawaydebt.com/2007/01/would-you-lend-75000...

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#116
post #85
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my understanding Put aside blockchain, ICO, and browsers for a moment. Imagine an app that shows ads, nothing more. The users of the app are credited in tokens for viewing and/or clicking ads. The advertisers pay tokens to show ads. There is a middleman (presumably brave) who manages the ad marketplace and distribution (for a cut) The users can then take their tokens (acquired viewing ads) and sell them on th…

And to make it more interesting... An average CPM is $2 (2 dollars for 1000 impressions). If you use the internet for an hour you likely generated ~200 impressions. You could in theory earn about $1 a day for casually using the internet (after Brave's/others' cut).

Braves traffic would be considered incentivized so no way it is making $2/cpm.

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#117
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All these things were put in place because your average person doesn't know what they're doing, and they think stock ownership is just gambling" In order to not be an "average person," you must make 200K+ in salary or have 1 million dollars in cash? I'm not saying that ICOs are currently perfect by any means. There will be a NEED for some type of regulation and time for the market to figure itself out. Unless youre…

Those opportunities are there for people who want to invest. The rules are in place to stop solicitations for investment, not investors. Anyone can go looking for these opportunities and participation is not hinged on being an accredited investor. The rules are to stop these startups from making promises they can't deliver to people who can't protect themselves when they don't.

Having participated in the very first ICO (Satoshi Dice), and seeing the field develop - it seems they are getting more and more professional every single year.

In 2017 we will probably see the first rating agencies for ICOs, plus distributed ways of doing due dilligence. It is quite possible that in a few years the investors will be protected as much, if not more, as in traditional investment opportunities.

It will be a dofferent model though - you will have scamcoins for speculators, but also many ways of gathering information about the startups, much more accessible and sensible than the current system. This may lead to naive investors being protected/educated well enough.

Look at the internet right now. Imagine that in 1996 the government required a ton of red tape to launch websites, and would pose limits on who can access it (so your grandma woukdn't put her cc numbers on a scam site)... That's how the investment environment looks right now.

Instead what we did was to allow anyone access and publish, and fight scamming by prosecution, education and built-in browser security. People are still getting scammed on the internet daily, but it's kind of under control, and the benefits far outweighted the losses.

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it easy to find examples of ones who have lost so much that they are literally poor?

Some people lost a lot of money on prosper.com, and at least in some cases, it was known that it was money they couldn't really afford to lose. See e.g. this (and be sure to read the last comment): http://www.bloggingawaydebt.com/2007/01/would-you-lend-75000...

I've tried to find more up to date information on him since that post is over 7 years old now and can't. Do you have anything more current or more details on the user pensioner?

ericscc.com appears to be gone as well as any of the other prosper forums I've found links to. Not really familiar with the site so is it basically dead or moved out of p2p or something?

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#119
post #14
post #3

You can download the Brave private browser at www.brave.com. The Brave browser automatically disables all ads and tracking when you browse any website. The founder of Brave also created JavaScript.

More crucially: the tokens sold here allow advertisers to show ads to users of the Brave browser.

Opt-in BAT ads. Like the bitcoin-based anonymous auto-microdonations in Brave Payments in beta-testing form today. We'll work to prototype and then propagate the BAT to other attention-based apps (browsers, games, video-players, and messengers).

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#120
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His hazing and firing from Mozilla really sounded like a concession favoring discrimination.

When you stand in a position of power and privilege, then your responsibilities are (or should be) commensurately greater

That is not an excuse to discriminate against people for having different opinions than you.
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