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Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

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Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#121

Post by amarkov »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #105
soneca wrote: post #3

edit: Weird, I thought I was commenting on another thread, about Nobel laureates criticizing Bitcoin. I saw it on my phone, then opened HN at my notebook to comment. I misread the title and commented here, but now I can't find the correct thread (was it flagged?). I am growing this idea that Bitcoin (and any cryptocurrency that is affected by aggressive price growth) is an anti-fragile indirect multilevel marketing s…

You're comparing Bitcoin to diamond, but there are many more asset classes that are actually more similar to Bitcoin, which actually work. I think a lot of people make the mistake of using pattern matching to judge Bitcoin when they don't have enough patterns to work with. There are and were many financial products that could have worked (but failed because of corruption) or are working currently that most people who…

Why does it matter that there's no single centralized group who does the marketing and controls scarcity? Bitcoin's entire selling point is that those kinds of things can happen without centralization!

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#122

Post by baddox »

alexasmyths wrote: post #39
soneca wrote: post #3

edit: Weird, I thought I was commenting on another thread, about Nobel laureates criticizing Bitcoin. I saw it on my phone, then opened HN at my notebook to comment. I misread the title and commented here, but now I can't find the correct thread (was it flagged?). I am growing this idea that Bitcoin (and any cryptocurrency that is affected by aggressive price growth) is an anti-fragile indirect multilevel marketing s…

I don't think Bitcoin was designed as a scheme, but it's effectively been turned into an MLM scheme and a brilliant one at that. I'm trying to hire a PR firm for a project and I've come across a handful of firms that have been hired to promote BTC. Think about that for a minute: if BTC is distributed - then who on earth is paying massive $$$ for PR firms to be hustling BTC in the press? Massive BTC owners - that's wh…

I don’t think that the existence of marketing firms involved in decentralized technologies is anywhere near as significant or mind-blowing of a point as you portray it.

There is no reason to expect or desire that, because Bitcoin is decentralized, there will never be any private for-profit organizations involved with Bitcoin.

Surely you wouldn’t say the same thing about, say, email. I’m sure marketing firms have worked with companies that offer services involving email.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#123

Post by amarkov »

SippinLean wrote: post #59
soneca wrote: post #3

edit: Weird, I thought I was commenting on another thread, about Nobel laureates criticizing Bitcoin. I saw it on my phone, then opened HN at my notebook to comment. I misread the title and commented here, but now I can't find the correct thread (was it flagged?). I am growing this idea that Bitcoin (and any cryptocurrency that is affected by aggressive price growth) is an anti-fragile indirect multilevel marketing s…

Cool, what does this have to do with Filecoin, their ICO, and Ponzi schemes? A MLM scheme is that: a scheme requiring a central actor to pay commissions. This is why Bitcoin and decentralized currency has never fit this definition. You could say there are some abstract resemblances (BTC bagholders encourage others to buy) but this is just abstract and not specific enough to fit the definition. We've seen people run P…

The argument is that Bitcoin is a decentralized, globally distributed Ponzi scheme, in the same way that it asserts itself to be a decentralized, globally distributed payment network. It seems unfair for Bitcoin proponents to go around saying "it's gotta be centralized or it's not really X".

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#124

Post by rklaehn »

throwawayico wrote: post #49
whyrusleeping wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, ipfs dev here. The amount of work being done on ipfs has been increasing continually. Work on filecoin is not detracting from ipfs development, and we are bringing on more people for ipfs, libp2p and filecoin.

That doesn't discount the fact you are involved in yet another ICO. Cryptocurency integration and identity within IPFS could have been done without a new coin. I know you know this, yet you choose to do it anyway. That means we should question your intentions, across all your projects. And, just for the record, a cryptocurrency fund raise is simply selling access to given private/public key pairs which contain values…

I don't get all the hatred for ICOs. Nobody is forcing anybody to invest in them, and for something like filecoin there is at least a chance of something extremely useful coming out of it. Many other ICOs seem pretty strange to me, but as long as I am not forced to invest in them, what's the problem?

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#125

Post by trhway »

api wrote: post #50
soneca wrote: post #3

edit: Weird, I thought I was commenting on another thread, about Nobel laureates criticizing Bitcoin. I saw it on my phone, then opened HN at my notebook to comment. I misread the title and commented here, but now I can't find the correct thread (was it flagged?). I am growing this idea that Bitcoin (and any cryptocurrency that is affected by aggressive price growth) is an anti-fragile indirect multilevel marketing s…

Bikeshedding this some more because HN is for bikeshedding... I am toying around with the wacky heresy that Karl Marx (not Lenin) was right. Capitalism will evolve into socialism. It would be a form of socialism we haven't seen yet and that would have been technologically impossible in the past. Capitalism's role is to develop the technology, wealth, and infrastructure to enable it... as Marx said. Tech titans, start…

>I am toying around with the wacky heresy that Karl Marx (not Lenin) was right. Capitalism will evolve into socialism.

that Marx discovered is that the degree of socialism rises and of capitalism decreases linear with the rise of entropy of ownership distribution. One owner of a factory - full capitalism. Many shareholders without any major concentrated holder - any such BigCo feels very close to socialism (where everybody is nominally an owner of everything) as we experienced back at the USSR.

> fully decentralized, consensus based, anti-fragile, nameless, leaderless, borderless, and viral as hell.

characteristics of high entropy, except for the consensus based and leaderless which are supposed to be an emerging property to manage the target object, yet as history shows delegation emerges to make management tractable in high entropy situations and it results in concentrated management power without corresponding ownership - typical socialism of USSR or BigCo or Federal government managed assets and agencies. Thus such a theory predicts some management "council of BTC Jedi-s" to emerge.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#126

Post by kimar »

alexasmyths wrote: post #39
soneca wrote: post #3

edit: Weird, I thought I was commenting on another thread, about Nobel laureates criticizing Bitcoin. I saw it on my phone, then opened HN at my notebook to comment. I misread the title and commented here, but now I can't find the correct thread (was it flagged?). I am growing this idea that Bitcoin (and any cryptocurrency that is affected by aggressive price growth) is an anti-fragile indirect multilevel marketing s…

I don't think Bitcoin was designed as a scheme, but it's effectively been turned into an MLM scheme and a brilliant one at that. I'm trying to hire a PR firm for a project and I've come across a handful of firms that have been hired to promote BTC. Think about that for a minute: if BTC is distributed - then who on earth is paying massive $$$ for PR firms to be hustling BTC in the press? Massive BTC owners - that's wh…

Agree. For one, BTC's decentralized nature makes the ponzi scheme highly resilient and scalable. On top of that, the coolness factor is undeniable.

As the Yale economist Robert J. Shiller puts it "You’re fast. You’re smart. You’ve figured out nobody else understands. You’re with it. And bitcoin has this anti-government, anti-regulation feel. It’s such a wonderful story. If it were only true."[1]

Therefore the bubble will most likely stretch a lot bigger (the current market cap of total crypto is 1-1.5% of US equity) before people get scared. But when they do, the fear will indeed be fueled by negative media coverage which might make the crash swift and brutal.

[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-30/so-it-loo...

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#127

Post by amarkov »

keymone wrote: post #79
superbrama wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) So, a worldwide payment solution requires a spaceship, but we have first generation mainframes currently. Bitcoin is the biggest of those mainframes, uses the most energy, etc. 2) You touched upon two independent considerations. Yes, bitcoin can evolve technologically, but it’s not assured. Energy spent is based on incentive. Value stored isn’t directly correlated, that’s a result of price which results from buyer…

1) the point is, we’ve just started 2) How is it not assured that bitcoin will evolve? It evolves all the time. Are you even following the project? Energy spent correlates with incentive, incentive is based on price, price is based on demand/value. Where is demand/perceived value derived from is debatable. The rest of your message equally applies to all other endeavors where early movers have profited. Yes it’s a bub…

> How is it not assured that bitcoin will evolve? It evolves all the time. Are you even following the project?

I mean, are you even following the project? Very, very basic changes like "let's change this parameter from 1 to 2" are incredibly contentious, leading to hard forks and loud debates and furious accusations that people are shills trying to ruin Bitcoin for personal profit. If we can't even behave ourselves for a trivial proposal like Segwit2x, how could a truly significant protocol change ever get anywhere?

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#128

Post by azna »

rklaehn wrote: post #118
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #114

I think the top comment for this should be about Filecoin, instead of just another uninformed comments about Bitcoin that we see here every day. That said, one thing most people don't talk about is: I think most people think IPFS is disruptive, but I think IPFS itself is susceptible to disruption. The main reason why IPFS is useful is because there's not an easy way to do NAT traversal therefore it's super hard for p…

If your app is hosted on github, it is not really distributed. And Ethereum is extremely limited as a database.

Exactly, IPFS allows data storage and retrieval for Dapps to also be done through a decentralized network. That's the whole point of a D-app, not falling back on someone's central servers. The performance and scalability limitations of Ethereum make it virtually unusable as a database, application data definitely needs to be taken off-chain.

Also, the IPFS system contains IPNS, which allows users to host mutable content. Rather than navigating to the hash of a file, you're retrieving what's been signed by the publisher's key. So it's more flexible than just static content.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#129

Post by ringaroundthetx »

brndnmtthws wrote: post #5

Filecoin is one of the ones I'd stay far away from. VCs got in before anyone else with special preferences, which taints the whole project. There are alternatives which don't come with the VC problem attached to them.

Most token sales are like this. There is no difference from the equity markets in this regard, except its WAY more liquid, WAY faster route to liquidity, AND there is no dilution.

Sorry private equity, step to the left. Sorry egalitarian peons, take what you can get.

Re: Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]

#130

Post by blibble »

mswiss wrote: post #112
keymone wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it’s not a primarily solution to transferring money, it’s primarily decentralized, trustless and censorship-resistant solution to that. Of course centralized solutions are cheaper and more efficient.

This and that there is a hard upper limit on the amount of bitcoin available. There will be no QE of bitcoin.

until the miners are convinced otherwise

bit like the central banks

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