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Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

nytimes.com

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Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#131

Post by stagbeetle »

dmix wrote: post #104
flimflamfloozle wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That guy on TV is a broker. He doesn't want to hold any gold. He wants to sell and buy at the same time and make money off of the spread.

Not sure if the answer is obvious here but I don't know much about finance, does 'spread' here mean the difference in the asset price from purchase/sale time (whether by market change or artificial markup) or the brokering fees involved? or both?

Spread is, simply, the difference between the buying price and the selling price. Usually in the context of stocks.

Brokering fees are not calculated in with the base prices, though it would be once it's time to calculate returns.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#132

Post by Moshe_Silnorin »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #116
JSONwebtoken wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the degree of complexity or technical ambition of the project you were a part of, but it's not unusual for a 23 year old guy to write most of the Ethereum app. In fact, that's probably the reason why most ICOs are a scam, there's an insanely low barrier to building a proof of concept. The boilerplate is like 15 lines. When it's so easy that any 20 year old backend dev can issue a token, you should alread…

>23 year old guy to write most of the Ethereum app The project is a from-scratch smart contract blockchain: including a new contract language

The project is almost certainly Aeternity. They forked Zack's code, used his name to publicize their project and then paid Zack off to join their fork with tokens from his own chain! Zack is a smart guy but the whole thing is a shit show.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#133

Post by [deleted] »

hellbanner wrote: post #111
dmix wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if the answer is obvious here but I don't know much about finance, does 'spread' here mean the difference in the asset price from purchase/sale time (whether by market change or artificial markup) or the brokering fees involved? or both?

#2: Any vendor will buy a good at say, $9 and sell at $10. In the US there are many pawn shops saying "We buy and sell gold!" - it's never at the same price. #1: A smart gold trader will buy low, sell high.. they will buy more gold when prices are low and advertise to sell more when the price is high.

[deleted]

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#134

Post by cwkoss »

vanattab wrote: post #3

I am thinking a short position in bitcoin is in my near future. I am not saying bitcoin is doomed to fail but I am pretty confident this shit coin crazy is going to hit the fan sooner or later and it's going to drag the "legitimate" crypto currencies down.

Make sure you have enough margin that you aren't wiped out by a quick spike up.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#135

Post by jnordwick »

flimflamfloozle wrote: post #100
duxup wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That guy on TV keeps telling me how awesome owning gold is... it is so awesome he wants to sell me his...

That guy on TV is a broker. He doesn't want to hold any gold. He wants to sell and buy at the same time and make money off of the spread.

That's not what a broker does. A broker is basically in sales. He takes company research done by analysts and tries to sell you company financial products. He doesn't care which direction you go as long as you do something so he can take his commission, and a little extra if you are buying a company product he might be trying to push.

A market maker is the guy who's tying to capture the spread, but they don't really go around trying to get the public to buy and sell.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#136

Post by charlesdm »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #55

I was involved with one of the bigger ICO right at the beginning of the ICO craze. I had pretty regular conversations with the project founder and was in talks to become the dev evangelist. The project had raised ~$5 million in ETH (this is when ETH was trading around $80). Despite the fact that this project had raised a crazy amount of money the whole project was being conceptualized and coded by a single 23 old guy…

Perhaps a stupid question since I haven't followed this too closely, but is it THAT easy to raise money with a project? I have seen some $50-80-100m numbers flying around recently.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#137

Post by utnick »

If you want to really see what the environment is like now, read the bitcointalk ico announcement threads. It's absolutely insane. Very little of that stuff makes its way to hn.

People are raising money with 10 page vague 'white papers' with ideas that make no sense or are completely unworkable on the blockchain.

There is very little skepticism or research with these icos . Most of the commenters are trying to help the project and receive tokens in return, do tasks to qualify for free tokens ( bounties ) , or promote the ico so their token value increases

If there was a good way to short individual ico tokens it might bring some sanity

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#138

Post by NumberCruncher »

sgspace wrote: post #108
ajross wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the whole idea of cryptocurrency as a growth investment. The symptom is a bunch of copycat scams trying to freeload on the broader market. Without the bull market of the early '90's, Belfort would have had no one to sell to. Same deal here. The root cause is the insanity happening in bitcoin (and now Ethereal, I guess). Mark my words: this will all come crashing down. I can't tell you when or why, but…

You sound like the other thousands of posts I've read over the past 8 years. You're either correct or missing out on something massive.

That is what the investors of Bernie Madoff said... it takes time to vaporize 65 B$.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#139

Post by jcfrei »

cgmg wrote: post #103
ajross wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the whole idea of cryptocurrency as a growth investment. The symptom is a bunch of copycat scams trying to freeload on the broader market. Without the bull market of the early '90's, Belfort would have had no one to sell to. Same deal here. The root cause is the insanity happening in bitcoin (and now Ethereal, I guess). Mark my words: this will all come crashing down. I can't tell you when or why, but…

When you say "this" will all come crashing down and "this" is not sustainable, what exactly are you referring to?

Not OP, but here's a thought that has bugged me for a while: The bitcoin block reward is currently 12.5 BTC which equals to about 42500$. Put differently, this means that the market currently values 1MB of (transaction) data on the bitcoin blockchain at over 40'000 USD and miners will (collectively) spend about as much for mining each block. This is clearly not economically reasonable, unless of course you believe bitcoin will for some odd reason become the only safe haven for storing wealth. In reality though the price of a crypto currency and its blockchain should depend on the utility it provides to society.

Re: Despite S.E.C. Warning, Wave of Initial Coin Offerings Grows

#140

Post by SilasX »

blhack wrote: post #110

To put it into perspective, the tezos ICO recently raised a little more than $200,000,000 worth of BTC and ETH. Here's their twitter: https://twitter.com/tez0s?lang=en Here's their subreddit: https://reddit.com/r/tezos Here's their website: https://tezos.com It doesn't look like they have really updated anybody on what they're doing with $200,000,000 since their ICO closed.

Why are people throwing money at these? It makes no sense. You have no guarantee that they won't just run off with the money, except your trust in the operators.
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