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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

#161

Post by taysic »

eterm wrote: post #56
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…

The worst of is that early adopters will cash out boat loads of money and use that fact to claim they were right all along, as if somehow the top of the pyramid making money proves it's not a pyramid.

A pyramid scheme works such that if the growth stops, the whole pyramid collapses. It is dependent on newcomers.

With crypto, if anyone leaves or growth stops the price simply goes down. It doesn't collapse. It's more like stock.

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

#162

Post by koolba »

the_stc wrote: post #141
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…

>the same business model applied to a fiat currency Ding ding ding, winner! So many of these just have no point in being as companies, let alone as a token. At The STC, we're going to end sex trafficking in just like Apple and Amazon (and now Google and Spotify) ended music piracy. To operate, we must be an extrajurisdictional company which makes cryptocurrencies a useful way to get investment and pay dividends. But…

I thought this was a joke comment but I clicked on your user profile and now I'm not sure.

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

#163

Post by taysic »

jcfrei wrote: post #139
cgmg wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bi…

If the system works then it must be worth $40000 to the users of the block chain. There is a valid point to be made about energy efficiency but this possibly is right for the price of securing a global "bank".

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

#164

Post by honestlyreally »

suzzer99 wrote: post #146
Radim wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mark my words: this will all come crashing down. I can't tell you when or why, but it's not sustainable. The irony: lots of people feel the same way about the "real" debt-based modern economy. A ridiculous Ponzi scheme, clearly unsustainable in the long run. As always, the time horizon matters when talking about investments and sustainability. Given the right time window, everything works, and everything fails.

Let me know when BTC is backed by tanks and fighter jets.

Isn't that the problem here?

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

#165

Post by taysic »

HFTGuru wrote: post #144
adjkant wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been testing this out over the past 6 days with $500 to see how it would actually work while keeping my current amount in. I've been working a bit more on the micro level, but it still is pretty consistent in its volatility (lol). So far I have a 4.6% total return on trying to capitalize on the volatility. That's much less than if I had just held at the original buy. I'm going to keep doing it though to see how…

I've also been testing out the volatility with automated trading scripts, trading on the dimes and nickles. Unlimited amounts of trades with no transaction fees and this much volatility is a dream land. I started trading 4 months ago and turned 10k into a little under 75k. I was a bit late to the game, but I can't imagine how much some of the other automated traders are making.

What does your script look for?

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

#166

Post by honestlyreally »

arcticfox wrote: post #123
ovulator wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shorting has got to be the dumbest way to invest. With a normal investment there is a ceiling to how much you can lose (the amount you invested) but there is no ceiling to how much you can gain. The complete opposite is true for shorting, not a bet I would make on any certainty level.

You can just artificially limit your losses by bailing out when you lose as much as you shorted. You run a small / theoretical risk of getting stuck in a short squeeze situation where you can't get out, but that risk varies substantially by security and there are often laws or mechanisms you can use to protect yourself.

Crypto currency is the wild west,there's no one coming to save you, exchanges and whales have access to the books on who they can squeeze.

Its how many operate.

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

#167

Post by taysic »

flunhat wrote: post #160
proofofstake wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are people throwing money at these? Futures for Tezos are already trading at 6x the amount people invested during ICO. > It makes no sense. In the short term it makes a lot of sense (600% ROI). In the long term: An Ethereum based on OCaml has an interesting potential. > You have no guarantee that they won't just run off with the money If the developers are not anonymous, while no guarantee, it makes it less lik…

Can you, in one sentence, explain what Tezos is? Something of the form: Uber - Order a taxi with your phone Facebook - Connect with your friends online Google - Find stuff on the internet Wikipedia - An encyclopedia that anyone can edit Amazon - Buy stuff online, without going anywhere Tezos - ??? (And "Tezos is a new decentralized blockchain that governs itself by establishing a true digital commonwealth" doesn't co…

It's a competitor to ethereum - a place to create more ICOs basically from what I understand. Maybe they're running out of ideas

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

#168

Post by honestlyreally »

wmf wrote: post #153
blhack wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one is particularly baffling to me. $200,000,000 is a fortune . We're all presumably working on our own startups here. Can you imagine getting $200,000,000 in seed funding without even starting on your project? Just absolutely WTF is going on there?

There's a theory that people with enormous paper ETH gains are just diversifying by buying into all the ICOs. And the ICO "fortunes" are also on paper; I don't know if there's enough liquidity to sell the $500M per month that ICOs are bringing in.

What i don't get is how an eth token gets bought in eth, and creates millions of dollars of a new currency

yet eths marketcap doesn't go down?

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

#169

Post by cgmg »

phkahler wrote: post #151
cgmg wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that funny to you? What do you mean by "legitimate"?

It's funny because bitcoin seems designed to fail eventually. The computational cost of mining is going up faster than hardware can keep up. That's a problem because maintaining the whole blockchain is dependent on the continued possibility of mining. When the mining becomes impossible it will be impossible to maintain the distributed ledger. But that won't actually happen. Instead the mining will get increasingly di…

Your understanding is incorrect.

You don't even understand how mining difficulty works.

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

#170

Post by maneesh »

honestlyreally wrote: post #168
wmf wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a theory that people with enormous paper ETH gains are just diversifying by buying into all the ICOs. And the ICO "fortunes" are also on paper; I don't know if there's enough liquidity to sell the $500M per month that ICOs are bringing in.

What i don't get is how an eth token gets bought in eth, and creates millions of dollars of a new currency yet eths marketcap doesn't go down?

because money is a bet against bets against bets (the day before and the day after snap IPOed--was $25 billion really created? Where did it come from--and where does it go?)

And part of how the money supply has billion-xed since 2000 and no one seems to notice

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