Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 215 posts

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

#191

Post by runeks »

tylersmith wrote: post #176
api wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of the money raised actually exists as liquid and accessible? Is this just a big MMO?

According to coinmarketcap.com volumes on gdax for btc and eth and $115mm and $53mm over the past 24hrs. If you didn't want to increase overall volume by more than 10% you could sell out to USD around $12.5mm btc and $5.3mm eth per day.

Volume is not liquidity. You can’t deduce anything about the impact of a $10mm ETH market sell from looking at volume.

If you dump $5mm ETH on the GDAX ETHUSD market right now, the price would fall from $290 to $250[1].

[1] https://www.gdax.com/trade/ETH-USD (click “depth chart” in upper right corner)

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

#192

Post by runeks »

the_stc wrote: post #76

The SEC guidance galvanized us on not offering tokens. Instead, we are going to offer shares directly in the company, even if they are mostly issued via an ERC20 contract. If we are going to get heat from the SEC, might as well go all out and issue proper shares. Plus tokens don't even make sense most of the time. You can't buy a Tesla car with TSLA and you do not get dividends/trading with a car. And no one outside…

I’m not particularly knowledgeable on the subject, but isn’t the purpose of the SEC to prevent unauthorized entities from selling securities — including company shares — to people?

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

#193

Post by dsfjksdf »

proofofstake wrote: post #152
SilasX wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

"An Ethereum based on Ocaml" - that has to be a joke. 200 000 000 just because they use Ocaml?

Afaik Ethereum encouraged independent implementations of their PROTOCOL in different languages, also as a way to discover flaws in the protocol.

Ocaml as a selling point just sounds like an appeal to Noobs. Reading that was one of the reasons I decided to pass on the Tezos ICO.

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

#194

Post by lawless123 »

do5 wrote: post #177
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…

Why bring age into the equation? That's quite discriminatory considering the creator of Ethereum is just 19 years old. Aside from that I'm 23 years old and have been developing software professionally in the past 8 years. Age isn't much of a factor anymore.

Because most people haven't been developing software since they were 15.

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

#195

Post by dsfjksdf »

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 Ethereum with the claim of having a better language for the contracts (enabling automatic verification).

I don't think it makes that much sense, after all, you could also create another language that compiles to Solidity, and that is verifiable.

I mean it is OK, just not as much of an improvement as they make it sound.

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

#196

Post by DoctorBit »

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…

Tezos - Participate in the governance of your cryptocurrency. Read the source code of any smart-contract on the blockchain.

As I understand it, the source code of tezos itself is stored on its own blockchain. Any modifications to the source are proposed by and voted on by owners of the tezos currency (weighted by how much they own). Also, unlike Ethereum, smart contracts are stored as source code on the blockchain, rather than as compiled bytecode.

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

#197

Post by DennisP »

dsfjksdf wrote: post #195
flunhat wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ethereum with the claim of having a better language for the contracts (enabling automatic verification). I don't think it makes that much sense, after all, you could also create another language that compiles to Solidity, and that is verifiable. I mean it is OK, just not as much of an improvement as they make it sound.

Or create another language that compiles to the Ethereum virtual machine. There are several already, and at least two in development designed to be better for formal verification.

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

#198

Post by dsfjksdf »

DennisP wrote: post #197
dsfjksdf wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Ethereum with the claim of having a better language for the contracts (enabling automatic verification). I don't think it makes that much sense, after all, you could also create another language that compiles to Solidity, and that is verifiable. I mean it is OK, just not as much of an improvement as they make it sound.

Or create another language that compiles to the Ethereum virtual machine. There are several already, and at least two in development designed to be better for formal verification.

Yes that is what I meant - I don't know Ethereum as well, so I assumed Solidity is the already the level of the VM (the "assembly"). Thanks for clarifying!

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

#199

Post by lambdadmitry »

mrb wrote: post #187
rb666 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 160k+ is meaningless when no one is actually using BTC to buy things. Also, not far from the truth anyway: http://www.businessinsider.com/merchants-arent-accepting-bit...

Your comment is irrelevant to the point being discussed: it's obviously false that "ALL merchants STOPPED accepting bitcoin". Also this Morgan Stanley research note, and the reporting on it, is of laughable quality... 1) They don't release data: " Morgan Stanley, which based its usage analysis on the information, didn’t say which companies are using bitcoin. " 2) They extrapolate from an insufficient number of data p…

But it also makes sense "from the first principles": BTC is wildly deflationary right now, so there is a very strong incentive to hold BTC instead of paying with it. It's a flip side of "sheltering from the inflation" point that is quite popular among BTC enthusiasts. You can't have one without the other.

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

#200

Post by alistproducer2 »

do5 wrote: post #177
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…

Why bring age into the equation? That's quite discriminatory considering the creator of Ethereum is just 19 years old. Aside from that I'm 23 years old and have been developing software professionally in the past 8 years. Age isn't much of a factor anymore.

In the case of Vitalik, he was smart enough to enlist people more knowledgeable than him when organizing the Ethereum project. For example, he enlisted a PhD, Dr. Gavin Wood, to author the real white paper[0] (also known as the yellow paper). while it's possible that at 19 Vitalik could've been studying real CS long enough to work out the truely difficult parts of implementing his vision, it's highly unlikely and, to his credit, he was smart enough to know that. People who think they are the smartest people in the room rarely are. The really smart ones are the ones who realize this and are humble enough to seek the expertise of others.

[0]:https://bravenewcoin.com/assets/Whitepapers/Ethereum-A-Secur...

Post reply on HN