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China's Central Bank Bans ICOs

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Re: China's Central Bank Bans ICOs

#261

Post by [deleted] »

heymijo wrote: post #182
tudorconstantin wrote: post #129

I assume most of the HN readers are from USA and I can't believe my eyes what I'm reading here. People cheering a government's ban on what its citizens can do with their lawfully earned money. I worked for my money, I paid huge amounts of taxes on them. Why is it ok for somebody to come and tell me what I can and can't do with them, and then telling me it's in my best interest to not be allowed to invest them.

What I'm seeing is the classic regulation vs. non debate. What's missing is recognition of the historical precedent of regulating what people can/cannot do with their money in the USA and China's proposed plans to follow suit. Before the JOBS Act, for 70+ years the American Securities and Exchange Commission was very specific about what non-accredited investors could do with their money. [0] While China does not have…

[deleted]

Re: China's Central Bank Bans ICOs

#262

Post by mdpopescu »

tim333 wrote: post #215
rothbardrand wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, bubbles are a side effect of the money cycle which is created by central banking -- both the Dotcom and 2008 bubbles were created by the Fed selling money below cost, building a massive carry trade in, for instance, houses. Secondly, if there is a crash, the best thing to do is nothing. Let the people who invested poorly get wiped out-- it's better for the economy. (There are examples of this too- crashes…

Hmm... bubbles can also happen without central banking - think the original tulip bubble for example. Also not all bailouts are bad, for example the auto bailout was estimated to have saved ~380k jobs. And it wasn't the auto industry's fault the banking system went wonky. The system may not be perfect but it's not all bad.

The tulip bubble is mostly a myth. [1] [2]

[1] https://stratechery.com/2017/tulips-myths-and-cryptocurrenci... [2] https://medium.com/@adam_selene/tulips-and-other-myths-c7f69...

Re: China's Central Bank Bans ICOs

#263

Post by rficcaglia »

ig1 wrote: post #30

It's important to note that ICOs are a mechanism rather than a financial instrument and it's the nature of the underlying financial instrument that generally influences the legality. For example if it's used as pre-sale (i.e. currency that will be used in product for a future product) then that's likely legal in most places, if it's used as a proxy for equity then it's likely illegal in most countries (most countries…

not a lawyer but be careful, some "products" like a club membership for example, have been ruled as actually securities

in short, any "product" can be a security if there is even a hint of speculative investment activity (and a motivated prosecutor)

really it is less about logic and definitions...this audience wants to parse things and recompile. in law and moreso in regulatory affairs, it is far more about guiding behavior by carrots or sticks to a particular philosophical/moral/politial/economic subjective end goal

Re: China's Central Bank Bans ICOs

#264

Post by skummetmaelk »

patrickaljord wrote: post #115
skummetmaelk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying ICO's are scams, but do you think scamming should be legal?

I believe in freedom of association, I also believe that the market is driven by reputation, therefor bad actors (in this case scammers) cannot thrive (see how bad vendors get eliminated by the market on ebay or amazon without government help, just bad reputation).

I think people like you should try eating food produced by unregulated companies and see how you like it. Enjoy your sawdust bread.

Re: China's Central Bank Bans ICOs

#265

Post by flylib »

rothbardrand wrote: post #147

Why don't rich people need protection? Here's the answer: this is their protection. It reduces their competition. Seriously, these securities rules keep people like me from investing in AirBnB and Uber (two that I caught very early and wanted into)... but we can all go to Vegas and lose $100k in a single weekend. But putting $10k into Uber's seed round is somehow a crime I need to be protected from? Truth of the matt…

Knowing about Uber isn't enough, you need access to their seed round which is on a selective basis

Re: China's Central Bank Bans ICOs

#266

Post by richardknop »

rothbardrand wrote: post #189
richardknop wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can create a new cryptocurrency over a weekend. It's not really that hard and most of these ICOs are just copycats with few parameter changes. Projects which actually develop something new are very few so kudos to them. Majority are just quick copies of existing code and rebranding.

No. 2013 was a lot of clones of bitcoin with a few parameters changed. Nowadays ICOs I'm seeing involve a lot of very hard work. The risk is that the teams may way under-estimate how much work it is (And I think that's what's going to cause them to fail) but they are a lot more ambitious than you are characterizing.

No it is still the same as Bitcoin clones in 2013.

These days ICOs are cloning the same smart contract template and just making small edits to it.

Most of the time they barely have any other code than just the slightly edited smart contract template and white paper which is also pretty much a copy paste with buzz words relevant to their niche.

And based on that they are raising millions of dollars.

Of course there are couple of exceptions of projects that actually seem to have some tech foundation (like Sia for example) but these are rare. Scam copy cats without any tech are majority of ICOs.

Their reasoning is "we have an idea, let's raise millions of dollars and we will hire bunch of devs to write the software". Mostly founders are non technical "idea people" so I would doubt their ability to even know if their idea is feasible.

Projects which start with strong technical foundations and don't try to raise money to build their tech (putting cart in front of the horse) are the solid ones. Projects which have no tech and raise money first, those are not likely to succeed imho.

Re: China's Central Bank Bans ICOs

#267

Post by rficcaglia »

proofofstake wrote: post #114
richardknop wrote: post #51

Does this spell trouble for Ethereum? Without ICOs (one of it's major features if not the most important one) what else will drive the price speculation? I believe prices are inflated because of ICOs. People are buying tokens counting on ICO hype to increase their value so they can flip their initial invested principal with 2x/3x/4x return. Without ICOs this speculative technique will not be possible so we will see h…

Maybe in the short term, longer term it is no trouble. ICOs are far from the main use case for Ethereum. Speculation is driven by the price not close to matching the price if/when the technology matures. If anything, most ICOs pull money from Ethereum, they don't make the price go up. Being interested in tokens for their "features" not the price is very archaic. This also does not happen with stocks anymore: People h…

it would benefit China's economy if a bubble were to pop and wipe out huge amounts of savings

my guess: China will not allow ICOs but maybe after 10 years or so, blockchains and smart contracts will quietly infiltrate boring business use cases and financial services. especially if they can turn it into a centralized tool for control.

what better authoritarian tool could there be than a centralized ledger of all economic transactions, run by the government. in the name of reducing fraud/laundering/crime you could have absolute visibility and regulatory control on all economic activity.

EDIT: spelling

Re: China's Central Bank Bans ICOs

#268

Post by mcguire »

kobeya wrote: post #245
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, I had this conversation with someone on Twitter and it was like they had no clue this was an option. A state power isn't going to let some random currency come in and compete with their sovereign currency rules.

And they will stop people from making bitcoin transactions how, exactly? It's a bit silly to come in and dismissively say "the state will regulate it anyway" when the whole point of the technology is that it technologically prevents central actors (like a state) from interfering. It's a bit like saying "nah, the MPAA and RIAA will shut down filesharing." Nope. They shut down Napster (which was centralized), but BitTo…

The same way they stop you from falsifying your taxes records now. Is this a trick question?

Re: China's Central Bank Bans ICOs

#269

Post by mcguire »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #188
askmike wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a lot people in this thread want regulation as opposed to a flat out ban.

We have a regulation against fraud already. New proposed regulations are about banning unvetted token sales, to preempt possible scams, which is limiting people's contracting rights when there is no evidence of a crime - only a possibility of a scam based on a generalisation.

Problem: stock booms result in massive fraud and a great deal of economic damage.

Solution: regulate the stock market.

Problem: cannot sell things we want to sell.

Solution: Derivatives.

Problem: CDOs cause massive economic damage.

Solution: don't do that.

Problem: cannot sell what we want to.

Solution: Etherium.

...

Re: China's Central Bank Bans ICOs

#270

Post by logicallee »

omarchowdhury wrote: post #219
logicallee wrote: post #171

What about all those legitimate startups that raised money from ICO's??? Here on Hacker News we had a staunch defender of ICO's, who was saying "ICO's of some form are unquestionably the future of raising capital for most tech companies up to a certain size". In response to that wide claim, I asked the following question which I'll quote part of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15121111 >May I ask what the large…

https://science.tokenhub.com/

I looked at that webpage. About halfway down the page there is a "Latest Media Coverage" section: http://imgur.com/a/pCXCm

I tried to click on the Forbes, TechCrunch, recode, and Adweek links, but actually they're not links; that section is empty. The empty section is included to imply that there has been media coverage by these sources (or any other ones), but it is just an inactive placeholder that uses their greyed-out logos without permission to imply some kind of coverage. Clicking anywhere in that empty section does nothing.

Why does the page include an empty "latest media coverage" section that is completely empty (but includes famous news brand logos)? You and I both know why - it's obvious.

That might be fine for companies that are bootstrapping their own future: "imagine if we had something here." But this is why I didn't ask about such companies, but instead about companies that already have done that bootstrapping.

A lot of money has traded hands in ICO's. Has a single traditional tech startup that is shipping some kind of real product (hoverboard, whatever) totally unrelated to blockchain, been built as a result?

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