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Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

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Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#311

Post by tylersmith »

joeblau wrote: post #12

I listened to this YC podcast[1] twice with Juan Benet. Listening to Juan talk about a lot of historical information and the correlations he drew was fascinating. When he tried to explain the need for Filecoin to Dalton, I just didn't hear it. Dalton kept asking him over and over what the point was and he kept giving non-answers (at least in my opinion which doesn't mean much to be honest). I understand the goal of t…

Our decentralized marketplace, OpenBazaar, uses IPFS for storing stores' content. Visitors to the store seed the content so other users can interact with the store when the vendor is offline. But that means you have to wait for people to visit your store before you can shutdown the software. If Filecoin is successful they'd be able to pay to ensure their store stays available on the network without actively running the software.

Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#312

Post by matthewbauer »

evgen wrote: post #39
prepend wrote: post #27

I don't understand why they would do the coin offering now. The network is inoperable and won't be for quite a while. The main advantage to me seems to be a more of a community-driven storage approach. S3 is really cheap and really reliable and really old. A distributed file store would be cool, but as a community/free network like P2P. The $200M seems really high for a community project.

They do the offering now because they have a bit of a name and the world is currently filled with suckers who think that getting in on an ICO is a worthwhile speculation. The greater fool theory at work.

It could still tie their hands later on. Once it starts crashing they'll lose a lot of the early adopter enthusiasm that they will need to catch on.

Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#313

Post by elmar »

elmar wrote: post #168
simias wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a rather ridiculous reductio ad absurdum. The euro/USD exchange rate has varied between roughly 1 and 1.6 over the past 10 years. That's including the 2008 crisis. Meanwhile over the last year alone the BTC/USD exchange rate varied between about 500 to 3400. My 10 euro bill is extremely unlikely to suddenly massively increase or lose in value. That's the difference.

> The euro/USD exchange rate has varied between roughly 1 and 1.6 over the past 10 years. This low range variation is only possible because of government monetary intervention that doesn't exist on CryptoCurrency.

How Does the Government Regulate Exchange Rates?

https://www.thebalance.com/how-does-the-government-regulate-...

Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#314

Post by ScottBurson »

dmix wrote: post #253
nicpottier wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are absolutely right, that there are huge problems still left to solve. But even so, then how is this different than a very large VC round that is (slightly) more open to the public? Plenty of businesses get money to build out technology with only the belief that the team raising it have what it takes to make it happen.

That's not quite true. The vast majority of VC money is to scale up a company. Only a small minority of investments, aka a portion of seed rounds, are done with the technology (and subsequent business model) merely in a hypothetical whitepaper stage. This company might be different because they demonstrated their ability as IPFS is fleshed out but as others pointed out Filecoin is a different beast entirely and they…

> Only a small minority of investments, aka a portion of seed rounds, are done with the technology (and subsequent business model) merely in a hypothetical whitepaper stage.

There are occasional exceptions [0].

[0] https://venturebeat.com/2017/07/25/khosla-ventures-leads-50-...

Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#315

Post by matthewbauer »

anc84 wrote: post #57
jonmaim wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

filecoin is made by the creators of ipfs.

And it sheds a really bad light upon it for me. I like the idea of IPFS but cannot stand all this coin snake oil.

I think the /idea/ of IPFS is very useful. On the other hand, I think the creators are way too interested in bikeshedding and writing new white papers for less useful things. They just aren't interested in providing real value to end users. They have this early adopter bubble that seems to be quite popular but I don't think it's going anywhere.

Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#316

Post by ada1981 »

Karunamon wrote: post #268
ada1981 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always outraged when I see NY Lotto ads on the subway. This is just a way to profit off people who don't understand math and have some sort of addiction. It's a poor tax. I once saw an ad that said something like "if you are putting in your resume to be a door man, it's time to play the lottery"!!!! Not, time to go back to school, time to vote for better income redistribution, not good for you for looking for wor…

I find this offensive in many ways. The chance of winning the lottery might be minuscule, but minuscule is still infinitely larger than zero. On top of that, you don't have to hit the jackpot to win life-changing money. Powerball odds for a 10k/250k prize are 1 in 913K, and for a 1M/2M prize, 1 in 11M - much better than the jackpot prize's odds of 1 in 292M. Many people are totally okay with coughing up $2 every now…

You are offended by what, exactly?

That lotteries are a tax on the poor (who often cite gambling as a legitamit retirement investment option!)?

And you actually DON'T raise your chances, at all.

The odds are actually in favor of you lowering your standard of living by whatever you are spending on lottery tickets.

Look at the statistics on where the bulk of the money comes from for lotteries -- the poor, often people who can't afford food for their children.

It's offensive that a democracy would run state lotteries and advertise them to its most vulnerable people.

Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#317

Post by [deleted] »

Karunamon wrote: post #268
ada1981 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always outraged when I see NY Lotto ads on the subway. This is just a way to profit off people who don't understand math and have some sort of addiction. It's a poor tax. I once saw an ad that said something like "if you are putting in your resume to be a door man, it's time to play the lottery"!!!! Not, time to go back to school, time to vote for better income redistribution, not good for you for looking for wor…

I find this offensive in many ways. The chance of winning the lottery might be minuscule, but minuscule is still infinitely larger than zero. On top of that, you don't have to hit the jackpot to win life-changing money. Powerball odds for a 10k/250k prize are 1 in 913K, and for a 1M/2M prize, 1 in 11M - much better than the jackpot prize's odds of 1 in 292M. Many people are totally okay with coughing up $2 every now…

[deleted]

Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#318

Post by the_stc »

sschueller wrote: post #3
Torai wrote: post #2

So much people with much money trying to find new ways to make money out of money. That says much about the current state of the economy.

And making the rich richer. No way to invest unless you have money or you are in the inner circle. Code has also not been released. So much for open source.

We're about to announce our company and do a fundraising round. Relatively small, a few million at first with a limited number of investors, then do a blockchain IPO (yes IPO - we're selling shares with control and dividends, not pointless tokens). And our market is huge with no real coordinated players, so it should be very lucrative.

Even so, I am concerned about letting just anyone put money in. Even though we are an extrajurisdictional company and the SEC doesn't trouble us, I'd like to know people putting money in have some idea what they're doing. At first we thought to limit the amount, require a minimum $1000 or $2000 purchase. But that makes it worse, I think.

What is a company in our situation supposed to do to be socially aware and not just "make the rich richer", while also making sure someone doesn't invest their last $1000? Just put up disclaimers?

Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#319

Post by the_stc »

wmf wrote: post #298
jbob2000 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After watching Ozark, I'm actually convinced that software is amazing for money laundering, it's stupid easy to generate huge amounts of fake data. "Look, our food delivery app delivered 10,000,000 meals and everyone paid by cash!" "Wow, we rented 10,000 homes through our short term rental app this month and everyone paid by cash!" "Hey, we have an ATM that lets you convert money into NameCoin, sooo many people are u…

"Uber for X" apps generally don't even accept cash; it's credit card or nothing. Building an app that accepts cash would be a red flag in itself.

Why is that a red flag? Uber accepts cash. We are doing an Uber for X and accepting cash, cryptocoin, and limited credit cards (CC companies dislike adult services so it might involve too much cat-and-mouse to be worthwhile).

Not accepting cash seems like a the lack of features in an MVP. It's easier to handle CCs, but collecting cash in a sharing-economy situation is more work. It certainly isn't a good thing to not accept cash!

Re: Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

#320

Post by qaq »

mrb wrote: post #293
dpiers wrote: post #252

Can we stop describing ICO raises in USD? They raised ethereum tokens (ETH). The value of those tokens is specious, as there is no liquidity for the volume of ETH raised. Based on current ETH/USD rates, the USD figure given translates to ~614K ETH. The value of 614K ETH has ranged from 92MM USD to 240MM USD in the last two months, and has been as low as 4.3MM USD since the beginning of the year.

" no liquidity for the volume of ETH raised " Look again. Poloniex alone exchanges $1 billion dollars, 3M ETH, on the ETH/BTC pair, weekly. https://cryptowat.ch/poloniex/ethbtc/1w Volume on the path ETH→BTC→USD is a lot higher than ETH→USD and that's the path that whales dumping ETH take.

"Volume on the path ETH→BTC→USD is a lot higher than ETH→USD" which kinda reinforces the point that there is no liquidity
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