51–60 of 92 posts
> Let's think about that for a minute. Would you buy stock in a business whose business plan was a giant marketing campaign to promote the value of the stock? This is a beautiful summary of the ICO ecosphere.
I think he was alluding to Multi-Level Marketing as well, which seems like an even more apt comparison.
What really upsets me is that most of the whitepapers pumped out by ICOs today are emphatically not the way we best understand how sustainable new companies come into existence. Many contain big grandiose plans that stretch years and don’t admit the necessary network effects, new technologies, etc., for even modest success. An idea, a LaTeX installation, and WordPress landing page are a very low bar for raising milli…
> How to make money in ethereum, from high to low risk ... 3. Even more profitable is kicking off your own ICO. Go through the checklist - fancy HTML5 theme that you can buy off of Themeforest and edit the HTML a bit for the landing page, create a Slack channel/Twitter account/subreddit, write a "whitepaper" that is easy enough for the shmucks you're targeting to understand, yet replete with enough pseudo-academic crypto jargon and irrelevant/unnecessary mathematical symbols to get the shmucks nodding their heads and pretending to understand how this particular algorithm/equation based on the "turing-complete ethereum blockchain" will "change the world" or "bank the unbanked" or, more importantly to them, appreciate 500x in value.
What really upsets me is that most of the whitepapers pumped out by ICOs today are emphatically not the way we best understand how sustainable new companies come into existence. Many contain big grandiose plans that stretch years and don’t admit the necessary network effects, new technologies, etc., for even modest success. An idea, a LaTeX installation, and WordPress landing page are a very low bar for raising milli…
That's probably an optimistic view of the motivations of a lot of the ICOs. Your comment reminds me of an HN thread from about a month ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15072257 ). > How to make money in ethereum, from high to low risk ... 3. Even more profitable is kicking off your own ICO. Go through the checklist - fancy HTML5 theme that you can buy off of Themeforest and edit the HTML a bit for the landi…
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Due to the limited supply of 24 million BTC, Bitcoin is deflationary meaning it will go up in value as more people adopt it. Govt print fiat currency out of thin air to encourage the population to spend on the economy. Bitcoin as the opposit affect as people use it for a store of value and a hedge against fiat currencies.
That limit will only be hit in 2140.
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A cursory search reveals guy who was involved in BitCoin from the very start. For example, here's an exchange he had in 2008 with Satoshi over the design of Bitcoin: http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/5/
Wow, Satoshi was incredibly naive, dishonest, or just didn't have any idea how quickly it would get out of control.
because it seems to me satoshi was pretty right, by saying that bitcoins will get rarer and rarer even if miners mine more and more thanks to powerful machines. Rarer bitcoins means prices going down ( what costed 1 bitcoin before probably cost 0.001 bitcoin now), not up ( which is the definition of inflation).
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That's why I added "despite consequences". Ok, now they're in jail and they still refuse. Now what? Ugh, lets go convince the peers contributing to consensus that we need to fork the chain and delete this transaction (like Ethereal). This is just the tip of the iceberg BTW. What if they die or have a brain injury? Their password securing the wallet is now lost to the world. Now there's no way to reverse this transact…
The receiver of ill-gotten gains refusing/being unable to pay them back is not a new legal problem and certainly not unique to blockchain.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why I added "despite consequences". Ok, now they're in jail and they still refuse. Now what? Ugh, lets go convince the peers contributing to consensus that we need to fork the chain and delete this transaction (like Ethereal). This is just the tip of the iceberg BTW. What if they die or have a brain injury? Their password securing the wallet is now lost to the world. Now there's no way to reverse this transact…
Forking the chain or otherwise building consensus may be necessary to recover the coins from those particular transactions, but it's not clear that we would need to do that. As an analogy from traditional currency, consider what happens if somebody dies while in debt. Their estate can be used to settle the debt, but if the money isn't there, creditors will go unpaid. There's no guarantee that all of the transactions…
The problem is using blockchains to represent shares in a company (for example). Ownership of a company can't be "lost", or "unpaid". Legally, someone owns each share of a company, and a court can declare ownership is moved. At that point, your blockchain doesn't represent reality any more (as declared by a court) and then, what value does it have?
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How would you propose making bitcoin "have stable value"?
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/11/search-stable-cryptocur...
On a more day to day level, a few years ago a lot of e-commerce pay-by-bitcoin options existed. You would not put this on the checkout next to PayPal because nobody was doing bitcoin then. What I don't understand is why this never took off. People know bitcoin through the news, it is not new. In this time Apple Pay has come along nicely but not bitcoin. Bitcoin has gone off on a tulips tangent. This seems at odds wit…
At this adoption rate, I won't invest any more time if it ever breaks. The transaction costs are actually higher now than they are anywhere else, and both PayPal as well as credit cards are faster. Next year, the new EU legislation will open the market pretty wide and I'm expecting (almost-)free, instant transactions to be available Europe-wide (our market).
I had actually forgotten all about it until a few weeks ago, when I accidentally started the wallet app, and got quite excited seeing the balance. I got accidentally lucky by speculating in BC for the last three years :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Due to the limited supply of 24 million BTC, Bitcoin is deflationary meaning it will go up in value as more people adopt it. Govt print fiat currency out of thin air to encourage the population to spend on the economy. Bitcoin as the opposit affect as people use it for a store of value and a hedge against fiat currencies.
It's arbitrarily divisible, up to the limit of a float though right? So nominal prices can keep "decreasing" in bitcoin for a long time. Maybe that's just too much work to keep the prices reasonable? Edit: they can't actually be using a float for money though, right? So what is the actual limit of divisibiity?
[0]: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/114/what-is-a-sa...