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

Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 137 posts

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#61

Post by DennisP »

seibelj wrote: post #42
Cshelton wrote: post #21

All these ICO's have been avoiding any SEC regulation regarding private security sales by claiming the tokens are just a method to use/exchange services on their platform, not as an investment. However, when ICO's like this one keep happening where only 100 "accounts" own 99% of the ICO offering, you pretty much lose that argument of the tokens only being there for use of the platform. It's a private security sale, a…

But if you own a token, you own nothing in the company, no equity, no promises, no contract signed, you don't have any right to any profits and Brave can say tomorrow that all the tokens are worthless. It's not so straight-forward that they raised investment, really they sold $35mil of a product. But IANAL, and you could easily be right, I'm just saying it isn't so cut and dry.

Depends on the token. In some cases, there's deployed code that enforces various rights...perhaps a share of fee revenue, or access rights to the platform.

Whether the code is already deployed, or depends on further development effort by the team, is one aspect of the Howey Test, according to Coinbase which released the results of some legal research on the subject: https://blog.coinbase.com/2016-12-07-blockchain-token-securi...

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#62

Post by DennisP »

wmf wrote: post #60
hal9000xp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the notion of accredited investor is very discriminatory to small investors. It's basically says - if you already wealthy then you have an access to attractive investment opportunities with huge upside (and of course, huge risk), if you are just a middle class man then stay where you are (since your investment options with huge upside are severely limited and you don't have enough capital to make sense from i…

Equity crowdfunding by non-accredited investors is recently legal in the US due to the JOBS Act, yet none of these ICOs use it.

To raise from the public under the JOBS Act, you have to do your ICO through a regulated platform. As far as I know, none of those support blockchain projects, so it's not actually an option yet.

Plus you can't raise more than a million dollars or so that way. And there's a limit per person, so instead of just sending ETH, everybody would have to go through the platform's KYC, and declare how much income/assets they have.

In the meantime, people in countries with more economic freedom than the U.S. can just deploy a couple pages of code, make some basic efforts to block U.S. investors, and be done with it.

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#63

Post by jdavila90 »

ccrush wrote: post #51
jdavila90 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure, but the idea is the same. You bet on a company and you then sell for a profit.

Purchasing shares is much more than betting on a company. It's giving them money for a percent ownership of the company. Share ownership gives you voting rights on the company direction, a claim to the company's assets and profits, the potential for dividends payments, the right to sue directors for acting against the interest of the company, the right to recover losses from misleading statements and actions by corpo…

"All these things were put in place because your average person doesn't know what they're doing, and they think stock ownership is just gambling"

In order to not be an "average person," you must make 200K+ in salary or have 1 million dollars in cash?

I'm not saying that ICOs are currently perfect by any means. There will be a NEED for some type of regulation and time for the market to figure itself out. Unless youre in the elite group of VCs or a very wealthy person, then you should be excited about the ability to be able to directly invest in a company. As far as voting rights, that can be implemented in the tokens.

This is still very new and one should assume that the current state of ICOs will change as people start figuring it out

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#65

Post by gcp »

chongli wrote: post #45
gcp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Brave becomes popular, advertising space in it is worth real money, and the tokens get value. If.

To me, Brave's value is due to its ad blocker. If they start shoving native ads into the browser then I'll uninstall it. The set of technical users out there who will do anything and everything to avoid and block ads is not a valuable advertising space in any way, shape, or form.

I thought the entire point of Brave was to have ads, but share the revenue.

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#66

Post by gcp »

dharma1 wrote: post #58
jdavila90 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure, but the idea is the same. You bet on a company and you then sell for a profit.

Equity in a company and the tokens the company issues are two separate entities. The tokens only have value because people speculate on them (though some tokens promise to distribute revenue to the token holders through smart contracts in the future). It's possible we see companies in the future that exist solely on the blockchain and don't have a legal entity, and tokens effectively are shares in the company, with v…

The tokens only have value because people speculate on them

This is a bit weirdly stated for this case, I believe. The Brave tokens have value because they offer advertising space in the browser. You're speculating on the value of that advertising space, not so much on an altcoin/token itself.

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#67

Post by mason55 »

thebiglebrewski wrote: post #25

Lol, nobody understands what really happened here. Myself included! They used some kind of digital currency to purchase shares in an upcoming venture? I'd love to try to explain this to my grandma

The idea is that the Brave platform will allow users to send micropayments to content publishers. The micropayments will be in the form of "Brave Coins" which are like Bitcoins but specific to the Brave platform. The reason for this is that you reduce transaction costs to a point where it makes sense to send a $0.50 (or whatever) payment.

So if the Brave platform succeeds then you'll have a whole bunch of people who want to exchange cash for these "Brave Coins" so they can send micropayments. These early investors will hold all the Brave Coins and so they will get the initial influx of cash from people buying Brave Coins to use the platform.

Edit: Possibly the coins are being used by advertisers on the platform, not for micropayments.

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#68

Post by altern8tif »

mason55 wrote: post #67
thebiglebrewski wrote: post #25

Lol, nobody understands what really happened here. Myself included! They used some kind of digital currency to purchase shares in an upcoming venture? I'd love to try to explain this to my grandma

The idea is that the Brave platform will allow users to send micropayments to content publishers. The micropayments will be in the form of "Brave Coins" which are like Bitcoins but specific to the Brave platform. The reason for this is that you reduce transaction costs to a point where it makes sense to send a $0.50 (or whatever) payment. So if the Brave platform succeeds then you'll have a whole bunch of people who…

My understanding is that the tokens (BAT) are sold to/for advertisers to allow them to purchase advertising on the Brave platform so that they can advertise on specific publishers' websites.

The tokens paid for by the advertisers will then go into the pockets of these publishers, while a small portion will end up with users to compensate them for their attention spent viewing those ads.

Am I reading it wrong?

Re: Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO

#69

Post by pacaro »

cellis wrote: post #57

Could someone explain this to me like I'm five? I have an understanding of blockchain, kinda. What is this ICO?

This is my understanding

Put aside blockchain, ICO, and browsers for a moment.

Imagine an app that shows ads, nothing more.

The users of the app are credited in tokens for viewing and/or clicking ads.

The advertisers pay tokens to show ads.

There is a middleman (presumably brave) who manages the ad marketplace and distribution (for a cut)

The users can then take their tokens (acquired viewing ads) and sell them on the open market, ultimately to further advertisers.

The tokens become a CPM backed currency.

The ICO is how you create an initial pool of tokens and establish an initial value.

Blockchain is used as a clearing house and ledger of transactions.

Brave happen to be using a browser as the vehicle for ads.

Post reply on HN