Live data from Hacker News

Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour

financemagnates.com

61–70 of 382 posts

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

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto currency are the new tulip bulbs[1]. Only some are going to make money. Current buyers are relying on greater fools to take these off their hands. A crash is eminent so hold tight and wait for it. You will have plenty of opportunity. History will repeat itself as new fools arrive on the scene[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_market_crashes_a...

I am starting to worry that this bubble is going to grow until it threatens the world economy.

Depends on whether assets or debt will be leveraged for speculation and whether futures contracts will be used as some kind of meta-currency.

Then you have contagions because it will erode trust in other sectors. Economies kinda freeze up without trust or reliable value propositions.

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

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how many computing cycles and kWH are wasted on cryptocoins

I'll never understand why this keeps coming up. Energy consumption is not a waste if it has utility, and the bitcoin network has utility. I suppose you could make this argument for some worthless altcoins, but the difficulty for those is low enough that the amount of energy consumed is negligible.

Bitcoin is as worthy as tulips, in terms of intrinsic value.

(Of course the worth of paper currency is the same, still, the backing is stronger)

What will happen when bitcoins are worth less than the cost to mine them is anyone's guess

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

#63
post #49

Not completely thought out, but I believe parasitic storage might be a better approach to scaling out a censorship resistant distributed object store. Some kind of cryptocurrency could help fuel it as well. A parasitic storage approach would leverage existing "free" tiers of services like google drive, onedrive, dropbox, yandex.disk, etc. One of the hard parts of scaling that would be creating the fake accounts to ho…

This is why we can't have nice things. If you misuse the free tiers in this way, they will go away.

That's a fair point. Maybe if it focused on the services that more clearly abuse their customer's privacy. Like mapping to Facebook post attachments.

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

#64
post #34
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, this is my reason for not jumping mindlessly on the cryptocurrency bandwagon: it's wasting so much resources and power, especially when you take a look at videos of mining farms.

The whole thing reminds me of one Arthur C. Clarke short story, probably from the 1950s, where a group of Tibetan monks has purchased a computer to generate "all the one billion possible names of God". Before the computer, the monks had been doing the work by hand for centuries. An American computer engineer is sent to install the machine. He chuckles at the monks' superstition: they claim that generating the billion…

Then the Universe is destroyed when the billionth name is generated.

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

#65
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on your post I went and looked up that question/answer portion, and I think the back and forth is illuminating in it's lack of either communication or actual capability: TL;DR: It's a solution in search of a problem, like so much good, early technology. Dalton Caldwell [31:07] – What is the burning, and it’s okay if it’s not consumers, but what is the thing that, with Filecoin, that is gonna make, whether it’s…

That's a bit convoluted, but it isn't so bad, is it? Lots of unused storage, bitcoin showed you can use cryptocurrency to create a network of capabilities (there: hashing stuff, here: of storage), additional uses are possible when getting the mechanism right.

I don't think it's good or bad, but it shows that there isn't a slam dunk product-market fit here and they are searching for what the value is.

I think by the way, that's absolutely vital to progress, and I am glad someone has convinced VC/Money to fund something potentially breakthrough (whether I think it is or not).

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

#66
post #34
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, this is my reason for not jumping mindlessly on the cryptocurrency bandwagon: it's wasting so much resources and power, especially when you take a look at videos of mining farms.

The whole thing reminds me of one Arthur C. Clarke short story, probably from the 1950s, where a group of Tibetan monks has purchased a computer to generate "all the one billion possible names of God". Before the computer, the monks had been doing the work by hand for centuries. An American computer engineer is sent to install the machine. He chuckles at the monks' superstition: they claim that generating the billion…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God

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

#67
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto currency are the new tulip bulbs[1]. Only some are going to make money. Current buyers are relying on greater fools to take these off their hands. A crash is eminent so hold tight and wait for it. You will have plenty of opportunity. History will repeat itself as new fools arrive on the scene[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_market_crashes_a...

I'm actually worried that one of the main things in favour of cryptocurrencies is that they can act as an effective currency for illegal activities, i.e. they'll stay profitable for as long as regulations struggle to keep up with them.

this is already a case for quite a few years in dark web (mostly bitcoin for now). or you think that illegal drugs and weapons and whatnot are being paid by money account transfers over SEPA?

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

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto currency are the new tulip bulbs[1]. Only some are going to make money. Current buyers are relying on greater fools to take these off their hands. A crash is eminent so hold tight and wait for it. You will have plenty of opportunity. History will repeat itself as new fools arrive on the scene[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_market_crashes_a...

I am starting to worry that this bubble is going to grow until it threatens the world economy.

See this prescient article, written in 2013: http://blog.gardeviance.org/2013/11/a-spoiler-for-future-bit...

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

#69
post #34
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, this is my reason for not jumping mindlessly on the cryptocurrency bandwagon: it's wasting so much resources and power, especially when you take a look at videos of mining farms.

The whole thing reminds me of one Arthur C. Clarke short story, probably from the 1950s, where a group of Tibetan monks has purchased a computer to generate "all the one billion possible names of God". Before the computer, the monks had been doing the work by hand for centuries. An American computer engineer is sent to install the machine. He chuckles at the monks' superstition: they claim that generating the billion…

They made a mistake by not increasing the search space (or difficulty in Bitcoin terms) in order to make that computer faith-compatible.

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

#70
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why we can't have nice things. If you misuse the free tiers in this way, they will go away.

That's a fair point. Maybe if it focused on the services that more clearly abuse their customer's privacy. Like mapping to Facebook post attachments.

Yeah, an interesting way to change the balance of "if it's free, you are the product".
Post reply on HN