There is a world of difference between gambling and being defrauded. I have little idea what will happen here, I don't know any more about the story than presented in the article, but an awful lot of securities sellers have gone to prison despite their customers being aware in theory that their investments might fail. If there's any merit to the claims, this is certainly not the end of the story.
The actual wording at least in the article is "maybe get rich". That doesn't sound like fraud to me. Fraud would have been to claim "you'll certainly get rich". Journalists must have known they are gambling if they don#t receive real money for their work. If not, they were incredibly naive and perhaps have learned a valuable lesson. Namely, don't rely on empty promises. The article mentions stock options. Stock optio…
If we're talking about "maybe get rich" then the relevant word is "regulated securities". If you want to trade dreams of "maybe get rich" to others for goods or services (as in this case, the services of journalists), then there's a set of rules that have to followed, pretty much every single nuance of them based on historical cases of mass fraud.
Issuing stock options and following all the rules of SEC designed to reduce (though, naturally, not eliminate) fraud is legal. Issuing promises of "maybe get rich" without following this bare minimum of requirements is a crime.
I thought the vouchers were going to people living in refugee camps? Presumably along with "100% digital vouchers", you need to ship out any required infrastructure, stuff like iris scanners and computers. Are these computers and iris scanners also immune to theft and abuse? They sound amazing :) Does the system require a working power grid?
Of course almost anything can be abused. The digital voucher system is much harder to abuse than sending pallets of cash or food though. Don't let perfect get in the way of improvement. You are correct though, that it's not an across the board improvement because of the additional required infrastructure.
>> The digital voucher system is much harder to abuse than sending pallets of cash or food though
I guess should have picked up on this claim sooner, but when trying to feed refugees with a digital blockchain-based voucher system, surely you have to send pallets of food as well?
I'm confused. The journalists have been paid their tokens, so theres already tokens in circulation, why does it require civil to make a sale? Surely that's worse from the journalists point of view because it increases supply of the tokens. Surely it is also worse for readers. I want to support journalists by buying their tokens, not support Civil by buying theirs. But that just brings up more questions. The flow of t…
"The journalists have been paid their tokens" - have they? As far as I understand from the article, the journalists have not received any tokens, as the creation and distribution of the tokens was to be done after the initial sale, which failed, so the creation of these tokens was postponed, so they have been promised a set number of tokens that don't exist yet.
That may be. I don't know. Still the stated problem of there being no token sale seems to be missing the point. The journalists have already earned their tokens and could sell them themselves, when they receive them.
I don't really see why civil needs to sell any in this situation.
Isn't the whole point of 'the blockchain' to avoid having to trust 3rd parties.
This is false - the demand comes from the project lead being an ETH hodler who wanted to shove a "blockchain" in there somehow, even though it makes literally no technical sense: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2017/11/26/the-world-fo...
It's entirely possible you miss the point of it being a PoC network which is why it only has "one client" and the fact that it helped real people.
It's philosophically possible, but it's overwhemingly more likely that what I described is the case, and is increasingly accepted as being the case.
It's not a PoC as far as they're concerned - they think this is the real system, and they've been trying to recruit new participants, and every one has declined. They don't seem to be asking themselves why this is ...
In every production case I've seen - and I've been watching closely for years - the blockchain bit is an extra that doesn't do anything better than alternative technologies would, and often does worse.
The ETH example you mention was a PoC. It did not generate revenue and is not a business. Don't get me wrong. I think it's great, and it might be technically very impressive, but it's not generating money. It's not a business. Omise is interesting in that they clearly have a product and users. They were one of the first ICOs to put a valuation of the tokens at over $1B. Do you have any idea what kind of transaction v…
> The ETH example you mention was a PoC. It did not generate revenue and is not a business. Don't get me wrong. I think it's great, and it might be technically very impressive, but it's not generating money. It's not a business. It's not even technically impressive. They're literally using Ethereum as the backend database so the guy running it can say "Blockchain!!" a lot, 'cos he's a hodler. I tracked down the detai…
It doesn't (shouldn't?) be technically impressive, it really isn't about the tech.
The news of course benefited from the "blockchain hype" but if the outcome proved to be as expected, real people got real help and the tech did the job just fine, then aren't we bikeshedding by arguing it?
Of course almost anything can be abused. The digital voucher system is much harder to abuse than sending pallets of cash or food though. Don't let perfect get in the way of improvement. You are correct though, that it's not an across the board improvement because of the additional required infrastructure.
>> The digital voucher system is much harder to abuse than sending pallets of cash or food though I guess should have picked up on this claim sooner, but when trying to feed refugees with a digital blockchain-based voucher system, surely you have to send pallets of food as well ?
Good point. It's a lot harder to say the food was properly distributed if none of the vouchers were used though. Obviously outright stealing is another issue entirely. I think though a lot of the supplies looked like they were getting to the right places, yet people were still starving.
Yeah, but having worked in tech for almost twenty years, and being completely forthright, I could probably count on one hand the number of people that ended up on the street making any gamble like that. The older I get, the more I think we really take a lot of things in our industry for granted. I mean the kind of salary people would scoff at is still two or three times what most Americans make.
Ending up on the street? That’s probably rare. Screwing up their future earning potential and savings requiring years to recover both? That’s pretty common. Also please don’t cheapen engineering jobs. Salaries would he lower if COL was lower in the biggest tech sectors (NYC, SF, Seattle). It would also be lower if engineering work was easy, but turns out plenty of people are either not interested or unable to hack it…
I'm really not sure where in my post you get that I'm cheapening engineering jobs. On the contrary, perhaps my post is worth another read. We are paid substantially more than almost every other industry specifically because engineering jobs are not something most folks out in the work force are capable of performing. This, despite our industry also being accessible when held up against the "traditional" most-highly-paid industries (e.g. medicine, law, etc.). And even more exceptional is that you can do equally well with or without a formal education in it, depending on your personality and technical capacity. And what you call "screwing up future earning potential and savings" is still light years ahead of what most people in the global workforce are thinking about. The vast majority of Americans will never be able to consider plans for a six-figure salary, but this is just par for the course in most disciplines and job titles in our industry no matter where you live. If you sit in front of a computer all day and your job has something to do with turning business processes into computer automation, you can expect to break that barrier at some point in your career, even if you're just okay at your job. In fact, it's actually a symptom of some kind of failure on an individual's part (career path, negotiation, perhaps external circumstances) if you don't break the six-figure barrier.