With potential ROIs like that (all across the board) I am certain that Wall Street cowboys are all over this market.
But at least we have the SEC to protec..oh we don't.
"The EOS Tokens do not have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features, express or implied, including, without limitation, any uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features on the EOS Platform."
And:
"We believe that EOS means different things to different people. We have received numerous amazing interpretations of what EOS stands for or what it should stand for so we have decided not to formally define it ourselves."
[0] https://eos.io/faq.html, last week's mirror: https://archive.fo/m3D1T
At least they're honest about it.
Or, they expect legal action and they see it as a possible disclaimer.
The special thing about Ethereum here is that they act like a participant in the gold rush to some degree. I actually thought they produce coins and try to find a meaningful use for them, just like bitcoin. But in fact they provide an infrastructure for coin producers. That's really interesting, imo. Since no matter how it goes, they will profit from it, and can easily exit any time when they feel the profits are diminishing too much.
If I were them, I'd create a regulatory company and take a cut for "Ethereum-approved ICOs."
Btw, Given is the number of Ethereum founders is small, you're probably referring to some of many devs working for the foundation as contractors.
Sorry but ethereum has no use case, nor is technically ethereum's architecture makes distributed computation possible or even is decentralised. There is not one single dapp that is decentralised and working.
Sure there is. ENS, for one example. Plenty of gambling apps for another (I don't find them particularly _compelling_, but they are there and they do work)
Also this is worse than the current system we have in the world because it wastes more energy in doing so!
It claims it is a decentralised naming system, though looking deeper you will find it is just clever marketing and underneath is it is only ethereum-platform based naming for anything like your address etc. will only work in eth browsers, not all etc. which I have already mentioned in my OP.
The "etc" is important here, because it refers to richer resources such as content hashes. With this, you could load the entire "frontend" for a website from a decentralized datasource, e.g. Swarm. Meanwhile, the backend could be the Ethereum blockchain/smart contract methods.
If the root multisig was deleted, would it be 'decentralised' in your book?
> It claims it is a decentralised naming system, though looking deeper you will find it is just clever marketing and underneath is it is only ethereum-platform based naming for anything like your address etc. will only work in eth browsers, not all etc. which I have already mentioned in my OP.
It doesn't claim to be DNS. DNS is not the only naming system.
Also, it can be used to resolve any resource you want - although you're shifting the goalposts, since that wasn't originally a requirement.
Any money into any cyptocoin is pure gambling. Don't put any money in you can't afford to lose. If anyone is saying the word "investment" while talking about a cryptocoin, smile and nod while slowly receding in the other direction.
As a gambling vehicle, cryptocoins are one of the finest ever created. But people should at least admit to themselves that it's not investing.
That's a little bit of a No True Scotsman, but there's a grain of truth to it. Yes, abstractly cryptocoins are going to create a lot of value for the world. But that value is abstract, at least for now. It's different from the sort of value that a startup creates: at least a startup is trying to affect the world in a tangible way that can usually be explained in a couple of sentences.
EDIT: I think it's possible to invest in cryptocoin, but you have to be willing to put money in and then not touch the coins for years. What bugs me about ICOs is that it's pandering solely to a get-rich-quick mindset. That's nearly the definition of any "initial X offering."
I believe there are ways to have an edge in cryptocoin speculating - it is unfair to say that it is all gambling. I cannot say I am very good in this game, there are people at the chats who are way less nervous and emotional and who must have made fortunes, but I have quit my programming job and now live from it.
I agree that it is different. Arguably, though, if Bitcoin gains enough traction, it would affect the world too.
But even then, the ways in which it would affect the world is unpredictable and any predictions are pure speculation.
In 2011 people where thinking that when 1BTC reaches $1000 in value, there would be mass adoption and it will be used as a currency for mundane everyday purchases. Well that didn't happen and it doesn't seem like Bitcoin will ever be use in that way.
Look at the history: circa 2000 E-Gold was the go-to currency for illegal activity online. In 2008 E-Gold got shut down.
A few months later the bitcoin proposal surfaces and coincidentally solves the "problems" with E-Gold by making it impossible to shut down, impossible to indict the owners, and easier to hide money flows if you are sophisticated enough to write programs to move your money through webs of anonymous proxy accounts.
Bitcoin was designed from the beginning to be ideal for illegal activity and the features that make it good for illegal activity also make it expensive, inefficient, and poorly suited to legitimate commerce (non-repudiation is basically a deal breaker).
Throw in the risk created by price fluctuations and the whole thing is just totally impractical for real world use at scale.
But hey, I was saying the same thing back then too, and I could be a millionaire now, so you probably shouldn't take my advice.
This hasn't caught on mainstream yet but the infrastructure is there, and it's growing.
And you are not paying with BTC. If it's a debit card then you have to have fiat in a bank account. I guess they exchange BTC to USD when you top up your shift card.
I paid $10 for the card. $0.00 annual fee $0.00 Domestic transactions
BTC is converted to fiat at the time of purchase, also with no fee, no need to "top up" the shift card..
But also conversion from BTC to USD is not for free. Whoever is doing the conversion is charging a fee.
Probably as part of exchange rate where they add a markup. So you don't see an explicit fee in your statement but they use little worse exchange rate and that is their cut.
Also whoever is their payment processor (whoever they partnered with to print those debit cards as they don't have license to do it themselves) is charging some fees.
Coinbase charges a 1.49% fee when transferring to/from my Bank changing between USD and BTC.
GDAX, which is owned by Coinbase, does not appear to charge me this fee.
I don't see evidence of the Shift card charging it either.
Shift appears to use Coinbase for its BTC->Fiat needs. Coinbase charges exchange fees [0]. Or am I not understanding how the card works?
[0]https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/210959...
>EDIT: I think it's possible to invest in cryptocoin
smiles about 1000% gains and walks away
Bitcoins will have to overcome massive challenges if it's to become something more than a vessel for speculation and black market purchases. It needs to scale to several orders of magnitude more transactions (none of the proposed scaling methods so far come even close). Then you need to convince the broad public to switch to an unregulated currency (not everybody is a crypto-anarchist/libertarian).
Maybe it'll make it, maybe it won't. And if it does we'll be left to wonder if it's fair that a small share of early adopters end up owning a significant share of the world's money (the new 0.1%). At any rate I'd strongly encourage you to diversify your 1000% gains if you haven't done so already...
If you put $2 into buying a powerball ticket, you have a ~1:290 million chance at becoming a millionaire and a ~1:50 chance at breaking even.
If you put $2 into bitcoin at any point in history and held for 2 years, you have a 0% chance at becoming a millionaire and a 100% chance at breaking even.
If you left $2 sitting in your wallet for 2 years, you lost $0.05-0.10 depending upon who you believe
That does not compute. What do you mean here exactly? Clearly if you invest $2 in BTC and the value of bitcoins increases 500,000% you're a millionaire. Conversely if it crashes and becomes worthless you've lost everything.
But more generally I wasn't arguing statistics, just pointing out that it's just a big gamble, like the lottery. It's extremely difficult to predict the future of bitcoin so investing in it is not entirely unlike playing the lottery.
you sure? what happened to the estimates related to payment channel proposals: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/o...
In general it's a pretty complex technology that introduces a big number of new variables in the mix.
Look at the example in your paper:
>You're probably buying a coffee only once, right? Well, maybe the coffee is $5, and you put $50 into the channel and leave it open. Then someone else comes to the coffee shop and she does the same thing. But she has a channel with the grocery store. There's me, coffee shop, Alice, grocery store, they all have channels. When I go to the grocery store next time, I don't have to open a channel. Payments are routed.
[...]
>I am guessing the mean is going to be 3, but it will probably be an exponential distribution. Most people will probably have 1 channel, and then some might have 100s of channels open.
Note the use of "I am guessing". And what happens if I'm not willing to put $50 in the channel to leave it open because it's a one time thing and there's no point for me to do that? I'd say that most of ebay and other "peer to peer" purchases are like this. Would you put 10 times the amount of the transaction in a channel to some alibaba seller just for the sake of being a good bitcoin-izen?
In general I find the idea of people opening only 3 channels a year to be a tad optimistic if bitcoin is to replace Visa.
So it remains to be seen how well it'll work in practice. Maybe it'll work great, but maybe it'll be a huge mess. At any rate I wouldn't say that bitcoin scaling is a solved problem.
I realized that pg has some bitcoins, so it's a stretch to say he's just gambling and not investing. But Bitcoin and Ethereum seem to attract huge numbers of get-rich-quick people that try to convince others the flip is real investing.
There's a huge area in between, and where you place a particular activity on the continuum is largely a judgement call.
> How is investing in the stock market not a gamble?
The companies that make stock market in aggregate make money.
Agreed, if taken by count. But there's a few that offer real distinctiveness IMO: Litecoin (scrypt, segwit), Monero (cryptonight, ring ct), Myriad (multi-PoW), Peercoin (PoS), CounterParty (colored coins/tokens). I'm not super up-to-date so there are bound to be more modern ones too.
We all heard Litecoin loud and clear win the race to segwit and it lit a fire under Bitcoin. In fact, many of these coins serve as inspiration for features included or considered for inclusion in bitcoin. So if nothing else they offer real world testing grounds (not merely testnet) for cryptocoin features.
> Your position is just absurd to say that Ethereum and what is buildable on top of it are valueless.
As noted elsewhere, I don't think Ethereum is worthless. But there are a lot of junk assets on there. Are there more junk Ethereum assets than there are junk altcoins? Well, IMO, the only investment altcoins solicit is computational capacity of PoW to secure their blockchain. Some altcoins do a premine and in general I think those are often as shady as some of the junk Ethereum assets.
Given my assumption, can you explain why I can't do this:
1- Have a great idea for a decentralized marketplace app (think OpenBazaar)
2- Store 21 million BazaarCoin in a MySQL database and give these coins some purpose in my app (eg. used to buy stuff)
3- Setup APIs so people can easily trade them (use public-key crypto to track ownership)
4- Make all my code open source and also provide read-only APIs so anyone anywhere can quickly audit the database of coins.
5- Have various exchanges setup USD/BazaarCoin trading pairs
6- Explain all this in a white paper and organize an initial-bazaarcoin-offering to "bootstrap the network"
Where does the blockchain fit in to add value?
Blockchain prevents all that: your code is committed and public
The two most popular blockchains, Ethereum and Bitcoin, can't "handle too much traffic". They both suffer from severe congestion the moment people start using them actively. Distributed databases that have existed for a while scale much more efficiently.
Blockchains do not prevent this.
> you decided you didn't want to play anymore
If the coins have value, users are incentivized to keep the app running to preserve their wealth and to preserve the value of having a network of users participating in the decentralized app. Because all the code is open source and all the data is readily available, I can easily sell off the write keys to the highest bidder. There will be bidders because the BazaarCoins and userbase has value. If it does not have value, then there is nothing lost in me burning the write keys.
The blockchain does not add value here.
> you might be tempted to create a bunch of coins on your own mysql database to pay yourself
I cannot do this without hurting the network. The data is all readable so people will know. If I'm lying about the data being available, I will be sued or worse: arrested for fraud (because I'm selling something that is not in the contract).
The blockchain does not prevent this either, by the way. If anything, it is worse: for example, the Ethereum Foundation broke their promise of honoring "code is law" by reverting transactions on the blockchain and paying people who should not have been paid. In the real world, this is fraud.
> because authorities seized your servers
Bingo! I agree with this argument. The blockchain allows anyone to use the app and disregard authority.
That most alt coins are crap is, I think, common sense. Such agresssive investment into something with such limited present-day value (i.e. The PE ratio, as it were) smells off. If cryptos are like other markets, they'll need to show more short term value soon, or crash.
In fact the majority of ICOs are not even open to Americans.
Psychology?
Telling about something increases interest...
I have a website https://icofomo.com
I think this is not accurate. It's more likely accurate to state that their use is not tested in courts. But if you could show corporate communications indicating "such and such mechanism will be how we track obligations to shareholders or creditors" and establish that the tokens were not paid back per the operations of the token mechanism, then in all likelihood a court would agree and find evidence of damages and/or criminal wrongdoing.
Lawyers strike me as a particularly pedantic crowd (similar to programmers) and I would suppose if pressed about such tokens they'd say "this is a grey area because there's no precedent here yet." But AFAICT intent trumps everything else. If you make a new contract that's not called a contract but smells like a contract and get everyone to agree to it but not write their signature on paper, you have not dodged responsibility.
OTOH regulators like SEC might balk and throw their hands up at things like this and claim that they're not securities or that it's out of their scope. But district attorneys, attorneys general -- they probably wouldn't back down from a case like this if it happened to constituents that they think are important enough to stand up for.
More interestingly, there seems to be no real answer for the question you have asked. What is the real value, if the courts and legalities are what people need in this situations, and those things are already in place? Sometimes it really seems like the enthusiasm of most honest people coming into ICOs is fueled by the fact that they don't understand this. They don't comprehend what stocks are really about: making sure that the state can aid in contract enforcing.
Think otherwise? Please prove me wrong. There just don't seem to be any real industrial value in ICOs, we already have stock technology.
Now, Counterparty and much moreso Ethereum have created an opportunity for anyone to mostly click through to a new asset/token and make claims about some abstract business idea. FOMO drives folks to invest in the pump-n-dump of the day. Very few of these have any real claim of value.
Please, tell your friends not to invest in these ludicrous scams.