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A comment on What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work?.

Re:What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? by Animats on Monday July 03, 2017 @03:36PM (#14690793)
Mastercoin, mentioned in the article, is now down to 85th place on Coin Market Cap.

Despite all this smart contract stuff, few of these "ICO coins" give the holders any authority over anything. It's not like 51% of the coin holders can fire management.

Ethereum now has half the market cap of Bitcoin, despite the total failure of the DAO, the one big application of the smart contract technology. See "Use Cases Of Ethereum In Different Sectors 2016".[1] It's been six months; what's actually working?

* Branche.io - payday loans. Got as far as the initial token offering 6 months ago. Then, nothing. Did they take the money and run?

* Iconomi.net - "digital asset management platform" - site says "Coming in 2017".

* Augur.net - prediction/gambling platform. Not yet operating for real, but there's a play-money beta.

* RexMLS.com - distributed real estate listing service. Was supposed to have test listings live in April 2017. Didn't happen.

* truststamp.net - distributed identity system to detect fake social accounts. "Connect your Social Networks. The more accounts you connect, the higher your potential Trust Score! Your account information is not stored and your privacy is protected." Not working yet. If it did work, spammers could defeat it by creating interlinked fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook, etc., which some already do.

* chainy.info - store misc. info such as URL shortening bindings on the Etherium blockchain. This seems to work, but isn't used much. If it caught on like tinyurl, the Ethereum blockchain would choke on the traffic.

* uport.me - "self sovereign identity". Still at "sign up for alpha".

* dynamisapp.com - supplementary unemployment insurance that checks LinkedIn to see if you're employed. Not working. Last blog update January 2016.

* ico.inchain.io - insurance against cyber hacks. Site not responding.

* ujomusic.com - some kind of music platform. Not working yet.

* peertracks.com - distributed music royalty system. Not working yet.

* singulardtv.com - distributed video payment system. 5000 Twitter followers! Not working yet.

* beyond-the-void.net - game with Ethereum contracts for in-game currency. Beta version downloadable. At least it's running.

* firstblood.io - e-sports where you can put up money on your play. Alpha available, no beta yet.

* etherplay.io - "Play games and win tokens" - "Coming Soon".

* akasha.world - distributed social network. There's a downloadable alpha.

* vdice.io - online gambling. Like Satoshi Dice, but for Etherium. "Coming soon".

* slock.it - the guys with the DAO and the IoT door lock. That didn't end well.

* electricchain.org - buy and sell solar power over the Ethereum block chain. Lots of PR. May actually be working on a tiny scale.

* lo3energy.com - another energy trading system. Lots of PR, no operating installations.

So that's what people are actually doing with Ethereum. Not all that much. Even the online gambling startups aren't fully operational.

[1] https://www.ethnews.com/use-cases-of-ethereum-in-different-s...

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Re:What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? by sidko on Monday July 03, 2017 @04:57PM (#14691315)
Also, an additional note to your comment - remember that the Ethereum network has been backlogged for several hours to almost a day after an ICO (Bancor, Status). Now imagine one production application running on Ethereum. Now imagine several. How would they really even work?

And some projects thought Bitcoin wouldn't scale for micropayments so they should move to Ethereum because they have solved it. Oh boy.

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Re:What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? by dandero on Monday July 03, 2017 @07:45PM (#14692319)
"Ethereum now has half the market cap of Bitcoin, despite the total failure of the DAO, the one big application of the smart contract technology. See "Use Cases Of Ethereum In Different Sectors 2016"

It's funny how tech people can't understand that innovation is a trial and error path. Ethereum is doing something that has never been done, trying to disrupt the concept of finance and you are talking here about the DAO failure of one year ago that was already fixed with an hard fork solution. Do you really believe that with the hundreds of millions and the back up of some of the most successful companies in the world they will not be able to take the invention to phase 3? You are a really pessimistic folk man.

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Re:What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? by calafrax on Monday July 03, 2017 @08:38PM (#14692613)
I hear this "you just don't understand" claim a lot: from my teenage kids and *coin proponents.
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Re:What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? by banku_brougham on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @02:09AM (#14700255)
Technical failures are lethal to many kinds of enterprise, I'd put technical failures of financial instruments in a category of its own.
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Re:What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? by calafrax on Monday July 03, 2017 @05:15PM (#14691466)
You have to wonder how much insider trading goes into this.

I would assume there are some big bitcoin/ether holders from the early days now who are sitting on billions in theoretical worth and the ICOs provide an inflow of cash that allows them to cash out.

If you have a big bitcoin/ether position then you can make these ICOs pop and then the momentum ends up pulling more people into ether/bitcoin which allows you to exit your position.

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Re:What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? by omarchowdhury on Monday July 03, 2017 @08:07PM (#14692456)
This is exactly what has to be happening.
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Re:What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? by jonnathanson on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @12:06PM (#14696624)
Totally. I would actually be surprised if it's not the case.

I'd also expect a decent amount of what is essentially wire fraud from "startups" who never intend to ship anything.

The blockchain is a revolutionary concept, but right now it's looking like little more than a wild west of fly-by-night opportunism.

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Re:What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? by max_ on Monday July 03, 2017 @04:18PM (#14691075)
First you it's spelled "Ethereum" not "Etherium".

Second, the smart contracts industry has barely made two years and we already have lots of successfull Dapps running on the Ethereum platform(Dex, CryptoDerivatives.Market)

About TheDAO failing, how many air planes crashed before they finally succeeded. And contributed to the current massive mprivement in logistics.

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Re:What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? by ethpod on Monday July 03, 2017 @04:55PM (#14691296)
i was looking for a breakdown like this, thanks. newbie question: hey how about an ICO where token control actually does allow for voting out the CEO. or smart contract delivery of token after development ACTUALLY occurs (approved by stakeholders). any ideas please contact @ethpod on twitter
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Re:What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? by slappy_the_frog on Monday July 03, 2017 @06:39PM (#14691989)
Why is Rexmls.com on the list? They haven't even had their token sale yet.
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Re:What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? by Animats on Monday July 03, 2017 @07:06PM (#14692115)
They announced a product in 2016. The list is of Ethereum-powered products announced at least 6 months ago. Following up on how they worked out.

Not seeing any big successes.

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Re:What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? by NielDLR on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @06:39AM (#14694946)
Ujo has not done an ICO.
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Re:What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? by aaron-lebo on Monday July 03, 2017 @04:38PM (#14691190)
Cheers.
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Re:What is an Initial Coin Offering and How Does it Work? by Animats on Monday July 03, 2017 @05:20PM (#14691486)
Fixed.
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