This one is particularly baffling to me. $200,000,000 is a fortune.

We're all presumably working on our own startups here. Can you imagine getting $200,000,000 in seed funding without even starting on your project? Just absolutely WTF is going on there?

There's a theory that people with enormous paper ETH gains are just diversifying by buying into all the ICOs. And the ICO "fortunes" are also on paper; I don't know if there's enough liquidity to sell the $500M per month that ICOs are bringing in.

What i don't get is how an eth token gets bought in eth, and creates millions of dollars of a new currency

yet eths marketcap doesn't go down?

ICOs are probably best understood like companies, not currencies. As you observed, an ICO doesn't create any value since it's just moving ETH around. If the token value increases relative to ETH then you could say value has been created.

How many companies do you know that issue new shares every hour?

None, and neither do most ICOs. But that doesn't somehow make a token not a share.

Tezos, staus and filecoin all have inflating supplies, they are the biggest icos in history. Bancor is essentially uncapped in how many tokens can exist.

Between them they've raised $500m.

I'll have disagree with you on this

because money is a bet against bets against bets (the day before and the day after snap IPOed--was $25 billion really created? Where did it come from--and where does it go?)

And part of how the money supply has billion-xed since 2000 and no one seems to notice

Old vs. new money. It's a lot easier to get money from 15.000 people who got so rich with BTC and ETH, they have money to spare, than to find and convince 15 Venture Capitalists to put up 1.4 million.

> Why are people throwing money at these?

Futures for Tezos are already trading at 6x the amount people invested during ICO.

> It makes no sense.

In the short term it makes a lot of sense (600% ROI). In the long term: An Ethereum based on OCaml has an interesting potential.

> You have no guarantee that they won't just run off with the money

If the developers are not anonymous, while no guarantee, it makes it less likely. When you cross the road you also have no guarantee that the cars won't run you over. Some amount of trust is needed, whether for money or your entire life. Benefit of crypto is that you don't necessarily need to rely on trust. I doubt Tezos has contractual access to all the money they received, or are allowed to dump their shares as soon as it starts trading for real.

> An Ethereum based on OCaml has an interesting potential.

I see this kind of stuff a lot in the "cryptocurrency" space. When I was reading about Waves, for instance, one proponent unironically proclaimed that "It's built on Scala, which is a better architecture than Ethereum".

I'm no Scala hater, but surely stuff like the implementation language isn't the most important variable in evaluating a new altcoin / cryptocurrency platform? This sounds a lot like hand wavy mumbo jumbo that's meant to convince non-technical "investors" to part with their cash / BTC.

It's built on OCaml because of functionality and langsec - contract code and implementations written in procedural/objective languages are immensely unstable which is also why ETH smart contracts keep getting hacked.

Consider that not even the fucking inventor of Ethereum himself can write a contract without massive exploits.

Can you, in one sentence, explain what Tezos is? Something of the form:

Uber - Order a taxi with your phone

Facebook - Connect with your friends online

Google - Find stuff on the internet

Wikipedia - An encyclopedia that anyone can edit

Amazon - Buy stuff online, without going anywhere

Tezos - ???

(And "Tezos is a new decentralized blockchain that governs itself by establishing a true digital commonwealth" doesn't count as an explanation).

Tezos - Participate in the governance of your cryptocurrency. Read the source code of any smart-contract on the blockchain.

As I understand it, the source code of tezos itself is stored on its own blockchain. Any modifications to the source are proposed by and voted on by owners of the tezos currency (weighted by how much they own). Also, unlike Ethereum, smart contracts are stored as source code on the blockchain, rather than as compiled bytecode.

It's a competitor to ethereum - a place to create more ICOs basically from what I understand. Maybe they're running out of ideas

Token sales may end up being worth a ton of money. There's going to be competition.

Tezos - An Ethereum where the smart contract language ambiguity and procedural nature of the code doesn't result in hundreds of millions in theft.

It's Ethereum with the claim of having a better language for the contracts (enabling automatic verification).

I don't think it makes that much sense, after all, you could also create another language that compiles to Solidity, and that is verifiable.

I mean it is OK, just not as much of an improvement as they make it sound.

Or create another language that compiles to the Ethereum virtual machine. There are several already, and at least two in development designed to be better for formal verification.

Yes that is what I meant - I don't know Ethereum as well, so I assumed Solidity is the already the level of the VM (the "assembly"). Thanks for clarifying!

Its still intense. Tezos would have to become a unicorn to materialized 600% gains on 200 mill. It almost definitely wont, and thus the irrationality dominating this market is bursting the seams.

OTH, the market cap valuations these things are using is kind of ridiculous, since a 200 million sale of eth would crash it into oblivion.

"An Ethereum based on Ocaml" - that has to be a joke. 200 000 000 just because they use Ocaml?

Afaik Ethereum encouraged independent implementations of their PROTOCOL in different languages, also as a way to discover flaws in the protocol.

Ocaml as a selling point just sounds like an appeal to Noobs. Reading that was one of the reasons I decided to pass on the Tezos ICO.

Language security is a much bigger deal than anyone ever assumed and the DAO proved that. Just ask Vitalik.