turning your comment into a 10-week pdf course as we speak, just gonna pick a theme over ath theme forest brb

Why do the work _before_ getting paid? Take out an ICO and let them "preorder" your course!

While you say this in jest, it is actually a good idea. The pre-sale part. Get a sense of a market need before you dive in.

Caveat being you've done the work to be able to add authentic value to the people you're selling too. (which is where most ico's break down)

The value is that the course itself is hosted on the blockchain. It's distributed and decentralized. /s

Could I invest in your course academy via some sort of ICO?

Coursecoin is going to change the academic world altogether. The combination of a distributed ledger algorithm with online academia opens up a world of education to people who otherwise could not afford it. Student loans are out of control, but with course coin, the students earn their tuition by mining coins. All the overhead of an academic institution is distributed over a wide array of systems that are responsible for keeping track of enrollment, grades, and personal progress on the blockchain. Teachers get paid better because they get paid in coursecoins as they are mined. They have an actual incentive for their students to remain interested and to succeed.

The ICO will be raising money to bring on new material and for marketing of the courses. We expect 100,000 students in the first quarter, at which point the coin value on the open market is expected to skyrocket beyond all other blockchain coins.

Send your donation or investment money to [email protected] (seriously, please don't.). We will handle the rest.

If you'd like to see our white paper, check it out. https://futureoflife.org/data/documents/research_survey.pdf

Coursecoin regrets to inform its prospective student-investor-miners that there was a compromise to the secure ICO system before launch. There will be no courses or refunds. Thank you for your interest and investment in Coursecoin.

> there was a compromise to the secure ICO system before launch.

I assume that's a typo, and you mean before lunch on the day it was announced. :)

I had to do a double take to make sure this was a joke, because it's pretty much exactly the type of thing I'd expect people to be trampling each other to give their money to on cryptocurrency forums.

> Send your donation or investment money to [email protected] (seriously, please don't.)

On many of those same forums, I expect people would be sending money anyway, and justifying it by saying that "they have to say the seriously please don't part to avoid the SEC, but they don't mean it".

Need an advisor?

Right? I do have a Ph.D. from MIT, even.

I'd advise them to incorporate their PDF, and perhaps lesson taker's info, into a blockchain.

It's the first blockchain based Ph.D. program. Your degree is immutable and distributed.

Well, that's plenty for an ICO. Let's run with it. I know some PHP and can install WordPress!

downloading adobe acrobat as we speak. is there like a blockchain addon that launches my ico? kthxbye

That's great, you'll be running a hedge fund and talking about cryptocurrency in no time

I think it can all be automated:

1) Have the bot build the currency here: http://build-a-co.in

2) Generate HTML5 pages

3) Submit to twitter (focus on new york area) / make tshirts

Now you just need to do an ICO for a "CoinCoin" that automates ICOs.

Recursico. It's ICOs all the way down.

Love it. Somebody please trademark that, and: Metaico, an ICO price pegged to other ICOs. Slogan: "We eliminate volatility while preserving anonymity."

holy cow! that's so out of this world, you can now generate a whole new coin.

Welcome to 2013.

>make tshirts

Oh snap I just had the craziest business idea. Get this. I make tshirts... then I sell them. I'm gonna go tell the folks at /r/entrepreneur!

The best part is you can mix 3 and 4 together! Rob yourself! All the money, no effort and no accountability!

This sounds like The Producers meets Sneakers.

TBH I would watch that movie / tv show.

5. Set up an exchange, wait a few weeks, abscond with bitcoin/ether/whatever you've got.

I wonder if this is what the curmudgeons from the 70's and 80's sounded like during the web 1.0 boom of the mid-to-late 90's

I find the economic promise of the nascent Internet objectively more plausible than the promises of ~1000 altcoins.

And just like I said, I'm sure all the neckbeards from the 70's and 80's felt the same way about the Internet and shit like Geocities and pets.com.

But hey, I'm sure it's "different" this time, right? You're right and everyone in the crypto space is wrong.

> And just like I said, I'm sure all the neckbeards from the 70's and 80's felt the same way about the Internet and shit like Geocities and pets.com.

But they weren't wrong. Geocities and Pets.com died without making very much money.

The giants of the Internet were Search Engines, Online Shopping, Video Sharing, and Social Networks. The giants of "Blockchain" probably either in awful, primodial form (ie: Pets.com was online shopping, but a terrible experience. Geocities was also a social network... albeit a bad one by today's standards).

So today's coins probably will fail to some new coin made 3 or 4 years from now which really figures out the "killer app" of Blockchain.

------------

I think its fair to say that "Blockchain" as a technology will exist in the future. Back in the 90s, one could reasonably expect that "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" was going to be the primary methodology of looking for new websites... before the Search Engine was perfected.

So many people lost their life savings chasing after fad technologies of the 90s, Webvan being one of the most notable. Billions of dollars invested and lost into just... awful ideas that no one understood.

Frankly, the neckbeards of the 80s were right. The vast majority of 90s webpages were utter crap without a business model.

Like so often, technologies are overrated in the short term and underrated in the long term. Blockchain seems like something revolutionary but, like the internet, it feels like it's probably going to take a decade to discover where the real, solid, lasting value will exist.

For example, how many would have predicted the rise of small, fairly low-tech, text search ads as the multi-billion dollar revenue linchpin for all global search.

Similarly, whatever the core long-term value of crypto-currencies will be, it probably hasn't been truly understood yet.

Most of these ICOs are similar to the period before the dotcom crash when simply adding .com to the name of a failing business was enough to lift it's stock value. Anyone else remember that or can give an example?

Whatever rises from the rubble of this cryptocurrency bubble bursting is what will no doubt be most interesting and what will no doubt end up being truly world changing.

Looking forward to the middle/end-game.

Yes but they gave rise to the Internet economy we exist in now. Of course there's going to be chaff that needs to be separated from the wheat. That doesn't mean that it's all going to fail.

It's funny that we can take totally opposite lessons from "I'm sure it's different this time".

Given the fact that we're discussing this in the comments of a popular link aggregator for a VC firm/startup accelerator, I'd wager if Internet 1.0 hadn't happened we wouldn't be here.

Here you go, from 1995: http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva... Note that most of his predictions did come true for a while and then were later falsified; many dotcoms learned that "being early is the same as wrong" the hard way.

Interesting. I wanna try a 2017 scorecard:

1. Usenet is garbage: CORRECT although it was better in the early days. This seems to be a general trend with all comment/message board systems, they rapidly lose value when they breach a certain size, although some including our dear HN have survived for quite some time.

2. Downloading books won't happen: WRONG. Paper isn't going anywhere but ebooks are an unqualified success at this point, largely because (unlike at the time) we can carry our computers anywhere now.

3. The Internet is a wasteland of unfiltered data: CORRECT for now. Interestingly, there was a golden age of Google and Wikipedia that would have made this statement look false but now we've regressed back to fake news, social feeds, and personalized search results.

4. The internet will not be useful for governing: CORRECT for the most part.

5. Computers won't help schools: CORRECT for the most part.

6. "Cyberbusiness" will fail because the world needs salespeople: LOLZ.

I'm not going to try to break down the final paragraph. I think some of these will still improve in the longer run but 22 years later, I'm still giving him 4 out of 6 here.

While I wouldn't argue that #4 is wrong, I do think that as one gets more into self-driven learning the internet has become a major boon. Recorded lectures on 2.5-3x playback, lectures at my own (accelerated) pace, a wealth of information...

Granted, this doesn't readily translate to the classroom nor does it fit everyone's learning style.

Funny but ironic, b/c your list is actually in reverse order, from low to high risk, not high to low. The lowest risk thing to do is actually just buy BTC & ETH and let the associated frenzy of ICOs and cryptoassets drive them higher while remaining relatively liquid and legal. #2 - #4 are sequentially higher risk from potentially illiquid (tokens) to grey area (ICO) to illegal, and the SEC has shown they have patience, reach, and savvy.

Regarding #3, user uetokenceo did that with uetoken.com and put far less effort into it than what you described, to at least some decent effect.

Don't forget to use a Kickstarter campaign to pay for all the themes, text editing, soda drinking and online browsing costs 10.000x

But this is a good thing.

For who? Is it a good thing for everyone? Why, why not?