>> When the opportunity arose to help Stellar, we enthusiastically agreed. A couple of months ago, Stripe contributed $3M to help get the project going. In return, we received 2% of the stellars. However, the project is not run by Stripe. We just believe that a system with properties like Stellar's should exist in the world, and we heartily encourage anyone interested to participate in its development. We're going to auction a majority of our stellars to other interested companies, with any net profits being returned to the Stellar Foundation
That's a bit exaggerated. Lumens are currently trading at $0.58 and such a big sale would have a high impact cost too.
The market-cap is a made-up number calculated by (current_price x num_tokens). Except that current_price isn't fixed and the buying and selling will change it. You aren't selling to an infinite buyer market either, so you can't just sell everything at once to extract that value in one go.
Now since cryptos are currencies themselves, it makes no sense of talking about a market cap. The market cap of stellar is the number of stellar available.
The market cap of a real currency like USD is the money supply. The money supply has probably a couple dozen different definitions depending on how you want to look at it and the fungibility of different representation of money. (Eg does it really make sense to consider burned bitcoin or satoshi's supposedly "never moving" bitcoin as part of the "money supply")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#United_States
There is a reason forex market economists/analysts don't talk about the "market cap" of the Japanese Yen or market cap of the British pound.
There is also the whole intrinsic value of a company part. People buy stock because they believe the company is worth more than other people do. They (except for minor exceptions in the case of small investors) judge the companies future ability to generate profits and cash to decide on whether the buy or sell the stock. People buy crypto on pure speculation that other people will buy crypto in the future.
Amazon's balance sheet [0] shows assets minus liabilities of $19 billion. So the "assets" that shareholders "own" are less than 3% of the company's $690 billion market cap.
Not to mention that shareholders don't "own" those assets in any real, tangible sense.
If you look around at any form of wealth, from the balance in your checking account to stocks, bonds and even the title on real property, it's all invisible, intangible and socially constructed.
Not as different from cryptocurrency as one would like to think.
[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872417...
That's basically what you are saying.
Here's the thing though. Crypto currencies can have lots of uses. And even "simple" ones "only" made for payment like XLM and XRB have a value when they let me transact fast and cheaply.
I look forward to a future where my money is mine. Where no bank can arbitrarily decide to FREEZE MY FUNDS that I have LOANED TO THEM. The banking system is broken. Sure it gives us some nice things in return like fraud protection. But increasingly I begin to wonder whether the advantages of trad-banks are worth giving them control over my money, and increasingly the answer seems to me to be no.
I don't think he's saying that at all. Google is pretty digital but has value because it has millions of paying customers. With things like dogecoin the value proposition is more questionable.
If you can accept the later is where the real value is, eventually you're going to get to the point where you see the REAL value is in putting these pieces together into a system where a customer can exchange $$ for the value being created.
Then look at somebody like Stripe, and say, they make all the $$ just facilitating the exchange of $$ online.
Now, all of a sudden these other crypto services that enable the exchange of $$ don't seem so out there or do they?
1. Crypto-assets like Bitcoin/Ethereum/Steller/Ripple, etc, are created simply by typing some numbers into a piece of software. There's no underlying value, it's a number in a database.
2. Stocks have measurable value, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93earnings_ratio
3. Anytime someone sells a Bitcoin or whatevercoin it requires a buyer. Similar to baseball cards, beanie babies, or other artifitially scarce yet easy to produce asset, the market is subject to supply and demand. In the case of cryptocoins, the supply is created and distributed to a small group of users who horde it, in the hope that new users will come in and purchase the coins for more than it cost to create them. This is a hallmark of a typical pyramid scam, which collapses once no more investors can be found, leaving the late adopters holding now worthless "coins".
4. Stocks in Amazon and businesses grant you legal rights, and if the company goes bankrupt you are entitled to compensation from their assets.
My view is that everything is a pyramid scheme from the first wampum and beads that were traded by humans on down the line to where we are now. The difference is crypto is a chance to get in at the top for once. That chance was missed ages ago by our generation with regard to the US dollar.
If, in your hypothetical example, the reason there were no buyers was completely unrelated to the performance of Amazon as a company
And the price of Amazons stocks dropped enough, eventually it would reach a point where Amazon would start buying its stocks back as it would be financially nonsensical to not do so
The difference is crypto is a chance to get in at the top
for once.
Anyone who wants to just needs to create their own crypto-asset and market it like the others to convince "speculators" it's worth purchasing.
Notice how bitcoin/cryptocoin advocates tell others to "HODL" - psychological manipulation is needed to maintain the artificial market scarcity as there's no real demand, use, or acceptance from retailers. [1]
If you're genuinely concerned about control of the money supply, you would voice concern about how cryptocoins are majority owned by only a few hundred people [2] and because of how tether [3] has been marketed and used on exchanges it's essentially like the federal reserve of cryptocurrencies except it's just 2 guys and it's alleged to be backed by nothing which could mean they're stealing large amounts of cryptocoins. Given all the theft in the cryptocoin system, one might wonder if regulations and security standards exist for a reason. What happens if thieves become the majority wealth holders of all the cryptocoins?
[1] https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-inequality-2014-1
Maybe in 18 months, when the mythical lightning network gets released they will add it back. But not now.
I was starting to grow pretty concerned but clearly segwit and LN have made enough progress that fees have dropped to ~10sat/byte. [1] That is dirt cheap.
main reason for the drop imo is the end of the hype cycle: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=bitcoin
Edit: typo
> but it's just a test version so it could easily break.
> There’s no mainnet wallets available for regular users, but you can try testnet.
> This is all a work in progress,
Somewhere in a lab on this planet they might have a flying car, that doesn't mean you can use one any time soon.
When the actual devs tell me not to use a buggy, in working, piece of software, I am going to listen to them.
I made and lost 30k speculating on dumb stuff like Mazacoin and Auroracoin. I avoided looking up any numbers for a long time, but my non-tech friend asked me the other day what it would have been worth. If I had invested 20k of that in the Ethereum presale, it would be worth 30 to 40 million dollars (or would have been when the market was high).
Could kick yourself for stuff like that (I read the initial posts about Eth here on HN, figured it would be valuable, didn't know how soon it would be valuable), but the market was scammy even then. Mazacoin was supposedly going to be the first official coin of one of the Sioux reservations; that was exaggerated, didn't keep it from spiking 10x overnight.
There's nothing special about making a fortune gambling and taking money off other dummies throwing money into the hype. Regular people are getting hurt by this. For every big winner, there's some family who had a dad who mortgaged their house and lost it all. Maybe that's post hoc justification of missing out, but there's nothing to be proud of.
edit: doing the math as of today; $24k would have bought you about 80k Ether at the presale price of 2k eth per Bitcoin (about $600). 1 eth is about $1050 today, at a value of $1k that's 80 million dollars. The fortunes that people can and have made at out of this are absurd.
That's silly. Just look at the growth in the total crypto market cap over the last few years (or even over the last six months) and it's clear that this can't be true.
The vast majority of people who have been involved are way ahead.
Strong disagree :(
Cryptocurrency investment is speculation in a zero-sum game. Every dollar someone pulls out of the system in profit required someone else to put a dollar in. All those people who sold bitcoin at $19k could do so because there were buyers. Every single one of those buyers lost.
Cryptocurrencies are not shares in a corporation or bonds or any sort of interest or dividend producing financial instrument. Even the ICOs that claim to be so only work when new money is coming in. To get a (real) dollar out of the system, someone else has to put a dollar in. To get more money out of the system than you put in, someone else has to pay. For that person to get more money out, more people have to come in after them and pay. The top of the pyramid gets paid, the bottom is left holding the bag.
The only growth in market cap is new money flowing into the system. Once enough decides to flow out, the gig is up and the whole thing tanks.
I now assume every bubble serves a similar purpose.
Knowing that, a person smarter and braver than me could be skimming off some of those narco dollars.
Only if they sold. Otherwise they might just wait until the price climbs back.
SOME ONE made one a fortune during the tulip mania. Right?
Like all speculation, for every winner there are hundreds of losers, and hindsight is 20/20 but it's impossible to reasonably predict the future outcome.
Don't worry about it :)
Dave is a brilliant guy. But the response to a lunch talk shouldn't be to invest in tokens.
>swanson: Related to the Coinbase/insider trading noise around BCH a few weeks ago, it seems strange for Stripe to plug other alt-coins (OMG, Stellar, etc) in the post as things they view as "promising" and "imagine enabling support for". I don't think it's illegal nor unethical personally, but it is such a dicey topic that I'm surprised to see someone writing without a mountain of disclaimers on an official Stripe communication channel
>>ChristianBundy: FYI, Stripe has been very transparent in the fact that they believe (and have pumped millions of dollars into) Stellar
https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/7ntt4w/notes_from_...
Note: I'm not bashing Stellar, I'm actually a big fan.
: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216329