> Another startling fact to note is that neither company has an actual product in the market right now. Although that is common with ICOs because investors buy into a product roadmap that will developed with the funds raised via the token sale.
No, don't worry, this isn't a bubble. We're just experiencing a speculative soapy-water sphere situation.
Crypto is definitely a bubble. Perhaps one of the biggest bubbles to burst when this happens four to five years from now.
> I need to start thinking of a few product roadmaps
I know you are being facetious, but it really is not as simple as putting out a roadmap. Think about it: If you could pull this off, but are not doing it, you'll have us believe you are willingly turning down millions. If you can't pull it of, your comment becomes a cheap meaningless jab at things bigger than you. Both options are quite unbefitting of HackerNews.
> You also have to write a whitepaper.
http://plasma.io/ Pay attention to mentions of "micropayments".
I need to start thinking of a few product roadmaps.
Human nature hasn't changed much in the past 17 years, on either the scammer end or on the scammed end.
This is super interesting technology, regardless of your prejudices, and just complaining about it being a "bubble" doesn't add any value to the conversation.
That said, I'd like to invite you all to the ICO for my new coin, PNZ. The way it works is simple. I guarantee double your money for every 3 people you convince to invest. Stay tuned for the whitepaper explaining the math.
Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency. [1]
> Why can't we just have an intelligent conversation about this new technology?
It is quite the same with HN and SEO: Because there are a few scumbags in the SEO space that are very obvious for HN readers, every thread about optimizing websites for search engines has a negative sentiment.
This technology has a lot of obvious scumbags too. Now the companies in the article did not get to a billion market cap by being scumware. Speculators just assume the value of the coin will rise (again) with increased adoption of the technology.
Then I think a lot of early HN posters moved elsewhere or just stick to read-only mode. Also, maybe, "me too hates this!" is more popular on HN than "I like this".
I agree it is a shame that there isn't a single comment about the technology of the two ICO unicorns in the article. About successfully skipping VC and crowdfunding your next startup by issuing a token.
Instead we get a thread that is pushed off the front page, due to more comments than upvotes, most of the comments talking about unrelated scams or conflating value of distributed tokens with business evaluation.
Yeah but that is the kind of thing they said during the housing bubble and the dotcom bubble before that, then after those bubbles all the media and experts had the same talking point...no one saw this coming
What more do you want added to the conversation? Bold predictions, that will inevitably be true? That is a little hard to do and actually detracts from the known truth, still I'll bite. As many of the experts who missed the other bubbles are pointing toward charts suggesting a market correction/crash, many are pointing to crypto as a way to protect their money, my guess is barriers to crypto ownership will continue to lower allowing early investors to cash out a little but control supply to raise the price, and then when enough of the crypto market is distributed across uneducated investors...boom the remainder of early investors and investor money pulls out and all that value created by nothing more than belief disappears and reality appears. It costs nothing to start a new blockchain with a new cryptocurrency, there is no real value in Bitcoin or even Ethereum/Ether, the idea of smart contracts as a tool to replace lawyers and courts was just marketing effort to keep the good times rolling with no basis in reality.
Bitcoin does seem to be the best payment technology for online illegal transactions. Albeit, one could argue those shouldn't be 'real' in the first place.
Most charitably, because blockchain currencies don't solve any useful problem.
As has been aptly demonstrated by the by the Vinnick arrest, they are far from anonymous. And, has been aptly demonstrated by the recent Bitcoin Cash fork, blockchain currencies don't have distributed, immutable trust. So, a bitcoin currency isn't anonymous and is subject to a central authority who has enough power. And, all the while, it has all the downsides of cash (non-repudiable, stealable, etc.)
Explain to me again what the advantage of a cryptocurrency is?
> Why can't we just have an intelligent conversation about this new technology?
Because nobody really cares about the technology. If they cared you would see discussion about more articles like these:
https://qz.com/1031861/blockchain-could-fix-a-key-problem-in... "Blockchain could fix a key problem in China’s food industry: the fear of food made in China"
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-blockchain-ibm-idUSKB... "IBM, Maersk in blockchain tie-up for shipping industry"
Instead, you see crypto-currency speculation over ... and over ... and over.
I'm a bitcoin maximalist but there is an upcoming ICO that i have to plug. I bought some to use, not to speculate on, but in hindsight I didn't realize there was an opportunity to make some profit.
It's a lending platform. P2P lending w/o the need of banks. You don't need credit for a loan because you put up collateral in the form of Bitcoin (or probably Ethereum as well).
I've seen all the pump/dump tokens, and i'm not interested in those. I'd actually use and benefit from this platform. I hold a pretty significant amount of BTC and I learned after selling some btc to never sell again. However, If there is a time when I need $USD, I can put up my BTC as collateral, have USD deposited to my bank account, pay interest on it, and once I've paid it all I get my BTC back as well.
It's so easy to be cynical this early, and I don't blame you but we're still 3-8 years from the "Facebook" era of crypto... you're upset because we don't have the ecosystem now, but that's also because people are still coming out with use cases.
Are blockchains cool? OH FUCK YES!
Is people raising a lot of cash from suckers in a bubble-y market that threatens to rebound on all of us cool? Some might opine that this is slightly less than maximally cool.
The tech is cool, and the new funding model is also fascinating. Never before has it been possible for everyone to participate in the early funding of startups.
Sure, most will fail, but that's not different from the old model. The biggest difference is that it's not based on cronyism anymore.
It's being exploited by capitalists who don't fully understand the tech or its implications but who see a way to make some quick cash.
Couple all of this with the fact that the market is becoming extremely saturated with various coins, and bad management / corruption leading to fracturing of the Bitcoin blockchain, and you may start to see a problem developing. Bitcoin needs public adoption in order to prevail. It needs cohesion. It is losing ground on both fronts every day.
It's becoming clear that Bitcoin itself will not survive if Bitcoin Core continues to mix up their priorities and support / engage in vitriolic public discourse with those who think differently. But cryptocurrency tech itself is such a powerful idea, it really has the chance to revolutionize how we think about and use money.
Yet that won't happen as long as the general public, whose support is needed, is distracted and scared away by all of the different coins on the market, the controversy around Core / SegWit, or even worse, they see it as something completely trivial and useless thanks to the myriad of pointless coins being passed around to idiots who want to get in on the tulip mania. [0]
It's hard not to notice the bubble if you're paying attention. My hope is just that, after the bubble pops, something is left. Something that can evolve into a dependable, ubiquitous, cohesive technology that improves ours lives in the ways we dream it can.
It would be foolish, however, to assume that there won't be a handful of these startups that go on to actually change the world in a big way. Bitcoin, arguably, is already quite far along in that regard.
ICO's offer people investment opportunities to people who for numerous reasons couldn't invest in anything before.
That's a wonderful thing with educated investors prepared for the risk, but what some of these companies are pulling is modern day snake oil.
I'm not just talking about shady types, plenty of respectable people acting poorly for quick money. YC is in on it too with filecoin, history will be the judge and I hope all involved are remembered.
Go read some of the ico forums, ask yourself whether these people are stealing from underage children. Please.
As an aside, I wouldn't touch Filecoin (due to the VC taint), but Sia looks promising.
Does that mean we should shun and shame this new technology? Doing so would seem—to me at least—to be something that's really not in the spirit of HN.
Here are my concerns:
* These ICOs are raising Series D level capital from investors at Seed Round risks. So while we can expect that most of these will fail, it's tens of billions of value erased. The market cap for Ethereum (and their ICO tokens) is close to $100bn[1], largely in the last 3 months. It's one thing when 90 startups at $1M in investments fail. Not when they're a billion a pop. The total market cap for Cryptocurrencies nearly doubled in the last month.
* September has over 100 additional ICOs slated[2].
* Most of these ICOs are a slick website and a PDF document. Take decentraland. It raised $25M in 35 seconds. Here's their website[3] and their PDF plan. It's a virtual reality game, and they spend twice as many pages talking about their token economy than the entire engine of their platform. Here's how they're going to "solve" their decentralized content distribution:
> The current solution uses the battle-tested BitTorrent and Kademlia DHT networks by storing a magnet link for each parcel. However, the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) provides a compelling alternative as its technology matures.
> However, hosting these files and the bandwidth required to serve this content has significant costs. Currently, users of the Decentraland P2P network are seeding the content without compensation and out of goodwill. However, in the future, this infrastructure cost can be covered by the use of protocols like Filecoin [...]
They similarly gloss over 3D meshes, sounds, scripting languages with payment (!!!), voice chat, etc. I could go on. Out of 7 people officially involved, only one is a self proclaimed tech. This is MOST ICO proposals. Remember that got $25M in 35 seconds. Does this look like a proposal for a serious investment? I'm shitting on Decentraland, but they are hardly alone in the lack of clarity or seriousness for such an ambitious project.
* On a pragmatic level, the constant shift in value of the various coins makes it nearly impossible to build stable marketplaces to actually USE the tokens. I have to shelve a bill-and-rent-splitting app for now because I can't trust the token not to drop/inflate in value over a day. The same thing with attempting to price a good or service over more than a week, as seen by the spread on Ethlance[5].
* Fraud, scams, phishing, hacks, it's all there. Half the time these ICOs have their websites and email lists hacked, and the hackers send out pre-ICO notices and pilfer coins. Happens all the time. Enigma, the security ICO, was comically hacked when the founder used the same password as Ashley Madison[6].
You might notice I haven't talked about the tech much. Honestly it's some of the coolest stuff I've seen ever. Or at least since BitTorrent. The concept of machine-managed economic transactions, housed in a distributed, secure, and consensus-based public ledger, has the power to disintermediate in ways not possible since the Internet first started. But god I wish people would stop setting money on fire.
[1]: https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/
[2]: https://www.coinschedule.com/
[3]: https://decentraland.org/
[4]: https://decentraland.org/whitepaper.pdf
[5]: https://ethlance.com/#/find/candidates?cat=10&o=0&xhr=10
[6]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/21/hack-enigma-500000-ico/
EDIT: I can't type grammar good.
You too can become a millionaire from these penny stocks.
But even with a 40x return you need to dump TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS into a highly risky investment to make a single million dollars. Christ on a cracker, $25,000. That's a year of frugal living in most places. How could you even ... ?
So, the infinity:1 ratio of "bubble!" to "econ 101" doesn't speak well to the thinking going on here.
