Seriously, these securities rules keep people like me from investing in AirBnB and Uber (two that I caught very early and wanted into)... but we can all go to Vegas and lose $100k in a single weekend. But putting $10k into Uber's seed round is somehow a crime I need to be protected from? Truth of the matter is this is the essence of capitalism-- it is my right to invest in Uber's seed round and Uber's right to have me as an investor (if they consent), whether I am "accredited" or not. This is basic "Freedom of association" which underpins everything from gay marriage to the right to refuse service to barefoot people.
Also, of course, I've lost my own $10k on more than one occasions starting companies. (And I've made much more as well.) Why do I need protection from myself? Especially when the terms of that protection are written by people who don't know what SHA256 is.
No, these regulations mainly keep the middle class and the not-quite-wealthy-enough from investing in the highest upside opportunities. I know it's better to put $10k into 10 different seed rounds than $100k into one seed round. I don't need to be accredited to know that.
And I've certainly lost a lot more than that (and made even more) in the stock market using complicated options strategies involving multiple legs and expirations-- I'm the very definition of a sophisticated investor....
.... but I can't be trusted to give a startup $10k?
This is what regulation tends to do, which people don't seem to get -- it raises the bar keeping the little guy out.
Once again, the rich get richer and the poor and middle class have less opportunity.
PS-- To those responding: Yes, I have heard "but what about the grandmas? won't anyone think of the grandmas???" before. I'm acutely aware of the history of this type of regulation in the USA. Ultimately this stuff keeps grandmas poor.
You should all read G. Edward Griffens "The Creature from Jekyll Island". It's a history book about money, but it's not in the least dry.
Government always has an excuse, usually a claim to be helping or protecting people, when it violates our rights.
Keeping me out of Uber's seed round is a violation of my rights.
But ultimately, wanting to die on the ICO hill is a bit odd. I thought it was fairly clear (at least, it was fairly clear to me) that the whole "industry" is mostly powered by hype -- which leads to people being swindled out of their money. Wanting to protect a completely unregulated industry's ability to fool people into wasting their money doesn't seem like a sane or sustainable position (that's how economic crashes happen).
> Keeping me out of Uber's seed round is a violation of my rights.
First of all, this is a story about China. Second of all, it's a story about ICOs and not non-ICO startups. Third of all, is it also a violation of your rights to not be able to fund companies in countries that are at war with your country (which I assume is the US)? Is it a violation of your rights to not be able to fund illegal activity? I'm just trying to gauge at which point does your view on "the inalienable right to invest in anything" stop short? I would expect that China is trying to come to a decision about whether ICOs should be made illegal or more regulated.
Secondly, you think its "fairly clear to [you]" that these ICOs are scams. I am sure some are, but I know for a fact that many are not. I am quite capable of telling the difference (as a blockchain engineer.)
The presumption that every startup failing is "people being swindled out of their money" is very odd one for a discussion forum run by y-combinator.
Is y-combinator being swindled when an investment fails?
And you're still sidestepping the point:
It's my right to apply my own discernment to what are good and what are bad investments. Not people who don't know the difference between SHA1 and SHA2.
Reading tip: Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you were to tell any of your progressive friends about Reg-D, but framed it as written by "the 1%" - they'll naturally think the law is unjust and shouldn't exist.
I think this has less to do with political flavor and more to do with critical thinking skills. Unless Reg-D also bans gambling at Vegas and throwing your money down a well - then it comes up short of it's protectionist goals. But it definitely succeeds in protecting qualified investors from "unqualified" investors.
Makes sense why you feel this way.
What I will say, is no one stopped you from investing in Uber, besides Uber. Tomorrow I can go out and sell half my C-Corp to a friend. Legally, no one is stopping me, besides me and my contract(s). My company isn't publically traded, and as such, I haven't released shares to be bought and sold.
That being said, if you're talking about "accredition" - that shouldn't stop you from being able to invest in a friend's or aquantences company. At least until you have 35 of said people..
Which I agree is B.S., at the same time - it's just a way to ensure you don't get massive companies like Uber getting billions of funding and providing no services. It's an attempt at curbing a dot-com-esqu bubble. Overall, I do think this is government over reach, but I do see the point.
There are ways around that FYI, for example there isn't a reason a financial advisor couldn't invest on your behalf.
Peek your head into /r/ethtrader. You will find people putting their retirement savings, mortgaging houses, etc and these people aren't technically savvy and can be easily taken for a ride. While you might have good apples, there are going to be tons of bad apples, people just coming with a white paper and asking for millions of dollars. Coming back to your question, the rich don't need protection as its ok to lose money when you are rich. The 'not rich' need protection as if they lose all their savings, it will seriously harm their lives.
And a lot of those non-"savvy" people have outperformed me, for instance by buying ETH at the ICO.
You guys keep presuming that the only choice is "people losing all their money" and that these regulations stop that.
The reality is, these regulations keep the poor people poor, not keep them from losing all their money.
As I have pointed out, you can go to Las Vegas and lose all your savings in a weekend.
That dog don't hunt.
You're still free to give your friend 10k for a startup.
It's to prevent boiler room style organizations that quite effectively convince people without much information that an investment is sound when it's not.
You're still free to give your friend 10k for a startup.
It's because of that
This has left "startups" like this "company" YayYo, which raise money from TV commercials stating that they'll become the next Uber.
http://www.businessinsider.com/yayyo-ipo-ads-tv-ramy-el-batr...
2) In that alternate reality, what advantage did your money have over YC, Andreessen Horowitz or Benchmark money? Were you able to connect founders to top government decision makers, or bulk up their growing management team with hard-to-get candidates? If the answer is "yes", you could've been awarded advisory shares in Uber and AirBnb without being a qualified investor (a gift is a gift, after all). But since more likely the answer is "no, my money is no different than money from a joe schmoe down the street", you will likely be required to overpay for a ridiculous valuation at seed stage. What effect would that have on your portfolio as a whole?
1. Libertarianism sweeps negative externalities under the rug. Air quality, noise pollution, the costs to society when an elderly person goes bankrupt. The counter arguments are thin. If you don't ban building in a flood plain, people will build in the flood plain. Then the flood will happen and we'll all be worse off.
2. Libertarianism is inefficient because it demands that people become experts in a wide, wide array of topics in order to be healthy and financially secure. Sometimes becoming an expert in a topic is to experience it. For example, I used to be addicted to nicotine. It's one thing to explain with words how addictive it is, it's another to actually be addicted. By introducing a bit of a nanny state we can use laws and taxes as a kind of cross generational memory and save people from having to learn some of the lessons we had to learn.
3. Libertarianism doesn't address the concept of power. It pits the whole world through the lens of rights when there are other concerns like foreign citizens owning portions of companies critical to our national security or owning large portions of our media.
4. Libertarianism underestimates how much work the state puts towards fighting international crime. We use the financial system to track where mafias hide money and how they organize their money laundering schemes.
The problem with leaving libertarianism is that after years of thinking about everything through the lens of rights and the individual one is left with the question "well, what matters then?" and the answer is difficult, but here is my best shot:
The world is one of consequence. So when think about policies we should be concerned with our ends, but we should choose our ends as if we didn't know who we were in the world beforehand.
So my answer is roughly "consequentialism tempered by individual / human rights".
You don't get to buy into Uber's round because they aren't a public company. If they become a public company they have to open their books. Why? Because widespread fraud happened before this and it wasn't just to little old grandma. Sorry about the violation of your rights, but if I didn't know who I would be beforehand, this is what I think would lead to the best average outcome.
As for the middle class not being able to invest in the best companies, I agree with you that we should change some of our regulations. I agree that the rich are getting richer because not enough companies are going public. Let's fix the regulations that empower investment banks at the expense of the entrepreneurs and potential investors, and while we're at it let's raise taxes on the super rich and close their loopholes.
But at the same time let's acknowledge something else: The middle class and the poor have it best in countries like Sweden or Switzerland or Canada where we have more government not less. Where we have more international cooperation not less. Where we have more "collectivism", more education, more consumer protections, more environmental regulation, more investment into research.
And yes we also have rights too, but they're not these absolute mathematical truths and it doesn't mean we should let a bunch of people skirt fiscal regulation by raising a bunch of money anonymously with ICOs.
Public spending to GDP ratio [1]:
Sweden 51
US 42
Canada 42
Switzerland 34
No 1 is a good argument against libertarianism. A counter-argument is that more libertarian-style decentralized decision-making would mitigate negative externalities and the "common good tragedy". Research suggests [3] that negative externalities can be managed in smaller communities; smaller government also makes it harder for parasitic organisations to suck out money. Pollution can also be taken care of in the court system rather than regulation.
Before advancing an "how would X work?" argument, you should consider whether X really works better in other systems. Last time I checked, there was a ton of flooded houses in Houston, plenty of people smoke, and there is quite a bit of organized crime (a popular one in Sweden is "assistance compensation" paid out by the government to people who take care of sick relatives at home. Who would ever think about abusing it?? Surely not the mafia and IS). No-one is claiming that liberty will produce a perfect world, but that it's the morally right thing. As a bonus it would also likely produce better outcomes (on average) than what we have today.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#As_a_perce...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/18/switzerland-pu...
"Ultimately this stuff keeps grandmas poor."
Again, completely off topic to the post. But, when you talk about 'regulations', you should be making yourself clear, because you're covering massive territory and calling it all 'bad' with that statement, which is certainly not true.
What about Quirky, Homejoy, Zirtual, Secret, Grooveshark, Rdio, Leap, Theranos, Sprig, Beepi, ...
It sounds like "Why are there laws that prevent fools from giving their money to me?"
The more replies I read, the more I'm convinced these regulations are working exactly as intended: to protect the innocent from free-for-all sociopaths.
This isn't about me getting mine.
This is about the fact that the regulations deny you a chance to join me.
He describes how a return to sound money through Bitcoin and perhaps a new gold standard, as well as reducing these sorts of regulations you describe would enable a renewed prosperity of the middle class.. for a whole host of reasons worth reading in the book.
Almost any ban can be said to be done to protect people.
Cant have them reading some books for their own good!
Currently, I work at Neufund where we want to do exactly what you described: open access to broad range of investment opportunities for everyone by using cryptocurrencies. Check it out! https://neufund.org/
I believe prices are inflated because of ICOs. People are buying tokens counting on ICO hype to increase their value so they can flip their initial invested principal with 2x/3x/4x return.
Without ICOs this speculative technique will not be possible so we will see how many people are actually interested in buying these worthless tokens because they believe in their "features", rather than speculate on their price.
I wonder though if the speculation will just move from China to other countries though and the bubble will continue until there is more action by regulators around the world against this.
Being interested in tokens for their "features" not the price is very archaic. This also does not happen with stocks anymore: People hold for a few months/days/minutes, then sell, they don't sit on stock for many years like we used to.
My guess: China will allow ICOs after drafting up proper legislation and regulation. It would not benefit China's economy to blanket ban a new emerging technology. They just want to prevent crypto as a way to move money out of China, take a cut of the profit.
Another guess: Regulation will be good for established players (like Ethereum and 2016/2017 ICOs), but bad for speculators and newcomers. It will thus shoot past its intended goal of protecting investors: Those who like to gamble with money they can't afford to lose will find other get-rich-quick schemes unrelated to crypto. In Las Vegas you are actually sure to eventually lose all your money.
my guess: China will not allow ICOs but maybe after 10 years or so, blockchains and smart contracts will quietly infiltrate boring business use cases and financial services. especially if they can turn it into a centralized tool for control.
what better authoritarian tool could there be than a centralized ledger of all economic transactions, run by the government. in the name of reducing fraud/laundering/crime you could have absolute visibility and regulatory control on all economic activity.
EDIT: spelling
ICOs are among the few remaining opportunities to achieve liquidity for large BTC/ETH account balances.
For example if it's used as pre-sale (i.e. currency that will be used in product for a future product) then that's likely legal in most places, if it's used as a proxy for equity then it's likely illegal in most countries (most countries prohibit unregulated share offerings to non-sophisticated consumers).
Although in some cases ICOs might get considered as gambling if the purpose is primarily considered to be for speculation rather than whatever the underlying product is.
in short, any "product" can be a security if there is even a hint of speculative investment activity (and a motivated prosecutor)
really it is less about logic and definitions...this audience wants to parse things and recompile. in law and moreso in regulatory affairs, it is far more about guiding behavior by carrots or sticks to a particular philosophical/moral/politial/economic subjective end goal
While users would always be able to use their own forks, the gov would only allow taxes and retail trade to happen with their branch, thus de-legitimizing user forks and reducing their utility (and hence value).
Also given that most cryptocurrencies are only pseudonymous, means they could "follow the money" and quite easily charge someone for handling a disallowed cryptocurrency. This is why I feel Monero is undervalued compared to BTC - as Monero has greater utility for Bitcoin's original mainstream activity: online black-market purchasing.
You got a link to that how? How does that work with Schengen?
What?
To a relative outsider, a lot of the current movement in the crypto-currency space seems to be about amplifying the holdings of those who already hold. The BCC fork, for instance, effectively gave current bitcoin holders an overnight boost in the 15-20% range.
ICOs appear to be a way to finance things in a kickstartetr type way, only with instantly trade-able coins in the form of a new crypto-currency, with buy-in conducted in ether. These provide a new speculation vehicle, often/usually totally divorced from the underlying activity of the company.
Both of these things neatly skip any sort of bootstrapping phase that might be inherent to a new crypto-currency, and serve insiders and the already crypto-wealthy rather than newcomers or those outside the existing bubble. The whole thing seems very tenuous, and speaks very much of an "in-crowd".
So true. That bootstrapping phase has been reduced to dream up a whitepaper and that's basically it. All what comes afterwards to pump the launch is clever marketing (I've seen Google ads, FB ads, celebs on Twitter etc etc). I cannot understand why it is legal to behave like that.
ICO (Initial Crypto-Token Offering) refers to financing through the issuance of encrypted tokens (Crypto-Token).
People should really learn to define acronyms before using them in all writing mediums. I don't care if the author has used the term 10,000 with colleagues, he should still define them upon their first use in the article body.
I read the whole article wondering what on earth it meant. Then I went on Wikipedia which is usually pretty good with TLAs (Three Letters Acronyms).
So I made a point in reading the whole article just to figure out if they were at least defining it loosly...
there's that:
>ICOs involve raising funding by creating and selling new crypto tokens — commonly based on Ethereum — to investors
Which is not really in depth. It got me wondering if the person writing it understood what it meant.
Please don't do that when you write, always assume the person you're writing for doesn't know what you're talking about.
The US doesn't have to ban ICOs as most of them are securities and unregistered selling of securities is already illegal.
Then I remembered how it felt in 2000 where all you needed was a website for pet food and folks would throw money at you.
A state power isn't going to let some random currency come in and compete with their sovereign currency rules.
Venture Capitalists are all on board with a technology that forces them to compete with the masses during seed rounds...
and existing companies are all about upstart competitors having an easier way to get capital early on...
\s
You are quite mistaken here, from the top of my head, Tesco (late 90s) and Monzo (very recent) are 2 examples, and I'm not even into finance.
The point is ICOs are akin to scams. And there should be a regulations around it.
What they've done is very gentle soft-touch stuff. They've been calling ICO promoters and strongly suggesting they get their legal ducks in a row.
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2017/09/01/the-sec-told...
Protostarr - who hadn't consulted a lawyer at all - shut down and returned the money; BenjaCoin went "actually we're good" and has argued such to the SEC.
The SEC's approach is considerably softer-touch than most people expected - but despite the rantings of crypto paranoiacs, the government is not in fact there to harsh your mellow. Point 3 of the SEC’s mission statement is "facilitate capital formation" - they explicitly see their job as helping you get rich! But of course, point 2 is "maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets," and point 1 is "protect investors".
I don't see why projects such as "useless etherum token" https://uetoken.com/ should be banned.
You may want to ban trading the token to prevent money laundering but that would apply to all crypto coins.
Did they actually do an "ICO" or was it showing as "finished" from the get-go?
Let's find out!
30 seconds later.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170627123240/https://uetoken.c...
https://etherchain.org/account/0xbe5c1c298d0088886146a906cdf...
So they did but apparently nobody sent them any money, unless they also used some other addresses.
Another 60 seconds after that.
Actually they have a link on the current https://uetoken.com leading to https://etherchain.org/account/0xbe5c1c298d0088886146a906cdf... with 23562 txns total at the moment. Wonder if any of it was legit and if he got any money out of it.
250USD as in yesterday.
I think ICOs can be extremely beneficial for teams to raise money. But a lot of people buying these tokens do not understand what they're getting in return. I'd like to see it become easier to actually own equity or a % of a company's revenue by holding tokens. Hopefully these future regulations will build trust in the ecosystem by minimizing scams and providing clarity. More trust yields more people converting fiat -> crypto... which should yield a healthier less volatile ecosystem.
Case in point, NEO is probably one of the scammiest so-called "crypto" offerings out there
Actually I just noticed that the Wikipedia page on the gold standard has a section about bitcoin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard#Gold_standard_an...
[1] At those who bother to think about the long term economic consequences of Bitcoin instead of just trying to Get Rich Quick.
People assume, or just like to believe, that as Bitcoin adoption grows, the advantages of Bitcoin will far surpass fiat and people will gradually start moving to it as a de facto currency. This will/would be an organic process, likely to last a few decades at least.
I worked for my money, I paid huge amounts of taxes on them. Why is it ok for somebody to come and tell me what I can and can't do with them, and then telling me it's in my best interest to not be allowed to invest them.
Are you okay with laws about how money is earned? Why? If yes, why are you not okay with laws about how money is spent?
There are a vast number of regulations imposed on how you spend your money is spent in any government. Do you categorically disagree with them or are you okay with some of them?
EDIT: Every time a thread pops up like this, Hacker News seems to decide it's time to reinvent socioeconomic policy from first principles. Often libertarian principles. I'm trying to inject basic questions in here because much of the comment-response activity in the thread seems to be reactionary debating without substantive proof or rebuttal.
Outrage is fine! Your opinions are (probably) fine! But please try not to use personal opinions as axioms. Deconstruct your reasoning just a bit folks.
So I would be okay with laws about how money is earned, if there's a third person being impacted (pollution, for example), and i am okay with laws about how money is spent if there's a third person being impacted (idk, hiring a assassin)
Of course when one of the two consenting parties does something outside of the contract (false advertising, fraud, etc.), it should also be unlawful.
Everything else someone does to limit my choices/actions I do disagree.
What's missing is recognition of the historical precedent of regulating what people can/cannot do with their money in the USA and China's proposed plans to follow suit.
Before the JOBS Act, for 70+ years the American Securities and Exchange Commission was very specific about what non-accredited investors could do with their money. [0]
While China does not have an "accredited investor" status, its version of the SEC put forth a proposal in 2014 that would create accredited investor regulations almost exactly in line with the American SEC's regulations. [1]
Intent may be worth looking at here.
China sites terrorist financing and money laundering as problems with ICO's. I don't know the veracity of that concern, but I do know that citing terrorism, child pornography, prostitution/human trafficking, etc. are nearly impossible to argue against and thus can be used as a means to pass regulations/legislation that is rife for abuse (see the USA Patriot Act).
On the other hand, China banned exchanges allowing people to buy bitcoin in Yuan back in 2013, but today support for buying bitcoin has returned (from the article).
It seems both China and America (via the SEC) are trying to figure out what to do with ICOs. Regulation seems inevitable, but each country has thus far taken a different tact.
Does any of this make regulating/banning ICOs right or wrong? I don't know, but that seems like a different debate.
[0] https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=8edfd12967...
[1] https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2015/10/75384-crowdfunding-... (See "Challenges: Policy and Regulatory Challenges) section)
You can maliciously use your paper money right there in your leather wallet to do all sort of criminal activity, should we ban regular money too?
Secondly, if there is a crash, the best thing to do is nothing. Let the people who invested poorly get wiped out-- it's better for the economy. (There are examples of this too- crashes that happened before the federal reserve which were much worse than the 1929 crash, but which are forgotten to history because they didn't create Great Depressions because there was no Federal Reserve to "bail out the system")
The bailouts of 2008 were the worst thing that came out of that. Government shouldn't be bailing out these businesses, especially after those businesses made billions getting below cost money from that same government.
IT's not really economics you're talking about here but the corruption in the system.
Bailouts are part of the game-- thats how they scam us. Bailouts don't protect us (that's the con.)
For an excellent history of money and the last 100 years of bailouts and how this exact same thing has been done dozens of times already-- check out G Edward Griffens "The Creature from Jekyll Island" -- it's a history book about money, but it's anything but dry.
^ I assume this is how supporters of such laws think about the issue.
Would you dispute that even (otherwise) smart people can and do get taken in by dodgy financial schemes?
Regulations are there for good reasons...
For instance, a law against DUIs make sense, it's so you don't kill people. A law requiring seat belt wearing - not so much.
I'm all for shutting down assholes tricking people, but at what point does it begin/end?
Short incomplete list off the top of my head of organisations tricking people out of money with scams:
* Most (if not all?) nootropics
* Prosperity gospel
* Nutritional cereal
* Other low fat/diet food stuffs
* Fashion
* Art
* Diamond industry
* etc etc
This isn't hardship, just put your money somewhere else.
ICOs gave a level playing field and produced a resulting boom.
Most people don't even know what a cryptocurrency is.
On the contrary, North Korea seems like a collectivist's paradise. Total state control with omnipresent regulation. I wonder what the punishment for trading cryptocurrencies looks like there.
Not all of us are like that... What's happening here is people are butthurt cause ICOs are more successful and friendly to funders, so they took a very bad deal with the traditional investment route so everything negative against ICOs they are happy.
The HN community just like Reddit is just a bunch of children.
The crypto markets right now are in a free fall as a result of the panic. This is a ban on ICO's, not a ban on cryptocurrency. People don't realise how instrumental China is in the crypto world, quite crazy. I am taking this opportunity to buy up promising alt coins like TenX ($pay) which are all incredibly unvervalued right now as a result of the drop.
As we learned with Bitcoin, panic is temporary and eventually things will bounce back. We are entering a brave new world with cryptocoins as they reach the mainstream.
It's really easy to just say all these ICOs are scams but we have not seen many outright scams.
I have seen a lot of very young enthusiastic teams promising things that it would be very hard for them to deliver on.
And I imagine every Silicon Valley VC can see the same thing about their pitches.
How do you know which are scams and which aren't? There's no objective measure.
So basically this is banning the middle class from investing in the next massive technology cycle.
Reserving it once again only for VCs and accredited investors. Keeping the little guy out and making the rich richer.
> We are entering a brave new world with cryptocoins as they reach the mainstream.
You can't have both. decide
I don't really understand why it is appropriate for someone else to tell me how to spend my hard earned money? Isn't that what freedom of choice is about? Even if I'm being manipulated into a scam, it is still MY choice.
Let people spend their ICO money the way they spend their votes. Its basically the same form of manipulation anyway.
We all make choices like this daily on regular basis. However, its apparently appropriate to be scammed into various political promises, product descriptions, etc. But its not okay to be part of this 'ICO lottery' because one can easily be scammed? Give me a break.
This is not a new concept. The same regulations apply if you start telling your friends that you're smart and that they should let you manage their money for them.
u mean like a 'friends and family' investment round? ;)
Very good HN very good.
Here on Hacker News we had a staunch defender of ICO's, who was saying "ICO's of some form are unquestionably the future of raising capital for most tech companies up to a certain size".
In response to that wide claim, I asked the following question which I'll quote part of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15121111
>May I ask what the largest/most successful "traditional" tech company that used an ICO is? By "traditional" I mean that their tech has nothing to do with blockchains and they could have also just raised money on angellist, and today are just a normal tech company shipping some kind of a product, like a hoverboard.
Here was their response which I'll quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15121451
>This is early days, very early days. Give it a few years, and people won't bat an eye at raising capital via the blockchain. It's just more efficient and easier. I mean, if you like having to travel around, having tons of meetings and discussions, hoping your lead investor doesn't pull out and fuck up the whole round, by all means keep supporting the current system. It just is going to change, massively, in the coming years. There will be some sort of place for traditional capital but blockchain capital raising will hit every industry.
If you think about it, that response to my question really says it all.
(Upon my folowup, they did name two software companies.)
I tried to click on the Forbes, TechCrunch, recode, and Adweek links, but actually they're not links; that section is empty. The empty section is included to imply that there has been media coverage by these sources (or any other ones), but it is just an inactive placeholder that uses their greyed-out logos without permission to imply some kind of coverage. Clicking anywhere in that empty section does nothing.
Why does the page include an empty "latest media coverage" section that is completely empty (but includes famous news brand logos)? You and I both know why - it's obvious.
That might be fine for companies that are bootstrapping their own future: "imagine if we had something here." But this is why I didn't ask about such companies, but instead about companies that already have done that bootstrapping.
A lot of money has traded hands in ICO's. Has a single traditional tech startup that is shipping some kind of real product (hoverboard, whatever) totally unrelated to blockchain, been built as a result?
that being said this does feel a lot like a throw back to 2014 and earlier with "China bans bitcoin"
A lot of folks will lose their investment/money.
China will make some announcement in the future that softens or reverses this one, and we'll see a spike in crypto prices.
Hopefully there will be some sane regulation (or at least guidance) on ICOs to make it more difficult for scammy types to use ICOs as tools to bilk unsaavy "investors" (which includes most humans).
And if you think "stability and sanity will return" to a still mostly unregulated market, you are pretty naive.
I'd even say for stability and sanity to return, they had to be there at some point in the first place which they didn't. :-)
Will be very interested to see in the next couple of years how many of these projects still exist.
And about as useful.
- They have recent communist history/lack experience of crashes/associated fraud.
- Traditionally they actually worship money - By burning fake money.
- MLM scams are popular (at least in Taiwan).
- When I watched a video by Andreas - that Bitcoin guy - the audience (in US) was disproportionately east Asian.Burning hell money is a symbolic offering to the deceased, not an act of worshipping money itself. Or do Westerners "actually worship flowers" because we place them on graves?
Still it is a bit more than that. Flowers are merely a gesture/ritual whereas burning money is an attempt to send money to the afterlife (if my understanding is correct), which inevitably does elevate it somewhat in the minds of believers. I feel the original point is partially intact, in that they definitely do have superstitions surrounding money e.g. red packets ... etc.
The Asian financial crisis was all these things.