I would like to make an appeal to the YC community: please reach out and help guide those involved in this rapidly advancing phenomenon.<p>There is a huge amount of instantly-deployable capital in Ethereum and Bitcoin, held by individuals now seeking ways to put it to work. Many technologists will naturally make use of this energy, but so will BS artists and people under the influence of hubris.<p>I am making this appeal because it is irresponsible to stand by and watch so much financial energy be directed at projects without appropriate constraint. Many firms funded by ICOs (or soon to be) have qualified leaders and developers and are developing great ideas, but IMO many are also raising too much money for their own good.<p>What may be needed to guide these rockets to their full potential are maturity, mentorship, and the careful application of jurisprudence and principles of accounting.
So this is like buying food vouchers that I can redeem at a store that hasn't yet been built, if indeed it has been given planning permission and even if it does eventually get built, I have no idea how the service and product will taste. And I can't then report any irregularities.<p>Ponzi? No. Unregulated gambling? Of course.<p>Sign me up!
I have a fetish for watching complicated court cases play through. What you realize is a judge in a courtroom has a lot of power. They can take your money, freedom or even kids. However, if I had few hundred thousand in Ethereum encrypted placed into a few random anonymous git hub repros, well, the government can't take it. It is truly yours. No one can take it. That must be horrifying proposition for (some) governments - the inability to control people.
I am amazed that in 2017, there is still people qualifying Bitcoin or Ethereum of ponzi schemes. Crypto currencies have a lot of problems (technical, economical, philosophical, ICO are insanes) but saying they are ponzi schemes is plain wrong. And it just takes 5 minutes of reading on Ponzi Schemes signs and basic knowledges of how those currencies work to understand why.
ICO are the best thing that ever happened. This is no different then kickstarter.com started. People where saying the same things. People put up lot of BS project and they got funded, in time these kind of project will fail on there own. This is just the start, no government or bank would have supported such system. For once, the small guy can participate in this market. I would have loved to invest in amazon, facebook, etc when they where private. You had to have the connection and access .. here the little guy in columbia or Africa has the same access to such a deal
Last month, a small team of computer engineers in Lithuania raised $14 million in 45 minutes by selling a coin, known as Mysterium, that is intended to give access to an encrypted online data service that is still being built.<p>There has to be more background to this? Why would they ever bother building the service if they have the 14M in cash?
200 years ago in the U.S. regional banks printed their own currency. The constitution does not create a common US currency, although we have been operating as if it does.<p>Will a non-nation state be able to generate enough credibility to run their own currency that lasts a lifetime?<p>I don't know be I think it's interesting to watch.<p>And if they do, it may force central banks into a corner by limiting their ability to print money (i.e., lowering the value of your currency by printing money will cause people to move their money to the alternative currency, leaving you with inflation).
So these ICOs are currently legal? In that case, is it legal to have an ICO for shares in an existing private company?<p>I am imagining the following scenario:<p>Someone has some vested shares in a startup. They send proof of their shares to some administrators of this
hypothetical service. The shares are then listed on the website. Someone browses the website and decides that they like the company, and they want to invest $10k. They make a request on the site, and then transfer $10k worth of Bitcoins to a specific address. The Bitcoins are then transferred to the person with the shares.<p>When the company has an acquisition or an IPO, the person then buys $X worth of bitcoins, and sends them to an address, where they are distributed among the investors.<p>This would be highly illegal, no? Something that would have to operate on the darknet? So then why are people getting away with ICOs?<p>P.S. As you might be able to tell from my username, I've been trying to figure out a way to sell some of my shares in a private company. (They're a unicorn in Silicon Valley.) You could call it an options contract. Or you could call it a loan, that would be repaid if/when the company has an exit. I've tried using a secondary market service, but the company blocked the sale.<p>P.P.S. This is completely unrelated to any of the above, but feel free to send me $20k worth of Bitcoins or Ethereum. I could even send you a link to my LinkedIn profile. But of course, this would just be $20k with no strings attached. But who knows, you might receive some bitcoins in the future.
With regards to cryptocurrencies, which the standard HN anti-crypto groupthink is bashing in full swing, let me just point out that most bashings I've seen on here are US-consumer-centric and don't consider the needs of countries with oppressive governments that aim to control the wealth and labor of their citizens. In these countries, cyrptocurrencies allow the movement of wealth to your family overseas, allow the store of wealth in the face of 30% inflation (Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etc.), and allow privacy and economic freedom. If your central bank wants to lower interest rates so that yields are even more negative, you can take yourself out of that system in which you have no vote or control. If you oppressive ruler wants to track every transaction and stop funding to political opponents, you can take yourself out of that system and do so if you wish.<p>Yes, it's not easy and not for everyone, but people in these countries go through enormous risk and effort to accomplish economic freedom.
Wait until amazon offers its own coin...that is when the mainstream will happen and if these much less know are able to pull this valuation the legitimacy and hype will many x when amazon does it.
They have already tested the waters with <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1001166401" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1001166401</a>
> made it easier than ever for entrepreneurs to raise large sums of money without dealing with the hassles of regulators, investor protections or accountants.<p>Umm no easier than raising funds for any other venture, in fact probably more difficult and I would think a lot of that money is coming from people who were already made rich by other coin like bitcoin. Easy come, easy go, but enjoy the gravy train while you are riding it.
these things are strike me as greater-fool schemes. everyone hops on thinking they are probably ahead of the curve, and most of them are suckers. what a funny game- the skill is knowing how many other people will go for it.
It's been a running joke for a while that the easiest way to be a blockchain consultant is to charge $50k to say "you don't need blockchain for that". Not it seems the 2017 version is to charge 1M to say "you don't need a special token for that".<p>ICOs are not the micro-investing many would like to see and the use of a special tokens distinct from ETH is rather contrived.<p>That said, if people are willing to throw money at it, so be it. But the amounts are quite frankly insane.
Would it make sense for companies like Amazon or Alibaba to print their own currencies when they are in the business of selling everything under the sun?<p>Would they be saving on transaction costs?<p>I believe most of the money that is ending up in Bitcoin exchanges is laundered in the first place. Also, there is a whole lot more that is getting laundered everyday than Bitcoin being mined. That would mean Bitcoin will keep going up in value. Gold should correspondingly fall.
I'm sorry but this is so absurd. They are doing the equivalent of printing their own monopoly money in the garage and then selling it for real currency... dollars.
These guys took the money and ran. Absolute radio silence since the ico. Not to mention nobody is going to run an exit node since being paid to do so would mean you would be on the hook for illegal traffic, unlike TOR. It's a nice idea but completely impractical, even with a dev team that didn't disappear after raising money.