5 ms·

Maybe preface your comment with "I have never used or followed Bitcoin outside of news articles".

by theWatcher37 9y ago

prawn 9y ago
I'm genuinely curious - can you explain why Animats is off-track?
- campbelltown 9y ago
  Whether or not you agree with the model of token sales (most here don't) Ethereum already hit it's scaling limits after hosting several hyped ICOs. When the ICO bubble deflates or crashes, I suspect the ICO model is not going away, but will look different. I can envision a world where tons of small startups are chasing capital through small, niche-specific ICO funding rounds. For this to be possible, Ethereum in it's present state needs to handle many more transactions. For example, during the Status.im sale, the network was unusable for 2 full days. Similarly, many app developers have noted that gas fees are too high to validate using the blockchain for their applications. Just making a profile on ethlance.com is unnecessarily expense due to the gas cost. This results in unrealized demand. When Ethereum scales to 8x transactions I have no doubt the scaling debate will continue, as demand will have increased as well.
  - lambdadmitry 9y ago
    ICO model as we know will go away because it's a scam. The only reason they happen is that SEC is slow to prosecute what's basically an unregulated securities selling. You can't sell securities on the basis of some pretty landing and a few blog posts.
    - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
      I used to think that. By all accounts, it turns out i was wrong. Personally i think these things are a technological response to the pervasive AML/KYC laws that have been developed over the past 15-20 years that have been put in place with little thought or oversight. They (and by they it is really the US war on drugs) went after the source of that money. So the money changed. I really don't know how you put the toothpaste back in this tube.
      - lambdadmitry 9y ago
        > By all accounts, it turns out i was wrong. By which accounts? > So the money changed. "The money" didn't change, it's just an elaborate scam. Look: - there are early ETH/BTC adopters who have a ton of ETH/BTC and not much of financial sense - they bankroll recent ICOs (seriously, look at those "whales" at Status ICO) without due diligence or any financial sense (like, Signal ICO'ed to 1/4th of what FB paid for Whatsapp with what, a few hundred users? Built on unproven platform? That's freaking crazy) - companies who did their ICO cash out to fiat. They can do that because a ton of people believe the story of "buy you a bitcoin and get rich fast", buy BTC/ETH and provide fiat on exchanges - in the end the whole bubble bursts, early adopters loose their (now almost worthless) BTC/ETH and hundreds of thousands of people loose their "investments" in BTC/ETH. So it makes perfect sense from the financial standpoint to do ICOs right now if you can get away with that. It doesn't mean that the process is somehow "better", it's just more profitable because of a ton of hapless people that can easily separated with their money. > I really don't know how you put the toothpaste back in this tube. Easily: just start jailing people for unregulated ICOs in the same way they jail for unregulated securities trading.
        Frogolocalypse 9y ago
        How? It is a torrent-level problem if you felt you had to address it. With 700-odd coins (last time i looked) who would you jail? America can prosecute people in America, but how would you address this problem I crypto? Freeze their assets? How? I'm not being flippant. I really don't think that is going to be a successful strategy. I can't see how that would work. It would take a pretty coordinated effort in a time of very little trust. I said it somewhere else in this thread. I remember reading about the introduction of aml/kyc legislation right across the world at the direction of the US. the Maldives tried to buck it and they got crushed. I couldn't think of a way in our connected world that you could get out of it. I think this is the logical progression of that restriction of freedom. For better or worse. Like the concept of freedom i guess.
        lambdadmitry 9y ago
        Regarding the number of coins: just go for the bigger ones, it's not exactly new strategy (that's why you primarily go for drug lords instead of low-level resellers). Regarding the prosecution: the US has extradition agreements with a lot of countries, so if ICO resulted in American citizens either buying coins (i.e. securities) or offering them, than it's a fair game for the SEC and (possibly) some real jail time in US prison. It's also pretty easy to freeze assets as soon as they are converted to fiat, and they will be, because you can't buy a Ferrari with BTC. Even if it's a "logical progression", you got it backwards. We had an unregulated securities marked before 1933; it went really bad for various reasons. It turns out that peddling "securities" on the basis of rosy promises (or blog posts in the case of ICOs) is bad and some regulation forcing companies to open up is good.

Maybe preface your comment with "I have never used or followed Bitcoin outside of news articles".

prawn 9y ago

I'm genuinely curious - can you explain why Animats is off-track?

campbelltown 9y ago
Whether or not you agree with the model of token sales (most here don't) Ethereum already hit it's scaling limits after hosting several hyped ICOs. When the ICO bubble deflates or crashes, I suspect the ICO model is not going away, but will look different. I can envision a world where tons of small startups are chasing capital through small, niche-specific ICO funding rounds. For this to be possible, Ethereum in it's present state needs to handle many more transactions. For example, during the Status.im sale, the network was unusable for 2 full days. Similarly, many app developers have noted that gas fees are too high to validate using the blockchain for their applications. Just making a profile on ethlance.com is unnecessarily expense due to the gas cost. This results in unrealized demand. When Ethereum scales to 8x transactions I have no doubt the scaling debate will continue, as demand will have increased as well.
- lambdadmitry 9y ago
  ICO model as we know will go away because it's a scam. The only reason they happen is that SEC is slow to prosecute what's basically an unregulated securities selling. You can't sell securities on the basis of some pretty landing and a few blog posts.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    I used to think that. By all accounts, it turns out i was wrong. Personally i think these things are a technological response to the pervasive AML/KYC laws that have been developed over the past 15-20 years that have been put in place with little thought or oversight. They (and by they it is really the US war on drugs) went after the source of that money. So the money changed. I really don't know how you put the toothpaste back in this tube.
    - lambdadmitry 9y ago
      > By all accounts, it turns out i was wrong. By which accounts? > So the money changed. "The money" didn't change, it's just an elaborate scam. Look: - there are early ETH/BTC adopters who have a ton of ETH/BTC and not much of financial sense - they bankroll recent ICOs (seriously, look at those "whales" at Status ICO) without due diligence or any financial sense (like, Signal ICO'ed to 1/4th of what FB paid for Whatsapp with what, a few hundred users? Built on unproven platform? That's freaking crazy) - companies who did their ICO cash out to fiat. They can do that because a ton of people believe the story of "buy you a bitcoin and get rich fast", buy BTC/ETH and provide fiat on exchanges - in the end the whole bubble bursts, early adopters loose their (now almost worthless) BTC/ETH and hundreds of thousands of people loose their "investments" in BTC/ETH. So it makes perfect sense from the financial standpoint to do ICOs right now if you can get away with that. It doesn't mean that the process is somehow "better", it's just more profitable because of a ton of hapless people that can easily separated with their money. > I really don't know how you put the toothpaste back in this tube. Easily: just start jailing people for unregulated ICOs in the same way they jail for unregulated securities trading.
      - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
        How? It is a torrent-level problem if you felt you had to address it. With 700-odd coins (last time i looked) who would you jail? America can prosecute people in America, but how would you address this problem I crypto? Freeze their assets? How? I'm not being flippant. I really don't think that is going to be a successful strategy. I can't see how that would work. It would take a pretty coordinated effort in a time of very little trust. I said it somewhere else in this thread. I remember reading about the introduction of aml/kyc legislation right across the world at the direction of the US. the Maldives tried to buck it and they got crushed. I couldn't think of a way in our connected world that you could get out of it. I think this is the logical progression of that restriction of freedom. For better or worse. Like the concept of freedom i guess.
        lambdadmitry 9y ago
        Regarding the number of coins: just go for the bigger ones, it's not exactly new strategy (that's why you primarily go for drug lords instead of low-level resellers). Regarding the prosecution: the US has extradition agreements with a lot of countries, so if ICO resulted in American citizens either buying coins (i.e. securities) or offering them, than it's a fair game for the SEC and (possibly) some real jail time in US prison. It's also pretty easy to freeze assets as soon as they are converted to fiat, and they will be, because you can't buy a Ferrari with BTC. Even if it's a "logical progression", you got it backwards. We had an unregulated securities marked before 1933; it went really bad for various reasons. It turns out that peddling "securities" on the basis of rosy promises (or blog posts in the case of ICOs) is bad and some regulation forcing companies to open up is good.