5 ms·

I can't believe there is no mention of tezos here (https://www.tezos.com/ https://www.tezos.com/). Which currently has raised $123,317,760.00 in bitcoins and $

by blhack 9y ago

I can't believe there is no mention of tezos here (https://www.tezos.com/ https://www.tezos.com/). Which currently has raised $123,317,760.00 in bitcoins and $68,709,765.86 in ethereum. Almost $200,000,000 raised for something that doesn't even exist yet, all so that the founders can create it. It's basically $200,000,000 into a kickstarter. What the absolute frell is going on there I have no idea.

api 9y ago
> What the absolute frell is going on there I have no idea. Money laundering? Flight capital? Under the table payments for services rendered in some other area? I have no insider knowledge. It's just a speculation. But if even 10% of this actually exists in some liquid sense this is serious money. The number of participants in these markets is far lower than Kickstarter and yet the money in question here is massive. I've read a few of these ICO white papers. They are largely jokes, total buzzword salad with little in the way of novel developments. There are a few ICOs that might actually be worthwhile experiments but the majority are ridiculous. "If something makes no sense from a business perspective, maybe it makes sense in some other way." I've heard that saying from multiple sources. Apparently it's a saying in the investigative world. It is said of perpetually money-losing yet eternally floated businesses, businesses that don't actually do anything yet seem to be moving a lot of money around for services rendered, and absurd-looking "investments" that raise money from weird sources. Chinese or Russian flight capital is one very good possibility. There are a lot of very rich and often corrupt people who want to get money out of those countries without tipping off authorities and skirting currency controls and (in Russia's case) embargoes. One way of moving money illicitly is to basically execute a pump-and-dump or Ponzi scheme against yourself. The losing side is the sender, the winning side is the receiver. You lose some in the transfer but that's cost of doing business. Vancouver recently enacted a foreign property speculation tax to curtail its ridiculous flight-capital-driven property bubble. There are rumblings of similar measures elsewhere. Perhaps other avenues for flight capital are being experimented with. There are hundreds of billions of dollars waiting to be expatriated from these countries. Someone is always paying attention, especially when this kind of money flies around. I again have no inside knowledge but I can nevertheless say with 100% certainty that intelligence agencies and police agencies are watching. In any case stay away. Stay far away from scams. A lot of people get deluded into thinking they can skim from these, but if you aren't an insider and don't know the timing you'll get fleeced. Edit: I've long heard the rumor that some obscenely big ticket sales of crummy WTF "art" are money laundering. "If something makes no sense..."
- hellbanner 9y ago
  I've heard the same rumor about "WTF "art"".
- hellbanner 9y ago
  Re your last sentence: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/arts/design/art-proves-attractive-refuge-for-money-launderers.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/arts/design/art-proves-att...
lrvick 9y ago
Tezos has a working testnet available to anyone on request and a functional (albeit early) platform. They also took extra time and delayed their ICO to get proper accountability systems in place via good legal standing for the Tezos Foundation. Tezos asks a vital question. Can cryptocurrency governance be decentralized? Can we do better than the anarchy of management for Bitcoin and Ethereum with chain splits being the solution to dispute? I for one gambled some of my portfolio I am willing to lose to find out and spent a lot of time researching their code, and team before doing so. I am as interested in seeing Tezos fail (and thus further indicate anarchy and splits are unavoidable) and seeing my ETH/BTC holdings continue to rise as I am in seeing Tezos succeed and overshadow everything by proving it can rapidly evolve and incorporate the best features of other coins without forking.
- richardknop 9y ago
  You think 200 million in funding for a blockchain implementation in Ocaml written by one developer is reasonable? Because to me it seems absolutely ridiculous. For comparison, Docker has so far raised around 180 million in 5 funding rounds. It has somewhere between 300-400 employees.
  - simias 9y ago
    Yeah that's the most perplexing thing with those ICOs IMO. We could argue all day whether this and that idea has some merit or not, but many of those start ups end up raising orders of magnitude more money than they should ever need to build their thing. Many of these projects could be completed by a modest team in a few months. That's just absurd and a complete waste of resources.
  - lrvick 9y ago
    Not anymore than we say a billion pieces of green paper is worth trading for a company that lets you take selfies and put cute frames on them. Money as it exists today and how we attribute value is pretty ridiculous. Blockchain tech today is the 90s internet, poised to crash hard then later be integrated into the lives of everyone.
- 9y ago
bhouston 9y ago
Where is this 200M coming from? Just random people on the internet? I guess some of this is from Etherum and Bitcoin early investors who have been their holdings appreciate? The numbers are staggering given that I think institutional and professional investors are not in this market?
- jo909 9y ago
  I feel like thinking about it as "200M USD" is not helpful when talking about the source of that "money". I'm sure the amount of "fresh" USD that where recently exchanged to a crypto-currency only to participate in this ICO is absurdly small. This is a very very small amount of current total bitcoin market cap when expressed in USD. What might illustrate this is the famous pizza that was purchased with bitcoin in 2010, which would have been valued 23M USD today. So this is only 10 Pizzas that were not bought with bitcoin in 2010.
  - netsharc 9y ago
    Hah, great comparison. But somewhere in the world there must be a Lamborghini that's been traded for a slice or 2 of pizza...
satyrnein 9y ago
Kickstarter! Thank you! I had been wondering what the appropriate comparison was for ICOs, which don't confer ownership, dividends, etc. The difference I guess is that these are tradable immediately, whereas with Kickstarter, you have to hope they produce something tangible you can eventually sell on eBay.

by blhack 9y ago

api 9y ago

> What the absolute frell is going on there I have no idea. Money laundering? Flight capital? Under the table payments for services rendered in some other area? I have no insider knowledge. It's just a speculation. But if even 10% of this actually exists in some liquid sense this is serious money. The number of participants in these markets is far lower than Kickstarter and yet the money in question here is massive. I've read a few of these ICO white papers. They are largely jokes, total buzzword salad with little in the way of novel developments. There are a few ICOs that might actually be worthwhile experiments but the majority are ridiculous. "If something makes no sense from a business perspective, maybe it makes sense in some other way." I've heard that saying from multiple sources. Apparently it's a saying in the investigative world. It is said of perpetually money-losing yet eternally floated businesses, businesses that don't actually do anything yet seem to be moving a lot of money around for services rendered, and absurd-looking "investments" that raise money from weird sources. Chinese or Russian flight capital is one very good possibility. There are a lot of very rich and often corrupt people who want to get money out of those countries without tipping off authorities and skirting currency controls and (in Russia's case) embargoes. One way of moving money illicitly is to basically execute a pump-and-dump or Ponzi scheme against yourself. The losing side is the sender, the winning side is the receiver. You lose some in the transfer but that's cost of doing business. Vancouver recently enacted a foreign property speculation tax to curtail its ridiculous flight-capital-driven property bubble. There are rumblings of similar measures elsewhere. Perhaps other avenues for flight capital are being experimented with. There are hundreds of billions of dollars waiting to be expatriated from these countries. Someone is always paying attention, especially when this kind of money flies around. I again have no inside knowledge but I can nevertheless say with 100% certainty that intelligence agencies and police agencies are watching. In any case stay away. Stay far away from scams. A lot of people get deluded into thinking they can skim from these, but if you aren't an insider and don't know the timing you'll get fleeced. Edit: I've long heard the rumor that some obscenely big ticket sales of crummy WTF "art" are money laundering. "If something makes no sense..."

hellbanner 9y ago
I've heard the same rumor about "WTF "art"".
hellbanner 9y ago
Re your last sentence: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/arts/design/art-proves-attractive-refuge-for-money-launderers.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/arts/design/art-proves-att...

lrvick 9y ago

Tezos has a working testnet available to anyone on request and a functional (albeit early) platform. They also took extra time and delayed their ICO to get proper accountability systems in place via good legal standing for the Tezos Foundation. Tezos asks a vital question. Can cryptocurrency governance be decentralized? Can we do better than the anarchy of management for Bitcoin and Ethereum with chain splits being the solution to dispute? I for one gambled some of my portfolio I am willing to lose to find out and spent a lot of time researching their code, and team before doing so. I am as interested in seeing Tezos fail (and thus further indicate anarchy and splits are unavoidable) and seeing my ETH/BTC holdings continue to rise as I am in seeing Tezos succeed and overshadow everything by proving it can rapidly evolve and incorporate the best features of other coins without forking.

richardknop 9y ago
You think 200 million in funding for a blockchain implementation in Ocaml written by one developer is reasonable? Because to me it seems absolutely ridiculous. For comparison, Docker has so far raised around 180 million in 5 funding rounds. It has somewhere between 300-400 employees.
- simias 9y ago
  Yeah that's the most perplexing thing with those ICOs IMO. We could argue all day whether this and that idea has some merit or not, but many of those start ups end up raising orders of magnitude more money than they should ever need to build their thing. Many of these projects could be completed by a modest team in a few months. That's just absurd and a complete waste of resources.
- lrvick 9y ago
  Not anymore than we say a billion pieces of green paper is worth trading for a company that lets you take selfies and put cute frames on them. Money as it exists today and how we attribute value is pretty ridiculous. Blockchain tech today is the 90s internet, poised to crash hard then later be integrated into the lives of everyone.
9y ago

bhouston 9y ago

Where is this 200M coming from? Just random people on the internet? I guess some of this is from Etherum and Bitcoin early investors who have been their holdings appreciate? The numbers are staggering given that I think institutional and professional investors are not in this market?

jo909 9y ago
I feel like thinking about it as "200M USD" is not helpful when talking about the source of that "money". I'm sure the amount of "fresh" USD that where recently exchanged to a crypto-currency only to participate in this ICO is absurdly small. This is a very very small amount of current total bitcoin market cap when expressed in USD. What might illustrate this is the famous pizza that was purchased with bitcoin in 2010, which would have been valued 23M USD today. So this is only 10 Pizzas that were not bought with bitcoin in 2010.
- netsharc 9y ago
  Hah, great comparison. But somewhere in the world there must be a Lamborghini that's been traded for a slice or 2 of pizza...

satyrnein 9y ago

Kickstarter! Thank you! I had been wondering what the appropriate comparison was for ICOs, which don't confer ownership, dividends, etc. The difference I guess is that these are tradable immediately, whereas with Kickstarter, you have to hope they produce something tangible you can eventually sell on eBay.