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So much people with much money trying to find new ways to make money out of money. That says much about the current state of the economy.
by Torai 9y ago
So much people with much money trying to find new ways to make money out of money.
That says much about the current state of the economy.
- sschueller 9y agoAnd making the rich richer. No way to invest unless you have money or you are in the inner circle. Code has also not been released. So much for open source.
- arethuza 9y agoIf it makes you feel any better, I suspect that a lot of these schemes are going to make a lot of rich people that bit less rich...
- koolba 9y agoAnd a few rich people a bit more rich. All depends which side of the coin you're on (pun intended).
- jondubois 9y agoYep, only accredited investors could buy Filecoin at the ICO. The rest of us can still buy Siacoin which is similar. I don't think these VC-backed cryptocurrencies will win in the long term. It's the same principle as with stocks, cryptocurrencies are going to work in favour those who understand them the most; in this case, developers. The mission of cryptocurrencies is to take control away from finance people. Hobbyist developers are going to decide which cryptocurrencies deserve their precious development time. Cryptocurrencies are all about the tooling and infrastructure around them.
- chii 9y ago> in this case, developers. i dont think developers are the ones who will profit - after all, developers are the ones who wrote the code for a lot of financial institutions, and none of them gain much more than just a salary.
- jmknoll 9y agoAt the same time though, 3 of the 5 largest companies in the US have CEOs with a background in software development/computer science. 5 years ago, 0 of 10 did. There's definitely a trend toward developers having more power.
- jamespo 9y agoThat trend started further back than the last couple of years, as billg can confirm.
- chii 9y agoand yet, are those CEO's doing dev when they are being paid their large sums of money? They may have learnt something as a developer, but _doing_ development isn't their major money making activity.
- icebraining 9y agojondubois said understand, not do.
- drieddust 9y agoCrypto currency are the new tulip bulbs[1]. Only some are going to make money. Current buyers are relying on greater fools to take these off their hands. A crash is eminent so hold tight and wait for it. You will have plenty of opportunity. History will repeat itself as new fools arrive on the scene[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_market_crashes_and_bear_markets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_market_crashes_a...
- kdelok 9y agoI'm actually worried that one of the main things in favour of cryptocurrencies is that they can act as an effective currency for illegal activities, i.e. they'll stay profitable for as long as regulations struggle to keep up with them.
- saiya-jin 9y agothis is already a case for quite a few years in dark web (mostly bitcoin for now). or you think that illegal drugs and weapons and whatnot are being paid by money account transfers over SEPA?
- soneca 9y agoI believe that cryptocurrencies only reached a critical mass to be relevant att all because of the value it delivers to criminals. All that is ever discussed about cryptocurrencies at HN is marginal in comparison.
- matthewbauer 9y agoI think enthusiasts and speculators are actually a significant driver of the high prices. Criminals would much rather have a stable, quick Bitcoin than what we're seeing right now.
- empath75 9y agoI am starting to worry that this bubble is going to grow until it threatens the world economy.
- sp332 9y agoAccording to https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/investors-poured-millions-into-a-storage-network-that-doesnt-exist/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/inves... they hardly have any code yet anyway.
- the_stc 9y agoWe're about to announce our company and do a fundraising round. Relatively small, a few million at first with a limited number of investors, then do a blockchain IPO (yes IPO - we're selling shares with control and dividends, not pointless tokens). And our market is huge with no real coordinated players, so it should be very lucrative. Even so, I am concerned about letting just anyone put money in. Even though we are an extrajurisdictional company and the SEC doesn't trouble us, I'd like to know people putting money in have some idea what they're doing. At first we thought to limit the amount, require a minimum $1000 or $2000 purchase. But that makes it worse, I think. What is a company in our situation supposed to do to be socially aware and not just "make the rich richer", while also making sure someone doesn't invest their last $1000? Just put up disclaimers?
- raverbashing 9y agoAnd how many computing cycles and kWH are wasted on cryptocoins
- pmlnr 9y agoTo be honest, this is my reason for not jumping mindlessly on the cryptocurrency bandwagon: it's wasting so much resources and power, especially when you take a look at videos of mining farms.
- wwwv 9y agoI'm not really in this world, but you'd save more power by recycling aluminium cans (%5+ of US power consumption) than by killing off cryptocurrency mining.
- pmlnr 9y agoPersonally I bring everything I can to recycling points, sometimes even if it's not my own garbage. But I'm aware people don't care. On the other side the crypto mining is not only the power consumption: it's all the hardware and it's production as well. The ASIC antminers can't be used for anything else, hard to recycle as well and they constantly need to get bigger and faster. For Ethereum, people are buying shitloads of high end GPUs. I also don't like the idea of storing insane amount of data, hoping to find correlations to make more money, but this is also nothing I can do anything about.
- wscott 9y agoYou understand that this article is about a cryptocurrency that uses a service (long term file storage and access) and the proof of work function instead of pointless computation.
- pmlnr 9y agoYes, I do, and this sounds like a good idea - emphasis on the sounds, because it's not new, see primecoin.
- csomar 9y agoAnd it is the whole world-wide economy. It is important that they keep this money from the poorer guys too, so that inflation doesn't look high and their investments look promising.