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Filecoin Breaks Record for ICO Funding
- chrischen 9y agoWhat is the difference between Filecoin and Siacoin? I thought Siacoin already proved renting out storage space was pointless?
- thinkloop 9y agoWhat do you mean by that, when did sia prove that
- acejam 9y agoSiacoin has had a working decentralized storage network for months. Filecoin is literally vaporware at this point.
- detaro 9y agoAnd in what way have they proved that renting out storage is pointless? Is there no availability, are the prices to high, ...?
- acejam 9y agoSorry, didn't mean it's pointless, I meant to say they have proved that this concept/idea can work. Siacoin has been up and running for a while now and works very well given how young the concept is. They have a great dev team backing them too.
- ericflo 9y agoFor what it's worth, I could not be more excited about Siacoin. I think both it and Filecoin are, along with the nascent self-sovereign identity providers, the most important projects in the tech industry right now.
- nickonline 9y agoDistributed storage is pretty neat definitely On your second point self-sovereign IDPs are not going to become a thing, it's a huge chicken and egg problem, consumers don't care because there's no merchants on board and as a result merchants don't care. The only real option is to extend out from something that already exists, has a large customer base, and that you true to be secure. That way you solve for the chicken and only need to make an egg. It could be social media (FB, LinkedIn, Insta, SNAP), private (teleco, bank, ISP) or gov but the point is ou already need that critical mass as identity is a secondary benefit to a consumer (at least right now).
- ericflo 9y agoI think we’re about to see a whole new class of browsers and app platforms emerge in order to exchange small amounts of cryptocurrencies for incremental services on the internet. It will start with ideologues who believe in a distributed internet or whatever, but what will quickly happen is people will learn the value of their personal digital output and monetizing ones own data will become the driving incentive for adoption.
- leoharsha2 9y agoThis article shows the dark side of filecoin. https://medium.com/token-economy/the-analysis-filecoin-doesnt-want-you-to-read-e60d5243f17c https://medium.com/token-economy/the-analysis-filecoin-doesn... So many funds will prove a big competitor though, and sequoia Investments is well known for its success with investing in the past. But who wouldn't invest at such a discount (read article: pre sale discount is massive) I think even more than the benefit of money (to hire talent,) Filecoin is benefitting from the advice and connections from their investors!
- product50 9y agoJust because someone else got the filecoins at a discount doesn't make it a bad investment. You are investing for future growth potential vs. what others have bought it for.
- chinathrow 9y agoFrom one of the linked investor questions: "..all our work has been funded by under $3.5M. We know how to deploy capital effectively." Then don't raise capital like hell. Pure greed. Money quote from your link: "Call me old fashioned, but wanting to raise half a billion dollars for a pre-product endeavor is absolutely fucking insane."
- AndrewKemendo 9y agoHey all the hottest startups do it: Magic Leap ($1.4B), Theranos ($720M), Color ($41M), Clinkle ($25M)
- sireat 9y agoSuddenly Color and Clinkle don't seem so outrageous.
- honestlyreally 9y agoPerhaps it is money that is worth little, rather than many asset classes being overvalued?
- 9y ago
- tzfld 9y agocan't find Filecoin on coinmarketcap
- product50 9y agoIt is because it hasn't launched yet. Their network will be ready in 6-12 months when the token will be released.
- doener 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15195178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15195178
- dispo001 9y agoYou are taking this place to seriously.
- quickthrower2 9y agoGotta get that Karma. It's kind of like a coin!
- dajohnson89 9y agoHow so? He's pointing out that this article is a dupe.
- sschueller 9y agoThis is just insane. No code yet, closed to investors with at least 250k income or 1M in the bank (Per SEC rules), coins given to friends before investors could get in on it. And what do you need this much money for?
- gritzko 9y agoIt's the new economy, man. It's perpetual growth on the blockchain. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169613
- product50 9y agoProtocol Labs is a Y-Combinator company with investors such as Naval and USV. They have already built out IPFS -- a popular decentralized file sharing protocol. If there is any team you want to bet on making decentralized storage possible, Protocol Labs is on the top of that list.
- VMG 9y ago> They have already built out IPFS -- a popular decentralized file sharing protocol. How popular? Who uses it?
- mungoid 9y agoI don't know much about it but they have 8.5k stars on github so it seems fairly popular.
- samastur 9y agoI star everything I find interesting so I may find it later, but in reality I did this maybe a handful of times which makes my stars ~99% meaningless. Not saying everyone does this, but I doubt my behaviour is rare and I wouldn't read too much into github stars as they are too cheap to create. Look for actual use.
- 9y ago
- mynewtb 9y agoI really hope that IPFS will not be affected by this nonsense...
- product50 9y agoIPFS will be powered by Filecoin in future. Filecoin will incentivize miners/users with redundant storage to be a part of the network thereby increasing the size of the network itself.
- diggan 9y agoThat's incorrect, the relationship between the two are the opposite. Filecoin will be powered by IPFS and not the other way around. IPFS will still be the same project it is today, and using Filecoin (if you're already using IPFS) will be optional.
- c3833174 9y agoI hope not, because the last time I tried it still ate a lot of resources just idling.
- ashark 9y agoIPFS has been a frustrating project to watch. It's felt like it was 6 months away from being amazing for... over two years now. Despite their writing it in Go explicitly so they could get something working and usable quickly, rather than C/C++ which would let other languages and platforms wrap their lib, which is what I'd have expected them to do if they were serious about becoming an infrastructure-level protocol. This ICO may explain some of those choices, and makes me more worried about the future of the project than ever, which sucks because I really want to use it and to be able to trust it'll still be around in 10 years.
- detaro 9y agoFrom my perspective, they seem to focus to much on the technical side. E.g. they are working on P2P communications over the network formed between nodes and lots of libraries and features, but not much work in the way of making it user-accessible. People put all kinds content on IPFS, but the most common way to access it is through centrally run gateways, either the official ones or ones run by the individual project. No browser plugins that would upgrade sites from HTTP through gateways to using IPFS locally, no special IPFS-enabled browser (like e.g. dat has in beaker browser), no other applications accessing it directly... It's possible that I'm missing something or approached it with the wrong expectations, but I'm underwhelmed by that side of it. E.g. I looked into using it on my website, but can't find an actual benefit to doing so.
- leonwin7 9y agoSo this is basically pied piper?
- dispo001 9y agoJust wait until they pay-wall all the things and drown out the children.
- gourou 9y agoExactly their product https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk0BT7tTWno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk0BT7tTWno Not as well received though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrv8i2X3gnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrv8i2X3gnI
- Geee 9y agoNo, it's more like Hooli. Sia is the product they're copying with lots of money.
- xHopen 9y ago257 million dollars is nothing, I don't know . PSG , REAL MADRID, BARCELONA, NFL TEAMS... they spend 100 times that in a single summer.
- slyfocks 9y agoThis is an absurd comparison—major sports teams bid for extremely scarce talent, and they generally have the revenue to support large talent purchases (which have never been anywhere close to the price of Neymar). No file storage startup with minimal operations needs or deserves this much money. They’re not in an industry with high initial fixed costs and they’re not labor-intensive like an Uber or Instacart.
- _pmf_ 9y ago> This is an absurd comparison—major sports teams bid for extremely scarce talent If you watch closely, the increased prices payed by sports teams are calculated in such a way to lower operating profit for the "team" (i.e . company) to a tax friendly point.
- quickthrower2 9y agoAny links? I'd be interested to know more.
- adtac 9y agoUhh, they absolutely don't. Real Madrid held the record for the costliest summer at €250m-ish IIRC.
- lightbyte 9y agoPSG spent ~400m on two players this summer, but that still is not even 2x what OP said, let alone 100.
- chinathrow 9y agoThis is pure madness. I wonder how long regulators in the western countries look before they act.
- Roshie5u 9y agoIt will be too late when they act but I can't blame them - it is all about politics. With recent pyramid scheme it was something like: 1. It is as scam, why the regulators don't do anything! 2. Regulators added company to warnings list - people say it is not enough 3. Regulators launch formal investigation - people still say it is not enough but another group complains that government tries to interfere with entrepreneur 4. Some branches are closed shut down - people say it is regulators fault that caused massive withdraws. 5. Pyramid scheme company is dead, everyone complains that regulators didn't do enough and reacted too late.
- berberous 9y agoI agree with you, but Filecoin was one of the only legally compliant offerings. They only sold to accredited investors.
- sgs1370 9y agoThe SEC issued a warning that many offerings labeled "ICO" are fraudulent. (This one may be different than the frauds, but the SEC's warning was to watch out if you see that initialism.)
- mpermar 9y agoAnd China was crazy for banning ICOs...
- mehh 9y agoPeople are willing to speculate, and until this pops some people will make money, some will get seriously burned. The credibility of the technology or adoption of it by users isn't really important at present.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- fergie 9y agoWhy would this investment makes sense? Can anybody ELI5?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- frabcus 9y agoAt a basic level, it is 1/280th the market cap of BitCoin. So just a bunch of people holding BitCoin selling <1% of their holdings for diversity would cover it. It is an error to compare it to an investment in a product. It isn't. ICOs are different. I reckon it is a lot of rich early crypto investors who will happily throw $1 million into each of 20 different new cryptocurrencies that look the most plausible. This one looks plausible, solves a real world problem, and covers a different set of use cases to Ethereum or BitCoin. It has VCs watching over it for management mentoring and control. So worth the diversification of portfolio. Esp for someone whose crypto portfolio shot up a load this year. Why are ICOs different? Because anyone (in this case, anyone acredited) can get in early. How many people in 2003 would have invested in 20 promising social networks if they could have?
- frabcus 9y agoI'm not sure I'm explaining this well - would love to see a proper psychological and economical analysis by someone.
- jondubois 9y agoFilecoin is VC money, it is a different type of coin because of it; after the first confidence crisis it might crash and never come back. I think VCs are too fickle and not idealistic enough to support the value of a cryptocurrency in the long run.
- joosters 9y agoICO lunacy aside, did they break the funding record by virtue of holding a month-long ICO? How much has ETH gone up in the meantime? Do you value their funds at the start price, the day they got each coin, or the end of the sale?
- berberous 9y agoThey received most of the money in the first hour. Like $175mm plus.
- gourou 9y agoPeople will only buy Filecoin because very well known VC firms are already backing it. And that creates trust somehow? I wonder how much it will hurt the reputations of these firms.
- MikeKusold 9y agoThat's how raising VC money works too. You get a lead investor to do their diligence and set the terms. Other investors come in and go "So&So is leading this round, I trust they did their due diligence so I'll invest too"
- joeblau 9y agoThis is the 2017 version of Color App where the team raised way more than they need.
- phkahler 9y agoICOs are fraud IMHO. I want to ask why this is even legal, but then I think - why shouldn't it be? And then how can people be so stupid? There is no legally recognized thing as ICO is there?
- berberous 9y agoNo, an "ICO" is not a legal term. Filecoin, however, is one of the few folks that tried to comply with US law. They limited their sale to accredited investors and user a new legal document referred to as a SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Token), analogous to the SAFE documents popular in startup land. Most ICOs are unregistered securities offering that are violating US law by going public without an effective registration statement in place with the SEC, or an exemption therefrom. Some ICOs may be legal to the extent they are not 'securities', I.e. the argument that you are buying a useful network token, not a security. In my opinion, this argument is BS for the majority of ICOs.
- deevolution 9y agoLaws are all made up dude, they aren't real, man.
- EGreg 9y agoNot every coin has to promise to appreciate in price. In fact, I'd argue that bitcoin and other deflationary currencies lead to hoarding behavior, and are not good as a medium of exchange. (However, they make an excellent store of value, and sending large amounts of money once in a while.) Here's who I think should really be issuing securities: local communities. There's an exemption for municipal securities in the Exchange Act, although I think later it was plugged (lawyers anyone?) That's what my company is building. A platform to help communities issue their own currency, like Bristol does. If Detroit had it, it probably wouldn't have gone bankrupt. Would like some feedback: https://qbix.com/blog https://qbix.com/blog What we still haven't figured out is, why would investors buy the tokens if they not increase in value, but perhaps the opposite? It can't be because of any "over and above" value to the investor, in the form of capital gains, etc. But if the communities buy the tokens, then that's a product that they issue to their members. Like kickstarter, it becomes a product and not a security.
- dispo001 9y agoI suppose the rest of the monies should be spend on advertising the service. At least, if you want to avoid people calling it a scam, Ponzi or pyramid scheme. also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15198854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15198854
- thinbeige 9y agoSince SoundCloud I am extra cautious with USV investments. They invest, pump (pulling other investors into their great opportunity) and then nothing.
- immad 9y agoWhat does "and then nothing" mean? Not every investment will succeed which is the point of risky startup investment. And USV has an incredible amount of success (Twitter, Kickstarter, Cloudflare etc)
- thinbeige 9y ago> What does "and then nothing" mean SoundCloud? Just look at the recent downround. The 'incredible auccess' is decades ago. USV had its best times.
- readhn 9y agocan you spell "b-u-b-b-l-e" ?
- cousin_it 9y agoSo Filecoin is intended to create a marketplace for the world's unused storage capacity. Is there a corresponding coin for the world's unused computation capacity? If there isn't, should someone create one? Probably using "deep learning" and "big data" as buzzwords, and somehow tie in with adtech / analytics / surveillance. I wouldn't buy it, but it seems like the kind of idea that investors would throw billions at!
- mmccaff 9y agoYes, there is Golem https://golem.network/ https://golem.network/
- trytolookcool 9y agoIs that what ethereum is?
- tyrust 9y agoNo, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (while Turing complete) is intended to run smart contracts. These are conceptually simple programs for moving around ETH (or other tokens). To execute a program on the EVM, storing the result in the blockchain, you must pay a fee proportional to the length of the program and required storage. So even though the EVM is capable of general computation, complex programs are prohibitively expensive. Distributed computation and storage can be made more reasonably priced by doing the work off-chain (that is, not on the EVM) and then putting some sort of proof that the work was done on-chain.
- Geee 9y agoComputation is much harder because it's not possible to do it in private and secure way. You could only compute public datasets. Even in 3D rendering this is the limiting factor. Still, I think such a network would be necessary for the creation of autonomous AIs.
- cousin_it 9y agoIt's possible, but expensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
- EGreg 9y agoI have a few legal questions (IANAL) First of all, is CoinList a registered broker-dealer with the SEC? The SAFT can take advantage of the 506(c) rule which the JOBS act introduced, allowing you to raise unlimited amounts from accredited investors, and do general solicitation. But I believe it requires the securities to be issued through a registered broker-dealer. This guy seems to believe that the token issuance itself is not covered by 506(c) if the token is a security. Where does his reasoning come from? https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/08/04/thoughts-on-the-saft/ https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/08/04/thoughts-on-the-saft/ But even when the next security is issued to these investors, will they be able to trade them? The Exchange Act regulates the sale and interstate (electronic certainly would be) exchange of securities. If the tokens are later considered securities, then they may not be tradeable. However, I doubt that, in practice the SEC will go after anyone in particular on the exchanges, since there will be tons of participants by that time, and especially since the project has taken the most amount of effort to comply with the regulations, and many others didn't. All it might do is halt the trading, and confiscate the tokens of whoever is trading at that time. And the exchanges have already been trading all sorts of tokens, so they are more likely to take this one.
- vasilipupkin 9y agoI don't think you need to issue them through a broker dealer - where does it say that?
- EGreg 9y agoIt says that here - but might be a simple omission https://www.crowdcheck.com/sites/default/files/CrowdCheck%20Memo%20on%20New%20Regulation%20D.pdf https://www.crowdcheck.com/sites/default/files/CrowdCheck%20...
- vasilipupkin 9y agoAhh, if you use an intermediary, that intermediary has to be a broker dealer
- companyhen 9y agoThis ICO is shit it's basically for rich people only. Not decentralization friendly!
- acejam 9y agoIf you're interested in Filecoin, I suggest looking into Siacoin. It's been online for several months and actually works. Filecoin is literally vaporware at this point with just a whitepaper.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- donnearness 9y agoExactly. Storj is another company with a working product in this space
- Veratyr 9y agoStorJ isn't really in this space as the entire system is centralized. You can't buy storage from anyone other than StorJ, nor can you sell storage to anyone other than StorJ. They don't have a free market like Sia (or even Filecoin). The protocol technically supports it but it's not implemented and doesn't seem to be high priority at all.
- deegles 9y agoHow does decentralized storage resist centralization? Backblaze B2 costs $0.005/GB/Mo (vs. $0.021/GB/Mo for S3). No reasonable person will have hardware at home that can compete with those prices. All it takes is a single person with a few unmetered boxes and a proxy to B2/S3/etc to effectively pressure the price down to cloud storage levels. As a user, how can I confirm that my data is being replicated properly if there are few big users? One of them might have multiple identities backed by a single cloud account, and if they stop paying their bill and run off with the coins all the data is lost. This will be those darknet market scams all over again. Aside from the oodles of money that the early adopters will make, what am I missing? Edit: Thought of another issue. The protocol replicates data, so if we assume a cloud provider does 3x replication, your data will be replicated again by the storage protocol. The extra overhead means that once the economies of scale kick in, only big players that can manage B2 style racks themselves will be able to host economically, just like how Bitcoin mining has consolidated on large mining operations.
- woah 9y agoFrom my reading of the whitepaper, the protocol forces the data to be replicated by scrambling it with the miner's public key. It's not possible to have two identities using the same backing storage. However, two identities could use the same account or even the same disk, in which case the data would be replicated on that disk, which is useless. At the same time, there is no benefit to the miner to doing things that way. As far as "running away", the miner is paid by the network for proving they are storing some data at a certain time. It's not like a storage contract for someone's individual data paid up front.
- trytolookcool 9y agoWhen will filcoins be available for purchase at exchanges?
- detaro 9y agoonce the network launches, which is supposed to happen some time next year if I remember correctly.
- eggs_and_avo 9y agoLet's be clear: Filecoin has no working product. THERE IS NO FILECOIN. $200 million for literally no working demo. We might as well turn VC into a lottery.