16 ms·

Hollywood Hitmaker Plans to Fund Next Blockbuster with Crypto

45 points by petethomas 9y ago

junk_f00d 9y ago
I think something similar but for musical artist could be very fun. Betting on the next 'big band' sounds like a good time.
jedberg 9y ago
Every ICO I hear about just sounds like a scam. Maybe I don't understand it, but I have yet to see a case where as an investor I thought "that sounds like a good investment!". Can someone describe a scenario where an ICO is a win for the investor? For example, at least with stocks, I get a share of ownership in return for my money. So as the value of the company goes up, the value of my share goes it. It's based on tangible ownership of a real thing. But with a crypto coin, what is the value tied to? Is it really just the perceived value of the underlying asset? And what happens when the company shuts down? They sell all the assets, the real shareholders take all the money, but what happens to all the coin holders?
- bfuller 9y ago
  they probably are all scams but people still make money on them and thats why they are popular
  - mrschwabe 9y ago
    You fail to understand the big picture so let me help you (and perhaps @jedberg) out a bit. Many yes, but not all, are scams and in fact the concept of an ICO is just as significant as cryptocurrency itself (though cryptocurrency a required predecessor). ICOs (tokens) are to IPOs (stocks) what cryptocurrency is to fiat currency. Just as banks will fight and make a fuss about cryptocurrency, stock exchanges (and banks again) will make a fuss about ICOs. Why? It's because ICOs, like cryptocurrency - are decentralized & blockchain powered and as such require no regulation or centralized authority to give them legitimacy. The blockchain, an immutable append-only log of transactions gives them legitimacy. In other words, crypto currency and ICOs 'cut out the middlemen' - and the middlemen don't like it (hence they will try to give ICOs negative press; but of course the pyramid schemers and scam artists don't help the matter either). Yet banks and exchanges are perhaps the lesser of worries; it is at the end of the day big brother who is most concerned because this entire crypto/blockchain movement has the potential to render their system of control - which is based on controlling and imposing rules on capital (something very difficult to do with the aforementioned crypto tech) - totally ineffective in the future. So yes, just as in the early days of the internet there were those who used it to share & publish scams or porn - there are some ICOs or users of cryptocurrency engaged in scams or questionable activity. But just because you can share porn on the internet does not mean it isn't going to be a critical business technology one day in the near future. In the meantime, expect big brother and its friends in media to be-little and all out attack the tech and the people who use it (via more laws & regulation, censorship and ultimately intimidation & force) until it inevitably becomes apart of everyday business.
    - jedberg 9y ago
      That explains the philosophical reasons, but just like cryptocurrency is weak compared to fiat currency, ICOs still sound even weaker than stocks. It's nice that there is no regulation, but in the case of both fiat currency and stock, it is the regulation that gives it value, because they are backed by a system of laws and an army to protect those laws. Like with stocks, they are already somewhat subject to the psychological whims of the shareholders, but what keeps most stock prices fairly stable is the fact that everyone who holds it knows that the worst case scenario is that the underlying company is liquidated and everyone gets some money back. With a crypto coin, if the masses just decide that it isn't worth anything anymore, then it just isn't worth anything anymore. It has no backing in reality as far as I can tell.
      - jstanley 9y ago
        > With a crypto coin, if the masses just decide that it isn't worth anything anymore, then it just isn't worth anything anymore. Note that this is true of every currency, not just cryptocurrency.
      - mrschwabe 9y ago
        > "It's nice that there is no regulation, but in the case of both fiat currency and stock, it is the regulation that gives it value, because they are backed by a system of laws and an army to protect those laws." Sure, but ultimately the value is not for you or me or the government to decide necessarily - it is a collective decision by the market. If the market eventually comes to a consesus that this whole idea of large scale government is a failed concept and that it only results in monopolies, wars, and extreme inequalities - then people can choose to abandon that system in favor of something they might prefer and see a brigther future for; something that is decentralized without any central authority perhaps. Personally, I would rather invest in companies that don't have to pay enormous legal fees and jump through umpteen regulations designed to benefit a failed system - I'd rather my capital flow away from violent 'armies' as you say and directly into the hands of those implementing new ideas on the front-line of innovation. Just so happens I can do just that, just send me your BTC address. And if you'd like to give me a return, you need only a BTC address of mine - there we just transacted a stock using no more than two Bitcoin addresses. See the power here? If even not for philosophical reasons, people are going to choose this method for trading securities (or whatever you want to call them) because it is easier. You can't reverse that; the cat is already out of the bag so to speak. > "With a crypto coin, if the masses just decide that it isn't worth anything anymore, then it just isn't worth anything anymore. It has no backing in reality as far as I can tell." That is a natural course of any failed business. Try not to invest in the ones that you feel people may one day decide isn't worth anything anymore and you'll be fine. We don't need the government to hand-hold us in our day to day lives; certainly not in what we eat, consume, read, or invest (or not invest) in.
- hackinthebochs 9y ago
  The best use-case for a crypto coin is as a share of an underlying economy. Take ethereum for example, their underlying asset ETH is used to power computation on the network. So when the network first launches you get to purchase a share of the ethereum economy for relatively cheap since the risk of failure is high. Your expectation is that once the network of apps and users is built up, that economy will grow and so will the value of your share of it. The value proposition in an ICO is that the potential upside of your investment can reasonably be 100x. I don't recall exactly but I think ether tokens sold for around 30 cents per coin which is about a 1000x return at current prices. So for the extra risk of having zero leverage in determining how the company operates, and no ability to recover assets if things fail, you hope for a much greater return than you get through traditional investments. The problem with the recent ICO wave is that the value proposition has gone completely out of whack. Instead of the underlying economy starting off at a $2M market cap and thus having huge room to grow, they're starting off at $20M or even $200+M with very little room to grow outside of the increase due to massive bubble valuations.
  - jedberg 9y ago
    > So for the extra risk of having zero leverage in determining how the company operates, and no ability to recover assets if things fail, you hope for a much greater return than you get through traditional investments. This was the best explanation yet, thank you! It almost sounds like gambling, in that I have no control in the outcome nor any way to recoup assets, expect that I can't even calculate the odds of my return on an ICO. :) I guess my question is, what is the end game? Doesn't someone end up at the bottom of the pyramid so to speak, stuck holding the bag with the whole thing goes spiraling down?
    - hackinthebochs 9y ago
      >I guess my question is, what is the end game? Doesn't someone end up at the bottom of the pyramid so to speak I think there's a chance a handful of blockchain projects will have enough utility to be sustainable long term, but almost certainly not at the valuations that are common currently. But the vast majority of them have zero long term value. The way I see it crypto is winner-take-most. There's room for one "currency" that can potentially have a Trillion+ market cap, followed by a couple of niche utility projects with maybe around 100M market cap at best, and the rest are utterly worthless.
- zodiac 9y ago
  > with a crypto coin, what is the value tied to? In the specific case of ethereum ERC20 tokens [1], it depends on how the mechanism design uses the token, there's no general answer. I can give 3 specific examples. MKR stablecoin (https://github.com/makerdao/docs/blob/master/Dai.md https://github.com/makerdao/docs/blob/master/Dai.md): users of the collateralized debt positions system pay fees for using the service (because they want to take margin long positions, or because they want to issue some stablecoins), those fees go to MKR holders (the mechanism for this has changed over time, but it could be through dividends, or buy-and-burn). In return MKR holders provide a service by having MKR be one "line of defence" in undercollatiralization scenarios (new MKR is minted and auctioned). REP (http://blog.augur.net/for-reporters-a-guide-to-rep-tokens/ http://blog.augur.net/for-reporters-a-guide-to-rep-tokens/) - users of Augur's prediction markets pay fees to REP holders, who in return participate as reporters in the prediction market. Decentralized exchanges (0x and Kyber Network are some that have recently ICO'd) - generally users of the exchanges (who consumer services like liquidity, order routing and matching) pay fees to the token holders, somehow. I'm less familiar with these. The fact that users pay fees is enforced by smart contracts. There is also some thoughts on a general framework for valuing these tokens here http://vitalik.ca/general/2017/10/17/moe.html http://vitalik.ca/general/2017/10/17/moe.html. > And what happens when the company shuts down In a "proper" decentralized application there's no centralized company that can unilaterally decide to "shut things down". All the projects I mentioned above aim to in the long run behave like this. Notes [1] of course, not all ICOs are of ethereum ERC20 tokens, eg recent ones are EOS, Tezos, arguably Polkadot. But I am much less able to talk about how the token economics of those tokens.
- zby 9y ago
  There are some speculations about ICOs founding things that are needed but are not founded now - like Open Protocols and Open Source software working with them. It might not be a good mechanism for extracting the value - but the others are also not very efficient. https://medium.com/@zby/the-case-for-icos-bee2c223ec71 https://medium.com/@zby/the-case-for-icos-bee2c223ec71
  - usrusr 9y ago
    In other words, the kickstarter donation model, with kickstarter the company removed from the equation. Makes sense, for certain use cases, but those use cases are not investments, in exactly the same way as kickstarter donations are not investments.
datamoshr 9y ago
Seriously Bloomberg, automatically playing a video? I just woke up my wife by accident thanks to your poor UX. I like the idea of more democratic film-making but am apprehensive about this as it seems just like crypto is hitting fever pitch and people are trying to make it fit in every paradigm they can think of
- schmookeeg 9y ago
  I use a Chrome plugin called "HTML5 Content Blocker" which allows me to selectively block JS, CSS, Images, Objects, or Media. I generally run with only the "Media" switch on, and I haven't seen autoplayed videos in an age. They annoy me mightily.
- jaryd 9y ago
  Anyone know of any extensions that automatically (and reliably) quash auto-play videos or automatically mute them?
  - pcmaffey 9y ago
    I thought I saw this was built into Safari with the new High Sierra update. Haven't dl'ed yet.
  - mintplant 9y ago
    This one automatically mutes new tabs until you explicitly unmute them: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-mute/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-mute/
    - teddyh 9y ago
      I prefer Advanced MuteList: Advanced Mute Links (MuteLinks fork) makes use of the Firefox's built-in mute tab functionality and automatically mutes a tab based on its URL. Every time a new tab loads or a tab URL changes, Advanced MuteLinks will check the URL and if it matches a link or criteria of the Blacklist, Whitelist the tab will be muted, in case a tab is muted and its URL changes to one not on the Blacklist the tab will be un-muted. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/advanced-mutelist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/advanced-mute...
klipt 9y ago
And then thanks to "Hollywood Accounting", the film makes no profit and the investors get nothing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
clarkmoody 9y ago
It would probably be more profitable to make a good film about the crypto space and fund it with dollars.
valsoltow 9y ago
It's already happening in music with several different cryptos http://vectorspace.ai/recommend/app/crypto_discover?query=music http://vectorspace.ai/recommend/app/crypto_discover?query=mu...
dreamdu5t 9y ago
It is fraud and a blatant lie for Christopher Woodrow to claim “Investors will benefit as the tokens, which can be traded in the secondary market, would appreciate based on the success of the films” That is a straight up lie. Token value is not a share of the film’s revenue or profits.
loup-vaillant 9y ago
Dammit, they say "cryptocurrencies" in the first sentence of the article, why don't they use that term in the title as well? For a second it looked like the blockbuster itself was about AES something.
dillondoyle 9y ago
Sounds like just buying a tiny piece of equity in a seed round. I don't get what a blockchain value adds here except probably easier SEC regs - maybe I'm missing something.
jondubois 9y ago
It would only work if they advertise the coin inside the movies that are produced. They have to keep driving attention towards the coin with every movie released.
Howered211 9y ago
I will watch first day first show.:)

45 points by petethomas 9y ago

I think something similar but for musical artist could be very fun. Betting on the next 'big band' sounds like a good time.

jedberg 9y ago

Every ICO I hear about just sounds like a scam. Maybe I don't understand it, but I have yet to see a case where as an investor I thought "that sounds like a good investment!". Can someone describe a scenario where an ICO is a win for the investor? For example, at least with stocks, I get a share of ownership in return for my money. So as the value of the company goes up, the value of my share goes it. It's based on tangible ownership of a real thing. But with a crypto coin, what is the value tied to? Is it really just the perceived value of the underlying asset? And what happens when the company shuts down? They sell all the assets, the real shareholders take all the money, but what happens to all the coin holders?

bfuller 9y ago
they probably are all scams but people still make money on them and thats why they are popular
- mrschwabe 9y ago
  You fail to understand the big picture so let me help you (and perhaps @jedberg) out a bit. Many yes, but not all, are scams and in fact the concept of an ICO is just as significant as cryptocurrency itself (though cryptocurrency a required predecessor). ICOs (tokens) are to IPOs (stocks) what cryptocurrency is to fiat currency. Just as banks will fight and make a fuss about cryptocurrency, stock exchanges (and banks again) will make a fuss about ICOs. Why? It's because ICOs, like cryptocurrency - are decentralized & blockchain powered and as such require no regulation or centralized authority to give them legitimacy. The blockchain, an immutable append-only log of transactions gives them legitimacy. In other words, crypto currency and ICOs 'cut out the middlemen' - and the middlemen don't like it (hence they will try to give ICOs negative press; but of course the pyramid schemers and scam artists don't help the matter either). Yet banks and exchanges are perhaps the lesser of worries; it is at the end of the day big brother who is most concerned because this entire crypto/blockchain movement has the potential to render their system of control - which is based on controlling and imposing rules on capital (something very difficult to do with the aforementioned crypto tech) - totally ineffective in the future. So yes, just as in the early days of the internet there were those who used it to share & publish scams or porn - there are some ICOs or users of cryptocurrency engaged in scams or questionable activity. But just because you can share porn on the internet does not mean it isn't going to be a critical business technology one day in the near future. In the meantime, expect big brother and its friends in media to be-little and all out attack the tech and the people who use it (via more laws & regulation, censorship and ultimately intimidation & force) until it inevitably becomes apart of everyday business.
  - jedberg 9y ago
    That explains the philosophical reasons, but just like cryptocurrency is weak compared to fiat currency, ICOs still sound even weaker than stocks. It's nice that there is no regulation, but in the case of both fiat currency and stock, it is the regulation that gives it value, because they are backed by a system of laws and an army to protect those laws. Like with stocks, they are already somewhat subject to the psychological whims of the shareholders, but what keeps most stock prices fairly stable is the fact that everyone who holds it knows that the worst case scenario is that the underlying company is liquidated and everyone gets some money back. With a crypto coin, if the masses just decide that it isn't worth anything anymore, then it just isn't worth anything anymore. It has no backing in reality as far as I can tell.
    - jstanley 9y ago
      > With a crypto coin, if the masses just decide that it isn't worth anything anymore, then it just isn't worth anything anymore. Note that this is true of every currency, not just cryptocurrency.
    - mrschwabe 9y ago
      > "It's nice that there is no regulation, but in the case of both fiat currency and stock, it is the regulation that gives it value, because they are backed by a system of laws and an army to protect those laws." Sure, but ultimately the value is not for you or me or the government to decide necessarily - it is a collective decision by the market. If the market eventually comes to a consesus that this whole idea of large scale government is a failed concept and that it only results in monopolies, wars, and extreme inequalities - then people can choose to abandon that system in favor of something they might prefer and see a brigther future for; something that is decentralized without any central authority perhaps. Personally, I would rather invest in companies that don't have to pay enormous legal fees and jump through umpteen regulations designed to benefit a failed system - I'd rather my capital flow away from violent 'armies' as you say and directly into the hands of those implementing new ideas on the front-line of innovation. Just so happens I can do just that, just send me your BTC address. And if you'd like to give me a return, you need only a BTC address of mine - there we just transacted a stock using no more than two Bitcoin addresses. See the power here? If even not for philosophical reasons, people are going to choose this method for trading securities (or whatever you want to call them) because it is easier. You can't reverse that; the cat is already out of the bag so to speak. > "With a crypto coin, if the masses just decide that it isn't worth anything anymore, then it just isn't worth anything anymore. It has no backing in reality as far as I can tell." That is a natural course of any failed business. Try not to invest in the ones that you feel people may one day decide isn't worth anything anymore and you'll be fine. We don't need the government to hand-hold us in our day to day lives; certainly not in what we eat, consume, read, or invest (or not invest) in.
hackinthebochs 9y ago
The best use-case for a crypto coin is as a share of an underlying economy. Take ethereum for example, their underlying asset ETH is used to power computation on the network. So when the network first launches you get to purchase a share of the ethereum economy for relatively cheap since the risk of failure is high. Your expectation is that once the network of apps and users is built up, that economy will grow and so will the value of your share of it. The value proposition in an ICO is that the potential upside of your investment can reasonably be 100x. I don't recall exactly but I think ether tokens sold for around 30 cents per coin which is about a 1000x return at current prices. So for the extra risk of having zero leverage in determining how the company operates, and no ability to recover assets if things fail, you hope for a much greater return than you get through traditional investments. The problem with the recent ICO wave is that the value proposition has gone completely out of whack. Instead of the underlying economy starting off at a $2M market cap and thus having huge room to grow, they're starting off at $20M or even $200+M with very little room to grow outside of the increase due to massive bubble valuations.
- jedberg 9y ago
  > So for the extra risk of having zero leverage in determining how the company operates, and no ability to recover assets if things fail, you hope for a much greater return than you get through traditional investments. This was the best explanation yet, thank you! It almost sounds like gambling, in that I have no control in the outcome nor any way to recoup assets, expect that I can't even calculate the odds of my return on an ICO. :) I guess my question is, what is the end game? Doesn't someone end up at the bottom of the pyramid so to speak, stuck holding the bag with the whole thing goes spiraling down?
  - hackinthebochs 9y ago
    >I guess my question is, what is the end game? Doesn't someone end up at the bottom of the pyramid so to speak I think there's a chance a handful of blockchain projects will have enough utility to be sustainable long term, but almost certainly not at the valuations that are common currently. But the vast majority of them have zero long term value. The way I see it crypto is winner-take-most. There's room for one "currency" that can potentially have a Trillion+ market cap, followed by a couple of niche utility projects with maybe around 100M market cap at best, and the rest are utterly worthless.
zodiac 9y ago
> with a crypto coin, what is the value tied to? In the specific case of ethereum ERC20 tokens [1], it depends on how the mechanism design uses the token, there's no general answer. I can give 3 specific examples. MKR stablecoin (https://github.com/makerdao/docs/blob/master/Dai.md https://github.com/makerdao/docs/blob/master/Dai.md): users of the collateralized debt positions system pay fees for using the service (because they want to take margin long positions, or because they want to issue some stablecoins), those fees go to MKR holders (the mechanism for this has changed over time, but it could be through dividends, or buy-and-burn). In return MKR holders provide a service by having MKR be one "line of defence" in undercollatiralization scenarios (new MKR is minted and auctioned). REP (http://blog.augur.net/for-reporters-a-guide-to-rep-tokens/ http://blog.augur.net/for-reporters-a-guide-to-rep-tokens/) - users of Augur's prediction markets pay fees to REP holders, who in return participate as reporters in the prediction market. Decentralized exchanges (0x and Kyber Network are some that have recently ICO'd) - generally users of the exchanges (who consumer services like liquidity, order routing and matching) pay fees to the token holders, somehow. I'm less familiar with these. The fact that users pay fees is enforced by smart contracts. There is also some thoughts on a general framework for valuing these tokens here http://vitalik.ca/general/2017/10/17/moe.html http://vitalik.ca/general/2017/10/17/moe.html. > And what happens when the company shuts down In a "proper" decentralized application there's no centralized company that can unilaterally decide to "shut things down". All the projects I mentioned above aim to in the long run behave like this. Notes [1] of course, not all ICOs are of ethereum ERC20 tokens, eg recent ones are EOS, Tezos, arguably Polkadot. But I am much less able to talk about how the token economics of those tokens.
zby 9y ago
There are some speculations about ICOs founding things that are needed but are not founded now - like Open Protocols and Open Source software working with them. It might not be a good mechanism for extracting the value - but the others are also not very efficient. https://medium.com/@zby/the-case-for-icos-bee2c223ec71 https://medium.com/@zby/the-case-for-icos-bee2c223ec71
- usrusr 9y ago
  In other words, the kickstarter donation model, with kickstarter the company removed from the equation. Makes sense, for certain use cases, but those use cases are not investments, in exactly the same way as kickstarter donations are not investments.

datamoshr 9y ago

Seriously Bloomberg, automatically playing a video? I just woke up my wife by accident thanks to your poor UX. I like the idea of more democratic film-making but am apprehensive about this as it seems just like crypto is hitting fever pitch and people are trying to make it fit in every paradigm they can think of

schmookeeg 9y ago
I use a Chrome plugin called "HTML5 Content Blocker" which allows me to selectively block JS, CSS, Images, Objects, or Media. I generally run with only the "Media" switch on, and I haven't seen autoplayed videos in an age. They annoy me mightily.
jaryd 9y ago
Anyone know of any extensions that automatically (and reliably) quash auto-play videos or automatically mute them?
- pcmaffey 9y ago
  I thought I saw this was built into Safari with the new High Sierra update. Haven't dl'ed yet.
- mintplant 9y ago
  This one automatically mutes new tabs until you explicitly unmute them: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-mute/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-mute/
  - teddyh 9y ago
    I prefer Advanced MuteList: Advanced Mute Links (MuteLinks fork) makes use of the Firefox's built-in mute tab functionality and automatically mutes a tab based on its URL. Every time a new tab loads or a tab URL changes, Advanced MuteLinks will check the URL and if it matches a link or criteria of the Blacklist, Whitelist the tab will be muted, in case a tab is muted and its URL changes to one not on the Blacklist the tab will be un-muted. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/advanced-mutelist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/advanced-mute...

klipt 9y ago

And then thanks to "Hollywood Accounting", the film makes no profit and the investors get nothing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

clarkmoody 9y ago

It would probably be more profitable to make a good film about the crypto space and fund it with dollars.

valsoltow 9y ago

It's already happening in music with several different cryptos http://vectorspace.ai/recommend/app/crypto_discover?query=music http://vectorspace.ai/recommend/app/crypto_discover?query=mu...

dreamdu5t 9y ago

It is fraud and a blatant lie for Christopher Woodrow to claim “Investors will benefit as the tokens, which can be traded in the secondary market, would appreciate based on the success of the films” That is a straight up lie. Token value is not a share of the film’s revenue or profits.

loup-vaillant 9y ago

Dammit, they say "cryptocurrencies" in the first sentence of the article, why don't they use that term in the title as well? For a second it looked like the blockbuster itself was about AES something.

dillondoyle 9y ago

Sounds like just buying a tiny piece of equity in a seed round. I don't get what a blockchain value adds here except probably easier SEC regs - maybe I'm missing something.

jondubois 9y ago

It would only work if they advertise the coin inside the movies that are produced. They have to keep driving attention towards the coin with every movie released.

Howered211 9y ago

I will watch first day first show.:)