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Long Island Iced Tea Soars 500% After Changing Its Name to Long Blockchain

316 points by dkyc 9y ago

miralabs 9y ago
definitely not a bubble
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  More like a bulb.
- Kiro 9y ago
  We don't even see this kind of stuff in a regular bubble. I think this is something new, either Bubble 2.0 or The New Dawn. I lived through the IT bubble and it mostly went unnoticed among me, my friends and family. Literally everyone talks about Bitcoin though. I'm seriously thinking this is a first for humanity and the consequences will be extreme regardless of crash or paradigm shift. It's one for the history books for sure.
  - throwawayReply 9y ago
    "It's different this time!" - Someone in every bubble.
    - Kiro 9y ago
      Can we just stop for a moment and look at what people are actually trading here? A decentralised protocol upheld by a cryptographic function. This can't be compared with any stocks or commodity. Maybe the crash will be the same but it is still different.
      - kgwgk 9y ago
        But it can be compared with other decentralised protocols upheld by cryptographic functions, so it’s a commodity of sorts.
      - beaconstudios 9y ago
        stocks and commodity holdings are just protocols too though - not technical ones but legal/contractual ones. It's still pretty crazy though given bitcoin doesn't even have a major (legal) use to anchor it.
    - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
      The Crypto Kitty bubble already popped. I lost a paycheck, which sucks right before Christmas. Ultimately I am probably lucky that I learned my lesson with "Captain Furball Cheezburger" instead of losing my mortgage when Bitcoin pops. According to the CIA there is 80 Trillion dollars in the world in soft money. With 21 million Bitcoins, if 1% of all the worlds money was transferred to Bitcoin, each Bitcoin would be worth $38,000. We are basically half way there. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets that high, but we I don't understand how people think it could keep going past that even theoretically. If someone understands the reasoning behind the $500,000 predictions, I would love to have that explained.
      - s17n 9y ago
        $500,000: BTC market cap approximately equal to value of all mined gold.
        bpicolo 9y ago
        There's really no actual reason it should have value equal to the value of all mined gold though.
        down 9y ago
        yes, bitcoin is better then gold, will probably get higher
        acchow 9y ago
        Except, the millions of gold holders (including in jewelry, etc) around the world can transact among each other at any time. Bitcoin can handle 3-7 transactions per second.
        ryanwaggoner 9y ago
        There’s no actual reason that gold should have the value it does, either, other than the global shared delusion of it as a store of value.
        9y ago
  - devdoomari 9y ago
    maybe you're in a different age group/peer group compared to when you lived thru the IT bubble? someone else going thru the 2000s IT bubble may have said that too...
  - Scalestein 9y ago
    My guess would be that the .com bubble wasn't as easy to get involved in. With Bitcoin you can buy/invest in Bitcoin in 10 minutes with zero prior knowledge. With the .com bubble you had to find a specific stock to buy and go through all the rigmarole of buying it. The barrier to entry to this bubble (if it is!) seems much lower.
    - workthrowaway27 9y ago
      I don't know. People at least know what stocks are. Bitcoin is mysterious to most non-technical people and seems sort of sketchy at first glance.
      - Kiro 9y ago
        That's also what makes it so different.
      - cableshaft 9y ago
        Most people have a tenuous knowledge at best about what stocks are or the ecosystem behind the stock market, how to analyze stocks, or what the rules of trading are (I managed to break one when I briefly thought I could daytrade from Sharebuilder years and years ago and got suspended from trading for a few days). They don't understand it much more than most people understand Bitcoin. Not really. It's all 'buy X and hope the number goes up!', where X is a mutual fund or random company, just like with Bitcoin/Altcoins.
        stordoff 9y ago
        Most people will at least know that a share is a tiny fraction of a company, and why it has value. Bitcoin is more of a black box (to many), and thus more prone to hype (it's far easier to make grandiose claims about the future of a currency than it is to pretend a company will grow at nearly the same rate).
    - ghaff 9y ago
      I'm pretty sure the opposite is true. Many people are already invested in stocks and, even in the .com bubble, many had accounts with etrade and the like--some of which were part of the bubble itself. All you had to do was transfer your cash/stocks to pets.com or whatever. With bitcoin, you have to sign up for/transfer money to various sketchy exchanges that you've never previously used.
  - rhino369 9y ago
    This probably isn‘t even 1/10 as bad as internet and tech bubble. That had common people throwing their entire 401k into tech stocks. My dad ruined his retirement fund buying Nextel options that ended up worthless. Bitcoin is a dumber bubble though.
    - Kiro 9y ago
      I don't think we've seen anything yet. Imagine the crash when Bitcoin is $1M or $10M. I don't see that as an impossibility.
    - cableshaft 9y ago
      There are people putting their life savings into bitcoin. You'll see those stories pop up from time to time on the bitcoin subreddit. I've only got in it what I can afford to lose, personally, which isn't a whole lot, but it's still some skin in the game, at least.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Several japanese retirement funds announced they’re going all in on Bitcoin, according to what I’ve heard. Even the rumors show that this is going in the same direction.
  - sulam 9y ago
    It’s pretty much exactly the same, down to companies adding .com to their names and talking about their internet strategy and seeing their stock double.
    - Kiro 9y ago
      There are so many other spectacular things with this bubble, down to the nature of the actual instrument itself. Cryptography, decentralisation, miners, forks, etc. The IT bubble was still a stock bubble. I think this is something new.
      - sulam 9y ago
        If you were an adult during the first one, we might be able to have a real conversation about this. If not, probably not so much. This bubble is relatively small in comparison -- so far. The number of companies, the amount of the real economy affected, the sheer pervasiveness in daily life, etc. AOL single handedly carpeted North America with CDs. Internet technology revolutionized so many things it's hard to pick the most important, in the space of about 5 years. The one that still stands out to me personally is how it totally crushed international long distance calling. Hell, it completely revolutionized the _porn_ industry. Bitcoin is no comparison (again, so far).
        Kiro 9y ago
        > If you were an adult during the first one That was uncalled for. I was very much an adult during the first one. You are talking about the internet revolution in general and a comparison to blockchains could possibly be relevant but not in this discussion. You didn't trade the internet in the Dot-com bubble, you traded stocks. Bitcoin is different because that's the actual instrument being traded.
        sulam 9y ago
        Not uncalled for at all. The people talking to me about Bitcoin and how big it is are almost all in their 20’s. They have a vague idea about the Internet bubble but they certainly didn’t live through it in any meaningful way. It’s like someone telling me I can’t properly appreciate the 70’s since I didn’t experience them as an adult. It’s totally true!
  - workthrowaway27 9y ago
    The most recent times I've met someone and told them I was a programmer there next question has been along the lines of: "Do you have bitcoin/what do you think about bitcoin". Super strange.
  - Keyframe 9y ago
    Someone said it's ok if everyone talks about that, start worrying when everyone says they bought some.
    - usrusr 9y ago
      Group A is talking about bitcoin a lot to mutually reassure themselves that buying into it was the right move (and also a bit to keep others from selling before they do). Group B is talking about bitcoin a lot to mutually reassure themselves that staying out of it was the right decision (and also a bit to keep others out since all new paper money entering the exchanges weakens their arguments, at least superficially) I think that defection rates between those groups are already very low and will keep shrinking.
  - ermir 9y ago
    I started to get tempted to get in the crypto craze after resisting it since 2011, until my mother, who can barely use a computer, told me last night "What is this Bitcoin that everyone keeps talking about, everyone is getting rich, we should get in on it". That was a definite sign to stay away. She was still tempted even after I explained the bubble and reminded her that 2000 of our people died last time something like this happened in 1997. A lot of people are going to suffer this time, it's not going to be pretty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War
    - Kiro 9y ago
      I posted another comment here saying that if the value reaches a certain level the Bitcoin crash could potentially start a war. I removed it though since I was downvoted to oblivion. I guess it wasn't so far-fetched after all!
  - s4vi0r 9y ago
    The technology behind it could maybe one day cause "the new dawn", but there's 0 chance this is anything other than people going full retard. It's like a smaller scale, equally as stupid/shitty version of that tulip craze that happened in the Netherlands like 400 years ago or whatever.
sidcool 9y ago
This does show how most share brokers/buyers trade.
sharemywin 9y ago
totally need to reverse merger a penny stock company and change it's name to some blockchain company name. I'm thinking: Ageless, blockchain, AI VR company
- thrillgore 9y ago
  The Ageless VR Blockchain Company!
- vishbar 9y ago
  Visit my new startup's website, http://serverless.blockchain.ai/mongodb http://serverless.blockchain.ai/mongodb!
  - api 9y ago
    It's Bitcoin Scale!
    - DeltaWhy 9y ago
      So, 4 requests per second?
mystcb 9y ago
My comment from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15978994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15978994 ---- Looks like it [is a joke!]. I mean, the new website is only a day old, hosted with "Hostgator", uses a free theme (http://websites.simplesphere.net/piupiu/ http://websites.simplesphere.net/piupiu/) and NGINX has directory listing switched on! That and all the news reports are syndicated from the same place, so its just propagating all over the place. That - or I am mistaken, in which case - "All Hail our new Blockchain overlords" :)
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  Hard to fake a NASDAQ listing: https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ALTEA https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ALTEA Whether or not the press release is a fake, the spike is real.
  - tokenizerrr 9y ago
    Maybe I'm blind. Where does that page show their new name (other than the news ticker on the side)?
    - rkcr 9y ago
      They didn't change their name (it's just a publicity stunt), yet they still got a 200% spike in stock value. It's just absurd.
    - falsedan 9y ago
      Why would their stock ticket show anything not related to the financials of the stock?
      - tokenizerrr 9y ago
        This person is claiming that the NASDAQ listing proves that they've changed their name. Yet the link itself clearly says "Long Island Iced Tea Corp", not "Long Blockchain". So, it would show it, because it shows the company name. And the company name is not "Long Blockchain", so the link proves nothing and the gp is full of shit.
ecshafer 9y ago
I think this might be block chain's pets.com moment. If this weren't from Bloomberg, I would honestly think this was satire.
- adventured 9y ago
  This is the fourth or fifth of these I've seen in the last year. Riot Blockchain for example, which used to be a worthless, failing, tiny biotech company. Overstock.com pulled a version of this fraud (I'm calling it a fraud, they may be technically legally in the clear; I believe these companies are commiting intentional fraud however, knowingly misrepresenting critical facts about their business to shareholders).
- jeffwass 9y ago
  This reminds me of the Linux moment. As in, back around 1999, companies with Linux in their name saw their value skyrocket, regardless of how associated their core business was with Linux. Supposedly a key reason VA Linux (now Geeknet) named themselves that way and used NASDAQ Ticker LNUX.
esseti 9y ago
gold rush at its finest
victor106 9y ago
A tulip of our times... History never repeats but it rhymes For people who missed out on the .com bubble don’t miss this out. It’s a good time to experience what a bubble looks like so you can detect one in the future... Remember this buffet quote It’s better to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful
- rootusrootus 9y ago
  Yesterday, finally, my 77 year old mother actually asked me about bitcoin. The end [of the bubble] is nigh...
  - tfha 9y ago
    The end is not nigh until she tells you she invested your inheritance into it.
  - ripberge 9y ago
    That’s also a sign that bitcoin could become the worlds most popular currency someday. Recognition and interest need to become ubiquitous.
    - nxsynonym 9y ago
      The general public is not talking about using bitcoin as a currency, or converting their daily spending habits into bitcoin, or even about the underlying tech and possible future applications for it. All of the "average-joe" hype is around getting rich quick off of it's meteoric rise. That's what scares me the most.
    - tankenmate 9y ago
      Bitcoin has some very serious problems with governance (code and policy governance that is, regulation governance is finally starting to happen, whether it will be good for bitcoin remains to be seen) which has led to very serious throughput problems (standard bitcoin can handle only 7tx/sec maximum, visa does up to 4,000tx/sec on it's busiest days) and cost problems (constrained throughput has pushed up transaction fees considerably compared to just a year ago). Bitcoin could increase it's maximum block size to 512MB to compensate but that would drastically increase the size of the blockchain as well as increase the cost of mining, how much that would decrease transaction fees is harder to determine.
matwood 9y ago
The only reason this made any news is because it's tied to blockchain. Penny type stocks do this pump and dump scheme all the time with whatever is hot. Biotech was big for awhile, then pot, and now blockchain (and I'm sure I missed a few in there).
spraak 9y ago
When I first read the title I thought, "How did an Onion article make it to the front page of HN?"
- mannykannot 9y ago
  There is a serious point here - as someone more familiar with the alcoholic beverage of the company's original name than its wholesome products, I think we need some blockchain-themed cocktails for the holidays (it's probably been done... does anyone have recipes?)
  - acdanger 9y ago
    Something with a lot of fizz that leaves you with a bitter aftertaste and a bad hangover? Looks like there's already a bitcoin cocktail floating about: http://www.barmeister.com/drinks/recipe/7511/?o=by_date http://www.barmeister.com/drinks/recipe/7511/?o=by_date
    - ceejayoz 9y ago
      Coke and Mentos, resulting in a briefly frothy mixture followed by a mostly empty glass.
      - mizzao 9y ago
        That only works with diet coke.
        SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
        It works with any carbonated drink, diet coke just happens to be the frothiest of the ones tested.
    - toomanybeersies 9y ago
      Cheap gin, soda water, and a salt rim. Depth charge a shot of Jagermeister for extra effect if the price of bitcoin has ended on a negative that day.
kneel 9y ago
Is this the result of algorithm trading?
- tpkj 9y ago
  Also wondering that same question. If it is, it would be interesting to learn how the conclusion to buy was reached.
  - ashelmire 9y ago
    buylist_keywords = ['blockchain', 'snake oil', 'tulip']
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
thrillgore 9y ago
Did satirists just give up? This can't be real life.
patio11 9y ago
I think this is likely not “small companies chasing a fad” but rather “penny stock promoters doing their usual thing: grab a listed entity for five figures then run a boiler room, citing the most recent successful boiler room.”
- acdanger 9y ago
  That's along the lines of what I was thinking was going on here. This is pretty brazen.
chrischen 9y ago
Unqualified Americans can’t invest in startups or ICOs. Blockchaina are the only assets that are growing that they can invest in. That deosn’t even include the rest of the world.
- ForHackernews 9y ago
  The S&P 500 is up 86.95% over the last 5 years. Is that "not growing" in your mind?
- api 9y ago
  Unqualified Americans can invest in some startups since the Jobs Act under Obama, but for various reasons it hasn't been very popular. Startups are hesitant to use it because they're afraid of being blackballed by VCs... or at least that's the FUD.
- JustFinishedBSG 9y ago
  > ICOs You mean IPOs
greysteil 9y ago
For those who think this is a spoof, check the 5 day view on Google Finance: https://www.google.com/search?q=NASDAQ:LTEA https://www.google.com/search?q=NASDAQ:LTEA
- C14L 9y ago
  Look at the 5 year chart, there have been a few large jumps in the company's stock price in the past. Don't think that "blame the Bitcoin" works for those.
LandR 9y ago
I've only known Long Island Iced Tea as Vodka, Rum, Tequilla, triple sec, gin and coca-cola.
- cafard 9y ago
  Yeah, go figure.
TheGrassyKnoll 9y ago
"money for nothing and chicks for free"...
jrs235 9y ago
WTF. Clickbait title. Even bloomberg knows it's not accurate. From the story itself: "Long Island Iced Tea Corp. shares rose 238 percent after the company rebranded itself Long Blockchain Corp." 238 != 500 Anyways, I think it's still crazy what blockchain mania is doing/causing.
- yohann305 9y ago
  maybe there're expecting to jump to 500% after we read the article...
- pessimizer 9y ago
  Check the chart at the bottom of the article. It went up 500%, then dropped. Since the article, it seems to only be up 190%. I imagine that over the intervening period, some value investors independently investigated the exact nature of Long Blockchain's technical innovations in the distributed thirst-quenching space.
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
Is there an 8-K filing supporting this?
- datamingle 9y ago
  None that I could see: https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?CIK=LTEA&owner=exclude&action=getcompany https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?CIK=LTEA&owner=excl...
  - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
    Might come after market close, but I think this is real judging from the other things I've read
Keyframe 9y ago
Can't wait for books about the crash, like boo.com. That was a good read.
down 9y ago
Except the industrial value of gold which is around 10% of its use and not the quality/pure one, how is gold better than bitcoin? The favorite argument and the only argument is its history, yet when someone tries to use the same historical argument of bitcoin going up and up for 7 years, the elitist, NY folk will quickly follow with "Past performance is not an indicator of future outcomes". I think people here are just salty because they think they are smart yet didn't saw the value in the crypto/blockchain, especially that is up their geeky alley.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  Good luck stealing a ton of gold using a keylogger.
  - down 9y ago
    if you keep a ton of gold in your house, good luck.. keeping it safe, there are safe ways to keep bitcoin, cold storage, etc. is not like is impossible.
    - ceejayoz 9y ago
      It appears to be substantially easier to secure a ton of gold than the equivalent amount of Bitcoin. It's also a lot harder to accidentally lose.
      - down 9y ago
        right is so hard to buy a device from amazon or print some words on plasticized paper and keep it safe, hell you can even memorize 12 words.
        ceejayoz 9y ago
        Sure, assuming the Amazon device isn't a compromised counterfeit, the printer isn't rooted, and the paper doesn't get burned up in a house fire. Case in point: https://www.wired.com/story/i-forgot-my-pin-an-epic-tale-of-losing-dollar30000-in-bitcoin/ https://www.wired.com/story/i-forgot-my-pin-an-epic-tale-of-...
beefield 9y ago
Efficient markets, price contains all available information, rational expectations and whatnot there were. Oh, yeah, almost forgot, I don't even know what a bubble means. These words have become popular. I don't think they have any meaning. - Eugene Fama, Nobel Memorial Prize laureate in Economics
DonHopkins 9y ago
It's not a bubble -- it's carbonated!
specialp 9y ago
This reminds me of during the dot com boom. An analyst said that business to business sector is worth some huge amount of money, and B2B stocks started booming. So a janitorial supply company changed their name and their symbol to BTOB and exploded in value.....
mrburton 9y ago
Is this real? It's not April 1st.
oroup 9y ago
Reminds me of Zapata the fish oil company launching zap.com an internet portal and then spinning out and IPOing the subsidiary. [0] [0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/1999/04/14/business/company-news-zapata-plans-to-spin-off-its-zapcom-internet-business.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/1999/04/14/business/company-news-...
dumbfounder 9y ago
I can see the shark below...
mancerayder 9y ago
So for those who remind us that the cryptocoin world is full of tulip-like behavior with no underlying asset value... while stocks provide dividends and represent growth and so forth: this article is a gentle reminder that stocks are also subject to tulipy speculations.
- cglace 9y ago
  Because people thought the stock was a tulip.
  - mancerayder 9y ago
    Sure, but as the prevalence of day trading and even automated trading that buys and sells in short periods of time (which you can tell if you look at the price movements of a stock in a small, say daily interval and notice repetitive price pattern movements), a lot if not MOST stock trading is entirely NOT based on the expectation of underlying value of the stock. Not everyone has a Warren Buffet or Bogle-like approach to long-term investing of stocks.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cpsempek 9y ago
Don't be surprised if in the next edition of A Random Walk Down Wall Street cryptos get appended to chapter 2, The Madness of Crowds. Events like these are embarrassingly similar to those that have occurred in past bubbles. If you have any skin in this game (as I do) you'd do well to read the aforementioned chapter and start planning your exit strategy.
timeout27 9y ago
Just dont let the funny-facts divert you from the important concepts: bitcoin = money-without-banks, first time in human history
- joekrill 9y ago
  That doesn't necessarily imply it's either a good or a bad thing, though.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  > money-without-banks, first time in human history ... please google 'salt as currency'
- stordoff 9y ago
  > money-without-banks Wouldn't most of the history of commodity money be exactly that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money
jondubois 9y ago
Is this what Karl Marx had in mind when he said that capitalism would destroy itself?
- ep103 9y ago
  No, that would be the republican party.
tehlike 9y ago
Lots of opportunity to make quick bucks with shorting this. And riot blockchain.
techolic 9y ago
For a moment I thought today is the first of April.
b0rsuk 9y ago
They should've named it Long JavaScript !
jimmies 9y ago
Anyone notices the screenshot? The price was at 13.37.
joejerryronnie 9y ago
Bubbles can be a fantastic way to generate wealth. Amass as much cash as possible, wait for the inevitable crash (you can't time this so just be prepared for when it does happen), and then buy tons of assets for pennies on the dollar. If you truly believe in the fundamental value of the frothy asset, this approach can be a huge win. Obviously, this should not be your primary investment strategy but it worked well for me (e.g. doubled the value of my stock portfolio in 2009 and doubled the square footage of my bay area home in 2010).
- take4 9y ago
  That's assuming you can correctly call the bottom, otherwise you could be waiting for a long time just to break even.
mr_data 9y ago
This happens all the time whenever there is a "craze". When marijuana companies were the craze, scammers who peddle stocks that sounded similar to high flying stocks. It happens during big IPOs. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-08/mistaken-identity-sends-snap-sound-alike-up-140-after-ipo-news https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-08/mistaken-... It's pretty much a non-story but bloomberg has to make money with clickbait.
allandubey 9y ago
Huh

316 points by dkyc 9y ago

miralabs 9y ago

definitely not a bubble

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
More like a bulb.
Kiro 9y ago
We don't even see this kind of stuff in a regular bubble. I think this is something new, either Bubble 2.0 or The New Dawn. I lived through the IT bubble and it mostly went unnoticed among me, my friends and family. Literally everyone talks about Bitcoin though. I'm seriously thinking this is a first for humanity and the consequences will be extreme regardless of crash or paradigm shift. It's one for the history books for sure.
- throwawayReply 9y ago
  "It's different this time!" - Someone in every bubble.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    Can we just stop for a moment and look at what people are actually trading here? A decentralised protocol upheld by a cryptographic function. This can't be compared with any stocks or commodity. Maybe the crash will be the same but it is still different.
    - kgwgk 9y ago
      But it can be compared with other decentralised protocols upheld by cryptographic functions, so it’s a commodity of sorts.
    - beaconstudios 9y ago
      stocks and commodity holdings are just protocols too though - not technical ones but legal/contractual ones. It's still pretty crazy though given bitcoin doesn't even have a major (legal) use to anchor it.
  - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
    The Crypto Kitty bubble already popped. I lost a paycheck, which sucks right before Christmas. Ultimately I am probably lucky that I learned my lesson with "Captain Furball Cheezburger" instead of losing my mortgage when Bitcoin pops. According to the CIA there is 80 Trillion dollars in the world in soft money. With 21 million Bitcoins, if 1% of all the worlds money was transferred to Bitcoin, each Bitcoin would be worth $38,000. We are basically half way there. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets that high, but we I don't understand how people think it could keep going past that even theoretically. If someone understands the reasoning behind the $500,000 predictions, I would love to have that explained.
    - s17n 9y ago
      $500,000: BTC market cap approximately equal to value of all mined gold.
      - bpicolo 9y ago
        There's really no actual reason it should have value equal to the value of all mined gold though.
        down 9y ago
        yes, bitcoin is better then gold, will probably get higher
        acchow 9y ago
        Except, the millions of gold holders (including in jewelry, etc) around the world can transact among each other at any time. Bitcoin can handle 3-7 transactions per second.
        ryanwaggoner 9y ago
        There’s no actual reason that gold should have the value it does, either, other than the global shared delusion of it as a store of value.
      - 9y ago
- devdoomari 9y ago
  maybe you're in a different age group/peer group compared to when you lived thru the IT bubble? someone else going thru the 2000s IT bubble may have said that too...
- Scalestein 9y ago
  My guess would be that the .com bubble wasn't as easy to get involved in. With Bitcoin you can buy/invest in Bitcoin in 10 minutes with zero prior knowledge. With the .com bubble you had to find a specific stock to buy and go through all the rigmarole of buying it. The barrier to entry to this bubble (if it is!) seems much lower.
  - workthrowaway27 9y ago
    I don't know. People at least know what stocks are. Bitcoin is mysterious to most non-technical people and seems sort of sketchy at first glance.
    - Kiro 9y ago
      That's also what makes it so different.
    - cableshaft 9y ago
      Most people have a tenuous knowledge at best about what stocks are or the ecosystem behind the stock market, how to analyze stocks, or what the rules of trading are (I managed to break one when I briefly thought I could daytrade from Sharebuilder years and years ago and got suspended from trading for a few days). They don't understand it much more than most people understand Bitcoin. Not really. It's all 'buy X and hope the number goes up!', where X is a mutual fund or random company, just like with Bitcoin/Altcoins.
      - stordoff 9y ago
        Most people will at least know that a share is a tiny fraction of a company, and why it has value. Bitcoin is more of a black box (to many), and thus more prone to hype (it's far easier to make grandiose claims about the future of a currency than it is to pretend a company will grow at nearly the same rate).
  - ghaff 9y ago
    I'm pretty sure the opposite is true. Many people are already invested in stocks and, even in the .com bubble, many had accounts with etrade and the like--some of which were part of the bubble itself. All you had to do was transfer your cash/stocks to pets.com or whatever. With bitcoin, you have to sign up for/transfer money to various sketchy exchanges that you've never previously used.
- rhino369 9y ago
  This probably isn‘t even 1/10 as bad as internet and tech bubble. That had common people throwing their entire 401k into tech stocks. My dad ruined his retirement fund buying Nextel options that ended up worthless. Bitcoin is a dumber bubble though.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    I don't think we've seen anything yet. Imagine the crash when Bitcoin is $1M or $10M. I don't see that as an impossibility.
  - cableshaft 9y ago
    There are people putting their life savings into bitcoin. You'll see those stories pop up from time to time on the bitcoin subreddit. I've only got in it what I can afford to lose, personally, which isn't a whole lot, but it's still some skin in the game, at least.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Several japanese retirement funds announced they’re going all in on Bitcoin, according to what I’ve heard. Even the rumors show that this is going in the same direction.
- sulam 9y ago
  It’s pretty much exactly the same, down to companies adding .com to their names and talking about their internet strategy and seeing their stock double.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    There are so many other spectacular things with this bubble, down to the nature of the actual instrument itself. Cryptography, decentralisation, miners, forks, etc. The IT bubble was still a stock bubble. I think this is something new.
    - sulam 9y ago
      If you were an adult during the first one, we might be able to have a real conversation about this. If not, probably not so much. This bubble is relatively small in comparison -- so far. The number of companies, the amount of the real economy affected, the sheer pervasiveness in daily life, etc. AOL single handedly carpeted North America with CDs. Internet technology revolutionized so many things it's hard to pick the most important, in the space of about 5 years. The one that still stands out to me personally is how it totally crushed international long distance calling. Hell, it completely revolutionized the _porn_ industry. Bitcoin is no comparison (again, so far).
      - Kiro 9y ago
        > If you were an adult during the first one That was uncalled for. I was very much an adult during the first one. You are talking about the internet revolution in general and a comparison to blockchains could possibly be relevant but not in this discussion. You didn't trade the internet in the Dot-com bubble, you traded stocks. Bitcoin is different because that's the actual instrument being traded.
        sulam 9y ago
        Not uncalled for at all. The people talking to me about Bitcoin and how big it is are almost all in their 20’s. They have a vague idea about the Internet bubble but they certainly didn’t live through it in any meaningful way. It’s like someone telling me I can’t properly appreciate the 70’s since I didn’t experience them as an adult. It’s totally true!
- workthrowaway27 9y ago
  The most recent times I've met someone and told them I was a programmer there next question has been along the lines of: "Do you have bitcoin/what do you think about bitcoin". Super strange.
- Keyframe 9y ago
  Someone said it's ok if everyone talks about that, start worrying when everyone says they bought some.
  - usrusr 9y ago
    Group A is talking about bitcoin a lot to mutually reassure themselves that buying into it was the right move (and also a bit to keep others from selling before they do). Group B is talking about bitcoin a lot to mutually reassure themselves that staying out of it was the right decision (and also a bit to keep others out since all new paper money entering the exchanges weakens their arguments, at least superficially) I think that defection rates between those groups are already very low and will keep shrinking.
- ermir 9y ago
  I started to get tempted to get in the crypto craze after resisting it since 2011, until my mother, who can barely use a computer, told me last night "What is this Bitcoin that everyone keeps talking about, everyone is getting rich, we should get in on it". That was a definite sign to stay away. She was still tempted even after I explained the bubble and reminded her that 2000 of our people died last time something like this happened in 1997. A lot of people are going to suffer this time, it's not going to be pretty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War
  - Kiro 9y ago
    I posted another comment here saying that if the value reaches a certain level the Bitcoin crash could potentially start a war. I removed it though since I was downvoted to oblivion. I guess it wasn't so far-fetched after all!
- s4vi0r 9y ago
  The technology behind it could maybe one day cause "the new dawn", but there's 0 chance this is anything other than people going full retard. It's like a smaller scale, equally as stupid/shitty version of that tulip craze that happened in the Netherlands like 400 years ago or whatever.

sidcool 9y ago

This does show how most share brokers/buyers trade.

sharemywin 9y ago

totally need to reverse merger a penny stock company and change it's name to some blockchain company name. I'm thinking: Ageless, blockchain, AI VR company

thrillgore 9y ago
The Ageless VR Blockchain Company!
vishbar 9y ago
Visit my new startup's website, http://serverless.blockchain.ai/mongodb http://serverless.blockchain.ai/mongodb!
- api 9y ago
  It's Bitcoin Scale!
  - DeltaWhy 9y ago
    So, 4 requests per second?

mystcb 9y ago

My comment from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15978994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15978994 ---- Looks like it [is a joke!]. I mean, the new website is only a day old, hosted with "Hostgator", uses a free theme (http://websites.simplesphere.net/piupiu/ http://websites.simplesphere.net/piupiu/) and NGINX has directory listing switched on! That and all the news reports are syndicated from the same place, so its just propagating all over the place. That - or I am mistaken, in which case - "All Hail our new Blockchain overlords" :)

ceejayoz 9y ago
Hard to fake a NASDAQ listing: https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ALTEA https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ALTEA Whether or not the press release is a fake, the spike is real.
- tokenizerrr 9y ago
  Maybe I'm blind. Where does that page show their new name (other than the news ticker on the side)?
  - rkcr 9y ago
    They didn't change their name (it's just a publicity stunt), yet they still got a 200% spike in stock value. It's just absurd.
  - falsedan 9y ago
    Why would their stock ticket show anything not related to the financials of the stock?
    - tokenizerrr 9y ago
      This person is claiming that the NASDAQ listing proves that they've changed their name. Yet the link itself clearly says "Long Island Iced Tea Corp", not "Long Blockchain". So, it would show it, because it shows the company name. And the company name is not "Long Blockchain", so the link proves nothing and the gp is full of shit.

ecshafer 9y ago

I think this might be block chain's pets.com moment. If this weren't from Bloomberg, I would honestly think this was satire.

adventured 9y ago
This is the fourth or fifth of these I've seen in the last year. Riot Blockchain for example, which used to be a worthless, failing, tiny biotech company. Overstock.com pulled a version of this fraud (I'm calling it a fraud, they may be technically legally in the clear; I believe these companies are commiting intentional fraud however, knowingly misrepresenting critical facts about their business to shareholders).
jeffwass 9y ago
This reminds me of the Linux moment. As in, back around 1999, companies with Linux in their name saw their value skyrocket, regardless of how associated their core business was with Linux. Supposedly a key reason VA Linux (now Geeknet) named themselves that way and used NASDAQ Ticker LNUX.

esseti 9y ago

gold rush at its finest

victor106 9y ago

A tulip of our times... History never repeats but it rhymes For people who missed out on the .com bubble don’t miss this out. It’s a good time to experience what a bubble looks like so you can detect one in the future... Remember this buffet quote It’s better to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful

rootusrootus 9y ago
Yesterday, finally, my 77 year old mother actually asked me about bitcoin. The end [of the bubble] is nigh...
- tfha 9y ago
  The end is not nigh until she tells you she invested your inheritance into it.
- ripberge 9y ago
  That’s also a sign that bitcoin could become the worlds most popular currency someday. Recognition and interest need to become ubiquitous.
  - nxsynonym 9y ago
    The general public is not talking about using bitcoin as a currency, or converting their daily spending habits into bitcoin, or even about the underlying tech and possible future applications for it. All of the "average-joe" hype is around getting rich quick off of it's meteoric rise. That's what scares me the most.
  - tankenmate 9y ago
    Bitcoin has some very serious problems with governance (code and policy governance that is, regulation governance is finally starting to happen, whether it will be good for bitcoin remains to be seen) which has led to very serious throughput problems (standard bitcoin can handle only 7tx/sec maximum, visa does up to 4,000tx/sec on it's busiest days) and cost problems (constrained throughput has pushed up transaction fees considerably compared to just a year ago). Bitcoin could increase it's maximum block size to 512MB to compensate but that would drastically increase the size of the blockchain as well as increase the cost of mining, how much that would decrease transaction fees is harder to determine.

matwood 9y ago

The only reason this made any news is because it's tied to blockchain. Penny type stocks do this pump and dump scheme all the time with whatever is hot. Biotech was big for awhile, then pot, and now blockchain (and I'm sure I missed a few in there).

spraak 9y ago

When I first read the title I thought, "How did an Onion article make it to the front page of HN?"

mannykannot 9y ago
There is a serious point here - as someone more familiar with the alcoholic beverage of the company's original name than its wholesome products, I think we need some blockchain-themed cocktails for the holidays (it's probably been done... does anyone have recipes?)
- acdanger 9y ago
  Something with a lot of fizz that leaves you with a bitter aftertaste and a bad hangover? Looks like there's already a bitcoin cocktail floating about: http://www.barmeister.com/drinks/recipe/7511/?o=by_date http://www.barmeister.com/drinks/recipe/7511/?o=by_date
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    Coke and Mentos, resulting in a briefly frothy mixture followed by a mostly empty glass.
    - mizzao 9y ago
      That only works with diet coke.
      - SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
        It works with any carbonated drink, diet coke just happens to be the frothiest of the ones tested.
  - toomanybeersies 9y ago
    Cheap gin, soda water, and a salt rim. Depth charge a shot of Jagermeister for extra effect if the price of bitcoin has ended on a negative that day.

kneel 9y ago

Is this the result of algorithm trading?

tpkj 9y ago
Also wondering that same question. If it is, it would be interesting to learn how the conclusion to buy was reached.
- ashelmire 9y ago
  buylist_keywords = ['blockchain', 'snake oil', 'tulip']
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

thrillgore 9y ago

Did satirists just give up? This can't be real life.

patio11 9y ago

I think this is likely not “small companies chasing a fad” but rather “penny stock promoters doing their usual thing: grab a listed entity for five figures then run a boiler room, citing the most recent successful boiler room.”

acdanger 9y ago
That's along the lines of what I was thinking was going on here. This is pretty brazen.

chrischen 9y ago

Unqualified Americans can’t invest in startups or ICOs. Blockchaina are the only assets that are growing that they can invest in. That deosn’t even include the rest of the world.

ForHackernews 9y ago
The S&P 500 is up 86.95% over the last 5 years. Is that "not growing" in your mind?
api 9y ago
Unqualified Americans can invest in some startups since the Jobs Act under Obama, but for various reasons it hasn't been very popular. Startups are hesitant to use it because they're afraid of being blackballed by VCs... or at least that's the FUD.
JustFinishedBSG 9y ago
> ICOs You mean IPOs

greysteil 9y ago

For those who think this is a spoof, check the 5 day view on Google Finance: https://www.google.com/search?q=NASDAQ:LTEA https://www.google.com/search?q=NASDAQ:LTEA

C14L 9y ago
Look at the 5 year chart, there have been a few large jumps in the company's stock price in the past. Don't think that "blame the Bitcoin" works for those.

LandR 9y ago

I've only known Long Island Iced Tea as Vodka, Rum, Tequilla, triple sec, gin and coca-cola.

cafard 9y ago
Yeah, go figure.

TheGrassyKnoll 9y ago

"money for nothing and chicks for free"...

jrs235 9y ago

WTF. Clickbait title. Even bloomberg knows it's not accurate. From the story itself: "Long Island Iced Tea Corp. shares rose 238 percent after the company rebranded itself Long Blockchain Corp." 238 != 500 Anyways, I think it's still crazy what blockchain mania is doing/causing.

yohann305 9y ago
maybe there're expecting to jump to 500% after we read the article...
pessimizer 9y ago
Check the chart at the bottom of the article. It went up 500%, then dropped. Since the article, it seems to only be up 190%. I imagine that over the intervening period, some value investors independently investigated the exact nature of Long Blockchain's technical innovations in the distributed thirst-quenching space.

ringaroundthetx 9y ago

Is there an 8-K filing supporting this?

datamingle 9y ago
None that I could see: https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?CIK=LTEA&owner=exclude&action=getcompany https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?CIK=LTEA&owner=excl...
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  Might come after market close, but I think this is real judging from the other things I've read

Keyframe 9y ago

Can't wait for books about the crash, like boo.com. That was a good read.

down 9y ago

Except the industrial value of gold which is around 10% of its use and not the quality/pure one, how is gold better than bitcoin? The favorite argument and the only argument is its history, yet when someone tries to use the same historical argument of bitcoin going up and up for 7 years, the elitist, NY folk will quickly follow with "Past performance is not an indicator of future outcomes". I think people here are just salty because they think they are smart yet didn't saw the value in the crypto/blockchain, especially that is up their geeky alley.

ceejayoz 9y ago
Good luck stealing a ton of gold using a keylogger.
- down 9y ago
  if you keep a ton of gold in your house, good luck.. keeping it safe, there are safe ways to keep bitcoin, cold storage, etc. is not like is impossible.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    It appears to be substantially easier to secure a ton of gold than the equivalent amount of Bitcoin. It's also a lot harder to accidentally lose.
    - down 9y ago
      right is so hard to buy a device from amazon or print some words on plasticized paper and keep it safe, hell you can even memorize 12 words.
      - ceejayoz 9y ago
        Sure, assuming the Amazon device isn't a compromised counterfeit, the printer isn't rooted, and the paper doesn't get burned up in a house fire. Case in point: https://www.wired.com/story/i-forgot-my-pin-an-epic-tale-of-losing-dollar30000-in-bitcoin/ https://www.wired.com/story/i-forgot-my-pin-an-epic-tale-of-...

beefield 9y ago

Efficient markets, price contains all available information, rational expectations and whatnot there were. Oh, yeah, almost forgot, I don't even know what a bubble means. These words have become popular. I don't think they have any meaning. - Eugene Fama, Nobel Memorial Prize laureate in Economics

DonHopkins 9y ago

It's not a bubble -- it's carbonated!

specialp 9y ago

This reminds me of during the dot com boom. An analyst said that business to business sector is worth some huge amount of money, and B2B stocks started booming. So a janitorial supply company changed their name and their symbol to BTOB and exploded in value.....

mrburton 9y ago

Is this real? It's not April 1st.

oroup 9y ago

Reminds me of Zapata the fish oil company launching zap.com an internet portal and then spinning out and IPOing the subsidiary. [0] [0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/1999/04/14/business/company-news-zapata-plans-to-spin-off-its-zapcom-internet-business.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/1999/04/14/business/company-news-...

dumbfounder 9y ago

I can see the shark below...

mancerayder 9y ago

So for those who remind us that the cryptocoin world is full of tulip-like behavior with no underlying asset value... while stocks provide dividends and represent growth and so forth: this article is a gentle reminder that stocks are also subject to tulipy speculations.

cglace 9y ago
Because people thought the stock was a tulip.
- mancerayder 9y ago
  Sure, but as the prevalence of day trading and even automated trading that buys and sells in short periods of time (which you can tell if you look at the price movements of a stock in a small, say daily interval and notice repetitive price pattern movements), a lot if not MOST stock trading is entirely NOT based on the expectation of underlying value of the stock. Not everyone has a Warren Buffet or Bogle-like approach to long-term investing of stocks.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

cpsempek 9y ago

Don't be surprised if in the next edition of A Random Walk Down Wall Street cryptos get appended to chapter 2, The Madness of Crowds. Events like these are embarrassingly similar to those that have occurred in past bubbles. If you have any skin in this game (as I do) you'd do well to read the aforementioned chapter and start planning your exit strategy.

timeout27 9y ago

Just dont let the funny-facts divert you from the important concepts: bitcoin = money-without-banks, first time in human history

joekrill 9y ago
That doesn't necessarily imply it's either a good or a bad thing, though.
pmlnr 9y ago
> money-without-banks, first time in human history ... please google 'salt as currency'
stordoff 9y ago
> money-without-banks Wouldn't most of the history of commodity money be exactly that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money

jondubois 9y ago

Is this what Karl Marx had in mind when he said that capitalism would destroy itself?

ep103 9y ago
No, that would be the republican party.

tehlike 9y ago

Lots of opportunity to make quick bucks with shorting this. And riot blockchain.

techolic 9y ago

For a moment I thought today is the first of April.

b0rsuk 9y ago

They should've named it Long JavaScript !

jimmies 9y ago

Anyone notices the screenshot? The price was at 13.37.

joejerryronnie 9y ago

Bubbles can be a fantastic way to generate wealth. Amass as much cash as possible, wait for the inevitable crash (you can't time this so just be prepared for when it does happen), and then buy tons of assets for pennies on the dollar. If you truly believe in the fundamental value of the frothy asset, this approach can be a huge win. Obviously, this should not be your primary investment strategy but it worked well for me (e.g. doubled the value of my stock portfolio in 2009 and doubled the square footage of my bay area home in 2010).

take4 9y ago
That's assuming you can correctly call the bottom, otherwise you could be waiting for a long time just to break even.

mr_data 9y ago

This happens all the time whenever there is a "craze". When marijuana companies were the craze, scammers who peddle stocks that sounded similar to high flying stocks. It happens during big IPOs. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-08/mistaken-identity-sends-snap-sound-alike-up-140-after-ipo-news https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-08/mistaken-... It's pretty much a non-story but bloomberg has to make money with clickbait.

allandubey 9y ago

Huh