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Crypto Market Crash Leaving Bankrupt Startups in Its Wake
- abootstrapper 8y agoI’m sure I’ll get buried for this, but it’s a shame that as a whole, we’ve spent billions of dollars, created tons of carbon, and wasted untold man hours on this blockchain and digital coin fad. At least nobody can say the concept wasn’t fully explored.
- sheeshkebab 8y agoIt was more useful than gaming.
- abootstrapper 8y agoHah! I think that's debatable, but I won't. :)
- mihaifm 8y agoNot sure if this is a joke or not, but the parallel is not even close.
- fastball 8y agoI actually think he might be right, so I'd like to hear more from your side of things. As far as I'm concerned, gaming is a drain on human productivity, often a drain on long term happiness, and provides little economic utility.
- mcintyre1994 8y agoI'm definitely doing less damage to the environment and my financial security if I spend my commute playing games on my phone than if I were to spend that time making transactions on a blockchain. Which is to say I don't think there's actually any sensible comparison that can be made here.
- abootstrapper 8y agoI mean, video games are about as useful as a summer swim, a piece of music, fine art, and fictional literature. Sometimes they’re also educational.
- fastball 8y agoI think the discussion was about energy consumption.
- farazzz 8y agoWhat is your source for gaming being a drain on happiness? I can only find research that says the opposite. Also I’m certain gaming would have created more economic opportunity than it would have destroyed via lower productivity
- yalogin 8y agoPeople here saying the underlying concept is worth a allot. I don’t see the use cases for a distributed consensus algorithm outside of coins. Even a distributed ledger shared by multiple companies is probably not useful compared to the status quo. You can always shove a square peg into a round hole, it could go in but is it making the situation better?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ikeboy 8y ago>Sirin Labs, for example, raised $158 million last year to create a mobile phone that allows consumers to trade and use crypto. The company, which will ship its first batch of a few thousand phones in December, is now considering abandoning hardware altogether and refocusing on shipping software for other phone makers to use, Chief Executive Moshe Hogeg said in an interview. Sirin now only has enough funds for six to 12 months of operations, he said. Uh. Glad this bubble has popped. Of all the things I want in a phone, "trade and use crypto" isn't quite a requirement. Besides existing phones trade and use crypto quite well
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- easymovet 8y agoWhich phone (secure computing platform) do you trust to securely store your wallet key? All it takes to lose is an update to the wallet app that sends the key to a server.
- drb91 8y agoWhy would you want the wallet with you at all times? How often are you transacting? Seems like more of a risk than a benefit here.
- atq2119 8y agoThere's clearly a demand for people having their old-school credit card or equivalent on their phone and debitable wirelessly. I personally find that more risk than benefit, but traditional banking's security mechanism seems adequate for many people. If crypto currencies cannot offer the same level of convenience/security, then how can they compete in the mass market?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ikeboy 8y agoYou can install from an apk and not get updates. Besides, if all you're doing is some kind of chain of authority you could do it through fdroid which enforces a constant key. No need for a standalone phone which will anyway have the same components as any other phone.
- balibebas 8y agoValue your assets in fiat and you've already lost.
- andrewmutz 8y agoThis is why SEC Reg D exists and is important. Most of the money wiped out during the last few years is not coming from wealthy “smart money” investors. The money has come from the middle class and mom and pop investors.
- rco8786 8y agoDo you have some data to support this?
- lifeisstillgood 8y agoBoiler room operators have traditionally not called the investment heads of major banks and pension funds. Less evidence and more historical precedent (Having said that, I would love to hear a recording of any such calls.)
- pmorici 8y agoDo you have any stats to back this up. While it seems like there is a boat load of stupid money washing around when you look at studies of coin distribution they tell another story.
- ikeboy 8y agoI think it's come from people who previously made a lot in crypto. Lottery winners are not known for their wise investments.
- lordnacho 8y agoThere's a flip side to this. When something goes well but mom and pop are excluded, the rich get richer.
- empath75 8y agoIf something is going really well, they don't need or want investment from mom and pop. The only people who sell investments to mom-and-pop are ripoff artists. Why else would you chase nickels and dimes from people who don't understand your business?
- throwaway713824 8y agoHow's chain.com doing? Anyone use their APIs?
- RL_Quine 8y agoI doubt it, they pivoted a few times from being a Bitcoin API, to a "cloud blockchain" thing whatever that could be. Nobody can ever describe why you'd even want this as a thing.
- kenneth 8y agoThey were acquired by Stellar's commercial division, Lightyear and merged to form a new entity/brand called Interstellar. It's now an enterprise consulting company with the aim of getting Stellar used in production and deployed more widely.
- Theodores 8y agoFunny how companies can go bust after getting millions from these token sales. Quite clearly they weren't on Ramen Noodle start up mode. Okay offices need to be paid for as do staff but it is not like they had to buy raw materials, build steel foundries, invest in a distribution chain or anything else capital intensive. If they had been promising to make regular products and didn't ship then there would be front page scandals and outrage on consumer rights TV shows. But nobody cares, cryptocurrency has become a dirty word, normal people reading cryptocurrency stories don't get past the headline as they know the story already. It will probably take a few years before documentary film makers make sense of the shenanigans that has gone on. There are no good stories though, at least with the dot.com crash you could tell the story through the lens of a company that was there at the time for it to have storytelling value. Shame Tom Wolfe is no longer with us, the crypto experiment needs someone of his character to do the story justice.
- jarym 8y agoThe points you make are valid but I would point out that building and bringing commercial software to market is capital intensive. Good luck building software, testing it, writing documentation, producing a go to market strategy and executing it without a lot of capital.
- empath75 8y agoThe millions they got from token sales were demoninated in cryptocurrency. All of them trying to cash out at once and you see what happened. A run on the bank.
- ErikAugust 8y agoMichael Lewis would be the best candidate.
- verroq 8y agoEmotional video of a mining startup shutting down posted a few days ago. https://youtube.com/watch?v=kxbCHlXZ-0U https://youtube.com/watch?v=kxbCHlXZ-0U
- konschubert 8y agoDamn. Proof of work is such a waste. Unless you really, really need it, you probably don't want to spend the money it takes.
- GhostVII 8y agoSo glad that kind of thing is shutting down. Sucks for the people who lost money, but that is a tonne of power being burnt for essentially nothing.
- arcticfox 8y agoTo me that video evoked zero sympathetic emotions from me, perhaps it's the GoFundMe right before the #bitcoinboom hashtag, or the name "Digie Gold", or the electricity that was just getting burned off for nothing...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jron 8y agoI'm not surprised this guy is closing up shop. GPU mining is an altcoin game and hasn't been profitable for bitcoin since 2013.
- cycrutchfield 8y agoThis video was hilarious. Thanks for the good laugh!
- latchkey 8y agoLess than a week earlier, the story was quite different. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLok7jlysU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLok7jlysU8
- pmorici 8y agoNo surprise here, same thing that happened last crash. Any crypto company that doesn't plan for the busts with the boom is going to meet this fate.
- dev_dull 8y agoIs there precedent in the last crash? I wasn’t receiving recruiter emails from crypto companies before the 20k crash. I think the blast radius here is much bigger.
- Alex3917 8y ago> Many of the companies are suffering because they kept a portion of their funds in digital assets Lol that makes it sound like they had a choice. Because essentially none of the ICOs did KYC/AML, none of them were allowed to create bank accounts anywhere worldwide so they had to keep their money in ETH. That’s why they’re just starting to go bankrupt and will mostly all go bankrupt in 2019. If you think it’s a bear market now, the real crash hasn’t even started yet. If you want to see something typical, here is what Jez, the founder of FunFair, wrote one year ago on Reddit: "in the august company announcement we said we were holding more than a year's running cost in cash and thats still the case. our holdings are approx $6m in cash (dollars), and several million in bitcoin (which keeps going up in value!) and a lot more in eth. in short, we have capital of more than $30m, at current valuations. we're not going to starve in 2019, unless bitcoin and eth values plummet which seems unlikely. bitcoin is more than double the price of the time of our token sale in june."
- seibelj 8y agoMy previous company (AirFox) did an ico, we had a bank account, and we sold everything. We also did KYC/AML for all purchasers. Most of the USA firms did. However, the SEC also just settled with AirFox for selling unregistered securities, so that didn’t exactly go as planned!
- dopamean 8y agoIf the settlement was for less than you got from the ico it may have been worth it.
- thetricia 8y agoThe biggest takeaway for me is how important stability and deleveraging is. In the regular stock market such price action would more likely be thought of as crazy volatility rather than a bubble-crash situation. Before the sudden appreciation there was a lot of optimism at similar prices. If it never happened many of these companies wouldn't go bankrupt. Volatility killed them.
- gigatexal 8y agoThis is what efficient markets do according to theory: capital deployed in areas not as productive relative to another move to the more productive one. Wait or is that just crazy investors hoping to get into the next bubble? Either way good. All these alt-coin save-the-world businesses can go the way of the do-do, I still need tools to help make Ansible not suck and learning K8s and figuring out how to scale MySQL. I’d rather see money and talent go into making tools that are actually useful even more useful than creating self directed businesses etc.
- wpietri 8y agoIt's a very good point. A lot of smart people jumped into an area that if I'm feeling very generous I would call "unproven". And I'm all for startups trying new things, but we could have learned just as much about the possible utility of cryptocurrencies with 100x less resources. My main worry now is that some of the people will have been damaged by this. Some of the interest we can write off as irrational exuberance; hopefully some will have gotten their fingers usefully burned and will be more careful choosing what they work on next time. But a lot of the field was somewhere between chasing a bubble and outright scammy. It reminds me of people I've seen burned by MLM schemes. Some say, "never again!" But some really buy into the get-rich-quick thinking and will keep on making the same mistake in different forms. "This time it will be different!" But it never is.
- WilliamEdward 8y agoThis is the financial version of natural selection. I don't feel bad for people losing their money over something that had little purchasing power and was very obviously unstable.
- decentralised 8y ago>I would call "unproven". Why wouldn't you call it novel? It's only 10 year old technology at this stage.
- jakelazaroff 8y ago
- fouc 8y agoGosh.. This foreshadowing the upcoming recession.
- splatt 8y agoWhat are you seeing that indicates an upcoming recession? Economic data looks solid currently.
- Aeroi 8y agoInversion of US treasury yield curve, 52 week lows in the tech sector, dissolve of NAFTA, trade wars with Asia. Excess money poured into failed tech. Oil+Gas at years low with excess supply. The death of Coal. Big banks in decline.
- quadcore 8y agoWhile bitcoin can crash, like a cockroach it can hardly die. So if the tech is better than visa, it should prevail eventually.
- leaveyou 8y agoDoes this mean that the price of video cards will fall ? or RAM ? I had to buy a video card 2-3 months ago and the prices were so high with the only explanation being "the coin miners".
- philjohn 8y agoGPU prices have been at pre mining craze levels for a while now
- belltaco 8y agoYes, but the price/performance ratio hasn't improved at higher mid-end and above in a long time. The graphics card I bought two years for $350 is at the same price and is still being manufactured. That hasn't traditionally been the case. The faster newer cards are just more expensive instead of replacing last gen.
- mjrpes 8y agoThat's partly because AMD is not able to compete at the high end, allowing Nvidia to set high prices. If you check out the rumors on the AMD Reddit regarding Navi GPU in 2019, there's a chance we'll be able to purchase a mid-high end card for $300 again.
- Armisael16 8y agoThat has more to do with nvidia betting long-term on RTX for ray tracing and neural networks. The cores aren’t particularly useful for traditional graphics work, so the pricing model gets kinda weird.
- RL_Quine 8y agoThey've been low for months, with nvidia sitting on a huge amount of unsold inventory. https://www.techspot.com/news/77566-nvidia-share-price-plummets-wake-cryptocurrency-crash.html https://www.techspot.com/news/77566-nvidia-share-price-plumm...
- gizmo 8y agoGood riddance. Hopefully this will serve as a reality check for regular people who are tempted by the siren song of quick riches. Crypto never provided any real economic value, so this was bound to happen sooner or later. With a bit of luck crypto will stay dead this time. Fingers crossed.
- leumas 8y agoI do agree that most have been trying to solve the wrong problems with blockchains, but to write off the technology in it's entirety seems rather ridiculous... Is immutability not a powerful programming concept? Is it not valuable to be able to prove that a piece of data is exactly how it was years ago? Or to be able to prove that a given signature was created before the corresponding private key was lost/compromised?
- PeterisP 8y agoThis doesn't need cryptocurrencies, a centralized public ledger applying hashes/signatures with something like a Merkle tree can do the same while avoiding the necessity to constantly burn proof-of-work proportional to how valuable your data integrity is.
- nickpsecurity 8y agoWhat you're describing are immutable, crypto-protected logs. They go way back before blockchains without blockchains problems. One was a big business: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5nzx4/what-was-the-first-blockchain https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5nzx4/what-was-t... I mentioned some random examples below showing that people stayed exploring and pushing the useful concepts again without all the bad stuff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776837
- spookthesunset 8y ago> Is it not valuable to be able to prove that a piece of data is exactly how it was years ago? Or to be able to prove that a given signature was created before the corresponding private key was lost/compromised? Use Git. It doesn't even require a small nation's worth of electricity to operate and it probably even has a substantially higher transaction throughput!
- sheeshkebab 8y agoBitcoin largely was born as a response to financial crisis that nearly wiped out worldwide financial system 10 years ago. With the leveraging currently going on, albeit at government level, i wonder how long it will be before next financial mess happens that would resurrect these deflationary, government currency decoupled instruments.
- tedajax 8y ago> Bitcoin largely was born as a response to financial crisis that nearly wiped out worldwide financial system 10 years ago. I'm by no means an expert here but this seems... very not true.
- sheeshkebab 8y agoit's pretty much written in plain language as possible in all the bitcoin explainers, docs, and bitcoin's source code - https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/04/02/the-history-of-bitcoin.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/04/02/the-history-of-bit... https://www.bitcoin.com/guides/bitcoin-white-paper-beginner-guide https://www.bitcoin.com/guides/bitcoin-white-paper-beginner-... https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/code/133/tree/trunk/main.cpp#l1613 https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/code/133/tree/trunk/main.c...
- haakon 8y agoIt's not, it's just a popular and appealing narrative. Bitcoin was in development for at least a few years before the financial crisis, but its developer's own admission.
- decentralised 8y agoBitcoin was the culmination of the engineering work done by Chaum, Wei Dai, Szabo, Finney and a few others but it's launch was marked by the economic crisis and many of its earlier adopters are people who believe that separating money and state will have the same net positive effects that separating state and church had some centuries ago.
- golergka 8y agoPlay stupid games, win stupid prizes.
- decentralised 8y agoI was watching something on youtube recently that brought back memories of the early days of the internet and the campaign to discredit it (it will bring smut directly into your home... it will be all over in 5 years..) and now I see HN users glee with the failure of fellow engineers and entrepreneurs and the same campaign (it's a scam, it will bring drugs directly into your home...). The bear market has been brutal and some very good teams were caught off guard because they lack to experience and know-how to balance a treasury or keep a startup alive. Many of us here are also equally unqualified to succeed though. In the aftermath of the 99 crash, Amazon shares were trading for a few dollars and so were many other companies that today are huge monopolies. I believe that many of the blockchain native companies that survive this crash likely have the same growth.
- Retric 8y agoBeanie Babies and housing both saw significant bubbles. But housing and the stock market have mechanics that push recovery. Crypto however is closer to the Beanie Babies model where it might come back, but people will continue to hype it either way.
- decentralised 8y agoI'm going to take the time to respond to you because you were the first reply to my comment. Beanie Babies are collectibles, cryptocurrencies are money. Both have had bubbles but only one of them is tied to a brand name and there have been plenty of great new collectibles that have taken its place since. Cryptocurrencies on the other hand are a new solution to a new problem (digital native representation of value) and even if the current offer isn't perfect their development hasn't stoped or even slowed down in any considerable way and there's no reason to believe we won't continue to grow and make better products and solutions. Money isn't going away anytime soon.
- lkrubner 8y ago"Beanie Babies are collectibles, cryptocurrencies are money." It's been established over and over again that cryptocurrencies are not money. They are a collectible like Beanie Babies. Cryptocurrencies vary too much in value to be used as money. Would you go into a Starbucks and spend $4 USD dollars to buy a coffee, if there was a chance that the $4 might gain 10,000% in value over the next year? Of course not. There have been dozens of good articles over the last two years comparing money to cryptocurrencies and detailing all of the differences. If you still don't understand the differences, at the end of 2018, then you are keeping yourself willfully misinformed, and I suspect no comment on Hacker News will be able to change your mind.
- orbifold 8y agoGiven that the biggest threat humanity faces is climate change, support for crypto currencies in their current form is morally corrupt. Also I don’t see a reason why I should buy into some scheme that disproportionately benefits early adopters. I’m already forced to participate in one tilted economic playing field, why expose myself to another one.
- gammateam 8y agoThe majority of cryptocurrency mining by hash rate is done using renewable energy.
- IAmEveryone 8y agoYeah. Because previously, China built all these hydro dams in the wilderness, unconnected to the grid?
- gammateam 8y agoThe connection to the grid doesnt make it a nonrenewable or an increased environmentally unsound proposition? The additional energy draw is using renewable sources for most of the mining hashrate
- drb91 8y agoI don’t see how it’s any better to put your money in the bank and have no control over how it’s invested—guns, tobacco, drugs, etc.
- decentralised 8y agoI bet you feel the same way about minerals whose extraction process is vastly more damaging to the environment. Early adopters benefit because they incur more risk than later adopters.
- coderzach 8y agoThe problem is that if the state were to provide secure public-private key cryptographic identity, there would be absolutely no need for PoW or PoS. Eventually we'll figure that out, and all of this work will haven been useless.
- Sargos 8y agoI think everyone can agree that cryptocurrency got way ahead of itself but HN almost seems Luddite in it's treatment of the underlying technology to the point that we are going to have our own "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." moment that people will link to for years to come. The underlying technology is actually pretty worthwhile. Ethereum is providing a base layer protocol for apps that never go down, never fail, and are fully trusted. That's something that future generations will take for granted but HN is largely ignoring right now. Even Google goes down (sometimes once or twice a month). Take a moment to imagine a few of the things you could do better if you had 100% reliable hosting that was safe and private. And basically free. (Either the user pays a penny or two when using your app or you pay a penny or two for each user). You wouldn't look at the internet in the early 90s and say it was useless because all it does is carry short messages on Usenet which take a while to appear. The tech was being improved. Those short pieces of messages evolved into images and then later video and now we have the internet of today. This isn't going to happen overnight but it's going to happen faster than the improvement of the internet since Ethereum is just software and no hardware needs to be rolled out. Go ahead and ignore it right now. It's still building time. But don't assume it's useless or beanie babies. In a few years the layer 1 protocols will be good enough for something useful and I would bet that we see something truly unique come out of the blockchain space that we never before knew we needed.
- tialaramex 8y agoMore succinctly than most of the replies: They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- Carl Sagan
- mamon 8y agoOfftopic, but people actually had a good reason to laugh at Columbus: he made a simple error in his calculations that lead him to believe Earth is much smaller that it really is. Most of the nobles he asked for money were actually better educated than him, so the error was obvious to them. And since noone could know about America's existence it was reasonable to assume that Columbus will simply run out of supplies and starve to death in the middle of the ocean. Which almost happened, they've found the land at the very last moment.
- ackfoo 8y agoAssholes and idiots, as usual, fuelled the crypto craze. They ruined a reasonable, although flawed, means of exchange with their greed and stupidity. There’s no value in a currency that is unstable either up or down because it’s not possible for those who wish to use it for its intended purpose to keep track of the fluctuations. Plus, it was another way for monsters to destroy the planet, as if we needed another one of those. When will you self-centred fucks understand that your personal profit does not justify destroying the planet?
- crazyfundu 8y agoBut Fiat currencies also inflate/deflate. Just that that rate is slower comparatively that's why it is reasonable to rely on them in short span of time. In long run if you aren't accounting for inflation/deflation then you are on losing end. For example, how often we hear that $10000 for that period..buy much more in today's world. PS: I am not trying to argue but putting across a counter point. I am not an expert niether in crypto or in economics.
- joejerryronnie 8y ago>When will you self-centred fucks understand that your personal profit does not justify destroying the planet? When the singularity occurs and all human consciousness merges into a single, altruistic meta-being?
- ceriodamus 8y agoI remember friends and collegues who were all crazed when the bubble started. They were buying, spamming on facebook about how cryptocurrency was the way to go and how they have a high R.O.I etc. But I knew and just like physics, all increasing bubbles eventually burst. Afterwards it was the bankers fault. All various conspiracy theories etc...
- rs86 8y agoThere is the theory that the bear market is just the FED trying to buy all Bitcoin at low price.
- test1999 8y agoCrypto+AI is how we switch from a world of finance and law, as Peter Thiel puts it, and towards an age of science and technology. As technologists you should be supportive of this disruption. I'm not saying buy(unless you want to), but stop being crabs laughing at people, a subset of which WILL kill themselves over this.
- kayhi 8y ago"I am sure if that happened a year ago, that wouldn’t be a problem at all, a year ago there was a lot of free money in the market. But in a bear market there’s a change." Ends up it's hard to run a business when you no longer have 'free money'.
- api 8y agoI keep asking for one cryptocurrency based application or service with a lot of users that is not directly related to cryptocurrency itself and that is not illegal. I keep getting nil. I keep searching independently and getting nil. The closest I've found is the Sia storage network but it's hard to set up and not competitive with cloud storage. If I want privacy I can just encrypt locally before using S3, Backblaze, etc. If I want redundancy I can use two cloud storage services in parallel.
- Passthepeas 8y agoSia is actually, at least in theory, cheaper. Long term Sia or something like it will dominate cloud storage. Right now though, it is not big enough for large enterprise investors, nor user-friendly enough for small scale/individual use.
- KasianFranks 8y agoBest time to build a crypto company. It almost seems like too many people in the HN filter forgot about how closely this resembles the dotcom boom and bust.
- bdcravens 8y agoOf course. In 2002 you'd probably be laughed at. You also could no longer just stick "e" at the front of your company name, or ".com" at the end, and get instant riches. (Just like "blockchain" today) It'll require a different class of entrepreneur, one who is patient, has a longer vision, and is willing to build boring companies. (Look at the companies that survived the dotcom bust)
- KasianFranks 8y agoPrecisely.
- wyck 8y agoLet's all wait and see what Craig Wright is building with SPV ;)
- randaouser 8y agoThe best use case for Blockchain is for internet money. Many seem to forget that a majority of the world has limited access to banking resources. Platforms like Ethereum will allow for marketplaces that cannot be manipulated by the ones operating them, though, it will always be subject to manipulation by the actors on the network.
- ykevinator 8y agoI think crypto is like VR. It's a great idea built by smart people but it's a solution looking for a problem. It never got the mass adoption that justified it's early price jumps. I genuinely hope some day someone needs it but for now I don't think venmo and dumb contracts are expensive enough or risky enough to incentivize the masses to adopt.
- ryuuseijin 8y agoWhat's interesting is that even though the value of for example Ethereum is going down, the usage statistics seem to be much healthier, specifically transaction volume [1] and address growth [2]. [0] https://etherscan.io/charts https://etherscan.io/charts [1] https://etherscan.io/chart/tx https://etherscan.io/chart/tx [2] https://etherscan.io/chart/address https://etherscan.io/chart/address
- gammateam 8y agoNot more dubious than traditionally funded tech ventures we've all worked at till our 1 year cliff. Just more liquid! So therefore I'm not sure why an article that mentions 2 downsizing companies, and 2 discontinued companies, amongst 1,180, is treated as validation amongst the hackernews crowd. I think its really strange how separately this particular buzzword sector is treated here.
- askmike 8y agoI'm about to go live with my crypto startup[1] (it's a SaaS version of my open source app[2] on Github since 2013, with a market place and other premium features). I bootstrapped the whole thing, but the tech is 90% my open source app that already existed. My app relies on people being interested in trading. Right now there is a lot of volatility in the markets (which means people are watching them). But most people have gotten burned hard in the last few weeks, it's not looking great if the markets keep going down like this. [1]: https://gekkoplus.com https://gekkoplus.com [2]: https://gekko.wizb.it https://gekko.wizb.it
- danielor 8y agoHopefully, the capital will not end up wasted, and at least some of these companies can gather the resources that they have and create something of value. If not, we will look at this speculative craze as a remarkable waste of resources.
- strayamaaate 8y agoGood. 99% of it was utter bullshit and any worthwhile research was getting drowned out. Regardless of whether or not blockchian and cryptocurrencies end up being pivotal technologies in future, one positive fallout is that we are asking "how can we do this better" of some very traditional and established industries.
- ThomPete 8y agoIn other words, lots of great tech available at a very good price. If anyone know of a company with a good crypto trading platform who are looking to sell don't hesitate sending them my way. This was just the crypto version of the dotcom bubble. The webvans and pet.com mistakes needs to be done. Next generation crypto startups will bring more value because the infrastructure is going to be much further. Give it a couple of years and we will start seeing companies build on top of blockchain rather than building blockchain companies.
- jjtheblunt 8y agoGreat tech?
- ThomPete 8y agoThere are definitely companies who have been working on some great tech either in the security token space or in the exchange space and I would love to be able to acquire some of that. Some of the types of industries we believe are going to be is anything in "digitally created" i.e. things that are born digital and thus can be born on the blockchain (think game assets, images, text, art, code) and then infrastructure technologies such as security tokens which can be used to validate inter-businesses data relationships. But the infrastructure is still being built.
- pl0x 8y agoI used to work at ConsenSys which recently laid off 13% of their workforce and I can tell you first hand they are a mess internally with senior leadership burning through cash. The company has zero management and favorites are left to do what ever they want. No wonder there is a crash, it was all one big ponzi scheme.
- latchkey 8y agoComments like this are interesting to me. I can see from your comment history here that you are pretty negative in what you have to say. I can see that you're also on a HB1 and a self taught engineer without a lot of experience. My advice to you is to take a step back and reflect on why you were let go. Regardless of the internal structure of Consensys, I don't think that blaming it on them or the big ponzi scheme of crypto is the answer. Reductions happen all the time across many different industries. Especially in technology. If anything, Consensys is doing the responsible thing and 'trimming the fat' when times get lean. Remember, there is still >1000 people that were not affected by the reduction. Look inwards before blaming outwards.
- pl0x 8y agoYou can look inwards as much as you would like but isn't it impossible to not see this entire industry as a ponzi scheme?
- latchkey 8y agoSorry, I do not see the entire cryptocurrency industry as a ponzi scheme. That said, I've been in it for a long time, for other reasons that have affected me personally [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgI0liAee4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgI0liAee4s
- turtlecloud 8y agoThe problem is that most of the software engineers here don’t have a strong liberal education in the classics to understand the societal implications of a decentralized money supply. Bitcoin is not meant to be used by the people in p2p exchanges. It is meant for large institutions. If country A wants to send country B, 5 billion, are they going to just wire it to them??? No that’s very difficult to do and Bitcoin solves that problem. Historically kings were the ones that controlled the money supply, but now that has fundamentally changed.
- p0nce 8y agoAnd nothing of value was lost.
- vongesell 8y agoI have the feeling this thread will be interesting to read in 20 years. Not in the same we read Krugman's 1998 [paraphrase] "the internet is dumb" statement but instead from a post-truth post-hypernormalization world were capital and code are closely entwined. You can already partially see in this thread a technical community that would like to, but can not quite, separate their personal bottom line from some pseudo-scientific idea of right/wrong. I would guess 20 years from now that falsehood will have faded and this thread will look interestingly passé. 1. web.archive.org/web/19980610100009/www.redherring.com/mag/issue55/economics.html