Leading negative economic indicator: when the articles and threads on HN and 4chan's /biz/ start looking identical.
Why not head over to 4chan's biz subboard to really get into this topic? The day trading, drop shipping and get rich quick schemes of yesteryear have made way for almost all threads being get rich quick on cryptocoin.
Kids, if you want to understand the 1999 dot com bubble in a modern context, read all the VC blog posts, quotes from interviews etc. about cryptocoins. Then realize they will all be worthless as 1999 e-currencies like Flooz and Beenz are now. VC's puffing up unicorns a little is one thing, this is a pure unbridled scam.
And you're missing the boat because it only goes up up up, right?
Bitcoin at least is original and has the digital gold aspect going for it. But all these new ICO tokens are complete copycats with just updated branding.
You just need a whitepaper. And a whole lot of blockchain "experts". Because what makes a biz work is not the soundness of its ideas but the fact that it has its own coin.
I highly doubt that most of the investors in ICOs are all that interested in the core business. They're interested in an arbitrary security loosely linked to the core business appreciating that is referred to as a token because calling it an asset/security would require more regulation.
I mean, you realize that penny stocks are much the same. People don't care much about the validity of the underlying business. They want to make money. Often the penny stock (or alt coin) has solid enough technical fundamentals , to merit an investment. Don't tell us it's risky, we fucking know. Don't tell us we're dumb for investing in something we know nothing about -- we know we are gambling and likely going to lose. There are too many millionaires be minted in this crypto world to be too dismissive of it.
Apparently, they promise to build part of your ICO for you in exchange for a 50BTC upfront fee (link at top right - 'Apply for FREE ICO').
Alternatively you can get their service without an upfront payment (hence 'FREE ICO'), by instead reserving 250 BTC worth of your ICO's tokens for holders of ICOS tokens. The latter can burn each ICOS token for 0.04 BTC worth of your token, which works out to a 75% discount on your presale price assuming that the ICOS tokens were bought during the ICOS ICO (for 0.01 BTC each).
The catch is, that since there's only 250 BTC reserved of each token, while there are, at least initially
4 * BTC_raised_in_ICOS_ICO
in outstanding rights to discounted tokens, buyers will only ever get a tiny discounted allocation.
You're currently looking at needing to participate in 100 ICOs until you've converted all your ICOS tokens. As there is no cap how much ICOS can raise, so this could get much higher.
Also, when the 250 BTC are oversubscribed, allocation is pro rata, based on how much ICOS you would be willing to convert. So lets say you've done due diligence and determined something will go up, now you're locking up your funds in ICOS and only a tiny fraction will buy the thing you want. It might make more sense to just sell your ICOS on an exchange and use the proceeds to buy the ICO normally.
The other catch is that the SEC might ban all this business before you find 100 ICOS-incubated ICOs to invest in. Nevermind that i haven't seen a reason why ICOS itself would ever acquire any clients. But they do have 10M$ in cash now.
this is great. I have similair idea to educate the public on crypto creation but I want to dumb it down even more. I wrote a how to understand crypto in 5 mins site live at https://higher.team that has the goal to explain it in 5 mins. But then walk through non-programmers how to make a very simple currency with signing the messages using an ez to break just write the string backwards or something simple like that.
Overall, this looks great, but I would consider changing the following:
> if you are smart* you will get it.
> *not everyone is smart
You've just insulted the intelligence of anyone who doesn't manage to understand your explanation. I don't think it's fair to assume a lack of understanding will always be because of a lack of intelligence.
This is amazing. In terms of the ICOs that people on HN talk about. Is that a company creating a coin and then selling the first coin offering to create capital?
yeah I got the idea after watching the Bernie Madoff movie and thinking, there is going to be a Madoff level ICO scandal at some point for sure. Only way to help is teach non programmers how blockchain works.
They will never be able to learn enough to not make a mistake. Instead they will learn barely just enough to think they understand, which is significantly more dangerous than not knowing at all.
I say this as an experienced programmer who has been learning this technology for a few months, and still don't fully understand the depth and the implications of the technology yet. This thing is really deep, trying to inform the general public how this thing works is as difficult as trying to teach the general public what they teach in medical school hoping they will be able to heal themselves when they're hurt.
The one valuable thing I've learned so far is that it's dangerous thinking that you understand how the entire ecosystem works just because you understand how each block in a blockchain is verified.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15073724