Separating bad actors and their crypto from good actors and their crypto is where were headed next. Lessons in due diligence apply to crypto just as with any other investment vehicle but it seems many have missed this. The crypto space is being refined, which is a good thing.
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Yes, I am confident that there are as many good actors in cryptocurrencies as there are in any other multi-level marketing scheme.
Many of them are MLMs but I'm referring to the ones that are not, the ones that actually using the crypto capital for true innovation.
Name 1 that has used that capital to achieve over 10$ million in profit per year.
It's early days. Think Netscape.
It's not so early. People have been developing apps on top of Bitcoin Blockchain for years now. Ethereum has been almost 2 and half years ago. I am not expecting any unicorns like Google/Facebook but at least couple of dapps with actual customers (e.g. not couple hundred crypto fanatics that sign up to every dapp just to pump the price) that are growing revenue and customer base and seem like a legitimate business.
I've been following crypto space for a long time but can't think of any blockchain app like that. Only money making companies are exchanges which make money from fees because of the mania and all the people trying to flip tokens to make big bucks and quickly sell to other noobs, but exchanges are old fashioned companies with centralised databases and Java/.NET codebase, they are not actual dapps.
Think back to when people had been building websites for 2 years on the internet.
It's still early days. 2 years feels like a long time, but it's not that long.
I was there, it was great. Suddenly I could access tons of information, save hundreds of dollars by sending emails instead of long distance calling, look up airline schedules, download lists of jokes, find local singles looking to mingle, browse mail order catalogs, read recipes, or order books from a small Seattle company with a huge selection.
The personal real-world benefits of the www were real and obvious and constantly improving. What has the blockchain actually done for people on a daily basis?
The WWW was developed 1989, first software (browser) in 1990, first websites went live in 1991, Mosaic came out in 1993, and things really exploded from 1994 on, with Amazon, Spiegel Online (German weekly newspaper), Pizza Hut, The Economist, etc. all going online.
Dotcom bubble was 1997 to 2001.
Bitcoin white paper came out in 2008, first software release in 2009. With comparable development, we'd have expected an explosion of usage and applications from 2013 already (that didn't happen), and a bubble about 2016 to 2020 (that arguably did happen).
At any rate, the WWW was super useful (and was being extensively used) pre- and during the bubble. You cannot say the same about cryptocurrencies.
(And by the way, during the dotcom bubble there were several companies, such as Flooz and Beenz, offering digital currencies. They're all defunct now. If only they had been decentralised on the blockchain...)
cryptokitties or whatever is called? :)
Name one use case for cryptocurrencies where they work better than existing technologies and that does not involve buying illegal stuff online.
Seriously, I must be writing a comment like this one at least two times a week lately on HN. I keep hearing "blockchain technology is here to stay, think of the possibilities!" and I say that it's already showing its limitations and people are scrambling to find real world use cases for them. See the Diamond Coin story the other day, or that Kodak Coin thing. When you look closely you realize that the technical side of things doesn't really hold up or could be achieved using good old non-buzzword technologies.
Cryptocurrencies are amazing if you want to create a ponzi scheme or buy drugs online. For everything else there's Mastercard.
Honestly the best use case is actually for the very financial services industry that the crypto community thinks they are supplanting. Distributed ledger with trusted confirmations + quicker and cheaper wires is actually pretty big. It's a rock solid use case that a couple of big banks have openly said they are working on. Of course, it's almost certain that any currency they move will probably end up pegged to a fiat, so that idea doesn't give people the warm and fuzzies, to say the least.
How the blockchain solution is better than SWIFT?
How about five?
* private transactions: your identity need not be associated with donating to wikileaks or buying a sex toy
* irreversible: no chargebacks or transaction reversals
* unseizable: protection against civil forfeiture, IRS account seizures for "structuring", etc
* remittance: send any amount of funds anywhere in the world with minimum fees with no 3rd party ever having access to funds
* exit from corrupt monetary policies: see Argentina, Venezuela
But apparently these don't apply to you personally so it may be best to continue swiping your Mastercard™.
Paranoid much?
In a world where someone will steal your account if you so much as look the other way, this is a good thing?
Because paying taxes is for chumps.
Tell us more about those fees... You want your transaction to happen when?
Replace corrupt monetary policy with corrupt money. Flawless.
Note that these applications are strictly about actual currency. This is not a counterpoint, I'm just pointing it out because I hear many people saying that the blockchain has many uses outside of just cryptocurrencies but I have yet to hear a compelling case.
>private transactions: your identity need not be associated with donating to wikileaks or buying a sex toy
We have to define "private", currently my purchase history is not exactly public even though some trusted entities do have access to it.
In the same way I keep getting conflicting viewpoints about transactions on the blockchain. Are they public or not? I ask because every time I point out that cryptocurrencies are a dream come true for anybody who's trying to evade taxes, launder money or corrupt politicians I always have somebody telling me that it's not true because with enough effort you can track money on the public blockchain. So which one is it?
>irreversible: no chargebacks or transaction reversals
As a consumer this is an obvious negative. As a seller it might also be because people will be more afraid to send money to somebody without reputation. So good for Amazon but bad for the little guy selling home made socks on ebay.
>unseizable: protection against civil forfeiture, IRS account seizures for "structuring", etc
Ah yeah, the "my government has issues so the obvious solution is to get rid of it" line of thought. Maybe you should work on fixing these weird idiosyncrasies instead of trying to find a way around them, because maybe you're being honest but I can assure you that there's a long line of thugs behind you waiting to use your "protection" scheme to evade taxes and regulations. You can't have a working government if you make taxes "opt-out".
>remittance: send any amount of funds anywhere in the world with minimum fees with no 3rd party ever having access to funds
That's only valid if you don't need any guarantees whatsoever (like a pure donation without counterparts or sending money to somebody you trust). If you try to buy something from an untrusted source you'll want a 3rd party to provide arbitration. No chargeback, remember?
As for the "minimum fees" we'll see about that when some cryptocurrency is actually used "at scale" to do this.
>exit from corrupt monetary policies: see Argentina, Venezuela
I can't offer any rebuttal to this but I wonder how much good it'd do. Rich people would be able to exfiltrate their money more easily to other countries and poor people will convert their 0peso into 0BTC. I'd be really curious to read a serious study about how things would've changed in Venezuela if they had switched to BTC before the crisis. I don't really believe in magic bullets, the failings of the Venezuelan economy are multiple and go way beyond a choice of currency.
I can't shake the feeling that if you put money out of the hands of the government you effectively give all the economy power to the rich people and it's effectively harming democracy. You seem to have a very USA-centric point of view (judging by your examples above) so I ask you: when you look at the state of the USA and its government, do you really think "damn, I really wish rich people had more power"?
Be fair. They're also useful for evading capital controls.
Yes, lets. From Crank it up article[1]: "In 1995, from Q1 to Q4, Netscape's revenue went from $5 million to $10 million to $20 million to $40 million."
Netscape was formed in April of 1994 so we are talking about 9 months after creation they had revenue of 5mil. First website was launched at the end of December 1990 so less than 4.5 years before. Blockchain is significantly older at this point.
And significantly more complex than a 1990's website having a a drastically different and unrefined business model connected to an actual trading vehicle. Try running a startup and let us know how long it takes for the average startup to start bringing in consequential revenue.
It's clear there's lots of unfounded disdain for crypto among certain software engineering camps as crypto is a combination of software engineering and financial engineering which is downright repulsive to certain purists.
If you step outside of this line of thinking and understand the power of a trading vehicle and it's ability to finance operations or fund research, that might shed some new light on things.
First, please do not pretend that you know me. I have neither a problem with financial engineering in principle (combined with software engineering or not) or cryptography as such and certainly would not describe myself as any sort of purist.
Not sure what running startups have to do with it (although have plenty of experience with them too), but comparing average startup with any ICO one is disingenuous. As far as I can tell there is little to show for so far if one ignores companies not aimed at cryptocurrencies ecosystem itself.
But more to the point, it has been 9 years since Bitcoin was released building on ideas that were even older. Tech is more complicated than building website mid-90s (although probably not as much as you seem to believe), but again is not that complicated to excuse lack of compelling products.
I am not saying those will not come, but "early days" is a piss-poor excuse.
I do, however, dislike your use of crypto as for an old fart like me this should be used for cryptography.
Kucoin (KCS)
> The crypto space is being refined, which is a good thing
Honest question, is this a parody account?
If only there was a token that could be used to verify reputation, stored on the blockchain...
According to your profile you are doing a new ICO so obviously you would defend them.
The author was more saying that this was going to be new way to fund startups, with coins that get speculatively gambled. So rather than crypto-coins being used as per the original dream of wonderful decentralised money with no payment fees and 'better than gold' store of wealth, in fact these coins are going to be the new way for companies to raise capital for taking their startup to the next level - so crypto-alt-coins are going to be replacing 'Kickstarter', 'YC' as well as the big VC companies as cited in the article.
So then the merit of a coin will be 'backed' by business fundamentals, i.e. is the business any good? So think of crypto-coins as shares, not this magic bean currency and everyone is a winner.