|
I posted the following onto reddit.com/r/bitcoin . They removed it and banned me. Unbelievable. They are like the North Korea media.
====================================
BCH, Ethereum and many coins came into existence because of Core/Blockstream.
Vitalik was looking at creating Ethereum on top of Bitcoin. The core developers were generally hostile to his idea, so they made a change to Bitcoin to reduce the allowed size of a particular part of a Bitcoin transaction to make it harder to do what Vitalik wanted to do. He saw the writing on the wall that he wasn't welcome and left. If Core/Blockstream did the right thing, Ethereum would be built on top of Bitcoin.
Satoshi believed that Bitcoin can scale and never had a block size limit. It was put in as a temporary measure. Miners and businesses asked for it to be increased. Core/Blockstream refused for 4 years. Out of frustration, miners created BCH.
Why won’t Core/Blockstream increase block size?
Investors gave $76 million to Blockstream. How will this be returned?
They have the Liquid sidechain product and are working on Lightning.
Liquid is used by exchanges to move bitcoins quickly, since bitcoins no longer move quickly on the blockchain. According to its website, its first release supports bitcoin only.
Lightning will provide fees to liquidity providers, i.e., exchanges. If exchanges make more money from Lightning, they can buy more Liquid.
How can the demand for Liquid and Lightning be increased? With small blocks, slow confirmations and high fees. (Blockstream’s Adam Back has said that users will be willing to pay $100 fees.)
Note that Lightning is a boon to many developers, not just Blockstream. Lightning is extremely complicated and convoluted, which will provide years of work for developers.
It is safe to assume that future releases of Liquid will support other coins. With small blocks, slow confirmations and high fees, Bitcoin-competing coins multiply and flourish. This makes exchanges multiply and flourish, which makes Liquid multiply and flourish.
If it wasn’t for Blockstream, there wouldn’t be so many altcoins and BTC’s market share would not have dropped from 95% to 60%. Everyone would still be in the same camp, singing kumbaya and BTC’s market cap would be $200B, not $120B.
|
|
|
|
You are both correct. /r/bitcoin is an echo chamber for core, /r/btc is an echo chamber for cash. Neither allow dissenting views. It is impossible to have a frank and open discussion on either side. That's why this forum is better IMO.
Xavofat says that r/btc does not have censorship. Do you disagree? I've read that Theymos controls both r/bitcoin and Bitcointalk. Is that true? Does Theymos ever try to censor comments here? |
|
|
|
Hey jlp, what do you think about Playkey ICO? It seems quite promising.
In regards to PlayKey, they seem to be much further along than most ICOs. They not only have a working product, but they had it for a few years and it looks impressive, though I didn’t try it. Their business is understandable. If they got 2.5M users in 2016, I do not understand why they need an ICO or another cryptocurrency. Why don’t they continue growing their customer base? If their market is truly as big as they say, then they should be able to make more money by growing their revenue instead of fund-raising through an ICO. Why don’t they show any revenue from the 2.5M users? Does this mean that they really don’t have 2.5M users, or that their free service does not provide enough value to warrant a fee? Their website says that the game industry is $109 billion. This is misleading. This would include games for infants and Zynga Poker. Their source ( https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/the-global-games-market-will-reach-108-9-billion-in-2017-with-mobile-taking-42/) shows that most of this is not relevant to PlayKey. I would assume that it is the $24.8 billion of “BOXED/DOWNLOADED PC GAMES” that is relevant, and NewZoo says that this is dropping. Their white paper claims that 1.5 billion people play PC games. If we assume that PC games are played mostly by males, then this means that close to half of all the males in the world play PC games. Is this believable? Most infants, middle-aged men and seniors do not play PC games. I would think that it’s mainly teenage males up to men in their 30’s that play these games. A significant part of the world do not have PCs. 4 billion people do not have internet access. Their video tells you to “invest” in their token. This means that they are pushing a security, which is illegal in most of the Western world unless you restrict your investors to accredited investors and comply with KYC (Know Your Client) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) requirements. Because the team is based in Russia, they are immune from European and North American laws because Russia does not have extradition agreements with them. Therefore, the team doesn’t need to worry about pesky European and North American laws. The team can say and claim anything they want. They can lie and worry much less than other teams about repercussions. If they defraud you, there is little that your lawyers or government can do to help you. An American law firm has filed a class action lawsuit against Tezos (based in Europe) to get money refunded to American investors. Your law firm won’t be able to do that against PlayKey. You won’t be able to do anything. The risk with any ICO that is selling a security is that if the regulators crack down on these, the token will crash. Teams that are in Russia may be immune from punishment from regulators, but you will still suffer if the token crashes. Their website says that they raised 16 039 ETH from 1048 backers so far. When I looked at their smart contract ( https://etherscan.io/address/0x26d08b9d227933a85e855656dc46ab889e183c88), it says that it received 2,404 Ethers, not 16,039 Ethers. Maybe they withdrew some Ethers from the smart contract, so I went through all 25 pages of the 1242 transactions and none of them were withdrawals. So, are they using a second smart contract, or are they lying about the amount of ETH raised so far in order to give you the impression that they are more popular than they really are? I would tend to think the latter. Since they are immune from European and North American securities laws, they will not get punished for fraud by them, so they can lie a lot more. I think many ICOs lie about the amount that they’ve raised. This makes me question the validity of PlayKey’s other numbers: 2 500 000 games 120 servers $7 000 000 raised from VCs and business angels It would seem intuitive that there should be a sizeable market for this business. The risks that you are taking are: - Will regulators ban the token in the future?
- Their numbers are not reliable.
- If they defraud you, you have no recourse.
|
|
|
|
Another type of ICO I was wondering about with regards to your view on it would be digital advertising ICOs like Papyrus for example. Considering social media and digital advertising are growing exponentially in this age, do you think Altcoins would have any potential to penetrate this space?
Papyrus is probably the 3rd or 4th project I’ve seen related to a new token being able to control advertising. They cite a lot of business problems, which seem legitimate. But I don’t see how they can solve them. Papyrus states the following as a Papyrus Advantage (solution to problem): Controlled advertising
Users are able to create precise policies to control what ads they see and what data they share with advertisers. How? The majority of advertising that you see is from Google, Youtube (which is Google), Facebook and Twitter. You can’t control the advertising that they show you. When you search on Google, it shows ads on top of the search results. How do you think Papyrus is going to let you control that? Are they going to hack into Google’s servers? When you watch Youtube, it shows commercials at the beginning of the video. How is Papyrus going to let you control Youtube? When Facebook shows ads in the right column, how are you going to stop them? Is Papyrus going to use a blockchain to stop these ads? How? The biggest source of revenue for Google is AdWords and Google is the biggest advertising middleman on the internet. Therefore, Google AdWords is the biggest form of advertising on the internet, and it runs on Google's sites. How is Papyrus going to interfere with this? For all of the other sites on the internet that have ads, most of them use Google AdSense. They put Google’s code into their website, select some parameters and let Google serve the ads into their websites. Then Google charges the advertiser every time a visitor clicks on that ad, and pays a percentage of that to the site owner. How is Papyrus going to interfere with this? Papyrus has all of these fancy diagrams, but no mention of Google Adwords or AdSense. The people who controls the advertising are the people who control the traffic. How will Papyrus convince these people to let them take over control? I didn’t read all of their information, so maybe I missed it. Maybe someone can explain to me how a blockchain is going to enable Papyrus take control. |
|
|
|
I just found out about Overstock: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2324406.0This project makes a lot of sense. They were the first major merchant to accept Bitcoin back in 2014, which the crypto community was very happy about. I still remember the announcement and we all hoped for more merchants to do the same. Now, they accept 40 altcoins as payment. So they have a lot of experience with cryptocurrencies. They're one of the most crypto friendly companies in existence. With this ICO, they're not going to do crazy things like put large files, 3D or VR data on the blockchain. They're going to put stock related data on the blockchain. If they've already bought a Wall Street firm that is approved by SEC to trade stocks, then one would assume that their tokens will be legal owners of the shares of the companies that they entitle you to. There are several ICOs that claim that their tokens will entitle you to ownership to real estate, USD, gold or other coins without giving detailed, convincing explanation of how the tokens will have legal ownership. They're going after a huge market and opportunity, much bigger than Ripple or most other markets that I can think of. This is the best ICO in a long time. However, we'll need to see if a retailer can transition into a stock exchange operator. The other drawback is the size of the ICO, which is expected to be $500 million. That's a very high price to pay and you can end up overpaying. It's possible that investors throw even more than $500 million at Overstock and increase the risk of losing money in the short term. Stockbet also makes a lot of sense. They won't be as big as Overstock, but their tokens will be more reasonably priced. |
|
|
|
Awesome advice! Definitely can empathize with all you wrote. Moreover, would add that transparency is vital; Team (LinkedIn, public Profile), Product (at least a smoke screen test), Whitepaper (well written, detailed, timeline, compensation, distribution, concept, people, etc), and online presence (Social media, blogs, etc). All helps with credibility (references never hurt either).  Feel free to give us some advice to make us as transparent at possible: http://www.telco.inCheers! Chris 's website is a textual, functionless website, but it is using 13-16% of my CPU. My fan is spinning on high speed, so I closed the browser tab. With 8 people on the team, plus 3 advisors, this should not be happening. I can understand if you're selling furniture or shoes. But if you're going to be in the technology space, you need to show that you can do technology. Sorry, but I wasn't able to read more of your site. |
|
|
|
much appreciated you for clearing it up.I truly dont see how individuals pick their speculations once in a while furthermore, its tragic when you see a shitty ico makes millions when genuine coins dont get enough consideration
Couldn't agree with you more. Tezos is a great example. There was nothing earth shattering about what they wanted to do: better governance and formal verification. They could've built it for less than $10 million, but investors threw $200 million at them. https://www.coindesk.com/tezos-founders-ico-controversy-will-blow/director of development at Digital Currency Group, and herself a Tezos backer, asked why the project ended up raising more than 20 times the $10 million the couple had initially envisioned seeking in September 2016. What's ironic is that Tezos' team cannot govern themselves: Early in the session, the Breitmans said that one of the reasons they started the project was to solve the governance challenges faced by bitcoin.
Later, during the discussion of their own governance problems, Kathleen smiled and told the audience:
"We appreciate the irony of the situation." Tezos was one of the most over-hyped and over-rated projects I've ever seen in my life. Investors got snookered and overpaid. If they gave that $200 million to 20 projects instead of one, we would have many more good products to use. |
|
|
|
Very informative thread and useful information for deciding in which ico to invest. I want to know what's OP opinion about PayPal based business model adaptation on blockchain like Monetha or Utrust? At first it looks like a great idea and proper model for a blockchain. What's your opinion?  ’s business is understandable, which is good. I think they’re in a country where we can extradite them or sue them if they screw us, which is good. Intuitively, one would think that there is big market need for Utrust. The question is whether they can execute. Bitpay has been doing Bitcoin payment processing for merchants for 4 or more years. One needs to find out why they haven’t expanded to process addition cryptocurrencies. Why haven’t they? Is it unprofitable to do so? Is there insufficient demand from merchants or shoppers? If they wanted to, would they be able to quickly do so? Bitpay has not exploded in growth. This means that there aren't enough people using Bitcoin to shop. If this is the case, how do you know it's worthwhile to add more cryptos and that processing more cryptos will grow this space? I like that they have a comparison chart with their competitors. However, how do we know that UTRUST’s will be able to survive by providing the lowest fees? If UTRUST supports multiple cryptocurrencies, which they should because this is their main differentiator from Bitpay, then why would shoppers use UTRUST’s token? The CEO does not have a LinkedIn profile. How do we know that he has a high school diploma or any work experience? With 16 people on the team (and 13 advisors), they should’ve built 8 prototypes by now. Most of these people are doing nothing. This reduces the confidence that they can out-execute Bitpay. It would be great if a company like Utrust succeeds. Maybe UTRUST can execute. I don’t know, as there isn’t enough information. |
|
|
|
Folks, www.balanc3.net a new accounting platform prove value with new accounting Tech, claims this would be good for investors. Would that work? In regards to balanc3.net, their homepage has a lot of verbose but says very little. What accounting is needed for the blockchain? It says that it will provide accounting services for token sales. Is there a need for this? I don’t know. They should explain why this is needed by token sales, but they don’t. Token sales usually involve having a smart contract receive ETH and sending tokens. The team only needs the total ETH received (one number) and then can put this in their Excel spreadsheet or other regular accounting software. What else do they need to do? If they need to do more, then balanc3 should explain why. It doesn’t look like they are hosting an ICO, are they? Maybe they’re running a business and will sell their accounting services to ICOs. I don’t know as it doesn’t say. This is one of most nebulous websites I’ve read. |
|
|
|
Bitcoin's blockchain is 100GB and is having scaling problems. Ethereum's blockchain is 200GB and is having scaling problems. Is ARToken going to put 3D or VR data on the blockchain? If so, isn't that going to be hundreds of Terabytes of data? How do they plan to scale this? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2243157Thank you for your question - the 3D, AR and VR content will be stored in another distributed network architecture but not a blockChain. Then what's the purpose of your blockchain? Why not use any existing blockchain or currency? |
|
|
|
Bitcoin's blockchain is 100GB and is having scaling problems. Ethereum's blockchain is 200GB and is having scaling problems. Is ARToken going to put 3D or VR data on the blockchain? If so, isn't that going to be hundreds of Terabytes of data? How do they plan to scale this? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2243157 |
|
|
|
Hey jlp, what do you think about Mobius Network? More importantly, what's your take on Mercury Protocol ICO, project in which Mark Cuban has invested as well?
In regards to Mobius, I read this part: The Mobius universal protocol APIs work across all blockchains and connect the internet world to the blockchain ecosystem so developers only have to learn and support one standard. I don’t know how they will be able to develop APIs for dozens or hundreds of blockchains. Even if they do, what will the API do? Enable developers to create an universal wallet that can send and receive coins to any blockchain? That would be VERY useful, but I don’t think they mentioned this. Shortly after reading this, their website was using up a lot of my CPU. My fan was going into overdrive, so I closed the browser tab. Does this happen to you? If they have coding skills, they should not have let this happen. |
|
|
|
Hey jlp, what do you think about Mobius Network? More importantly, what's your take on Mercury Protocol ICO, project in which Mark Cuban has invested as well?
If I have time, I’ll take a look at those. In the meantime, I'll comment on Mark Cuban. I think he’s completely overrated. He became rich because he sold his company, Broadcast.com, near the peak of the Dot Com bubble in 1999 to Yahoo for $5.7 billion, netting $1 billion for Cuban. But the company was TINY and LOSING MONEY. It was so worthless and burning so much money that Yahoo shut it down 3 years later. https://www.gurufocus.com/news/138012/mark-cuban-and-broadcastcom-the-multibillion-dollar-coup“When Broadcast.com was taken public it had fewer than $7 million in revenues, $28 million in equity, and an accumulated deficit of of nearly $10 million dollars in its brief history. In reality, the company had little or no chance of achieving profitability in the foreseeable future.” Here is a micro cap stock that you’ve probably never heard of: Castle Brands https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSEAMERICAN%3AROX&fstype=ii&ei=dejwWcmaGcaWjAG2sYiAAwIt does $77 million of revenue and has a market cap of $184 million. Broadcast had one eleventh the revenue. Essentially, Broadcast was a micro micro micro cap. But, it sold for 31 times more than Castle Brands. Yahoo overpaid by 341 times. Can you imagine paying $13,630,000 for a car that is worth $40,000? Fortune Magazine listed Broadcast.com as one of the 5 worst internet acquisitions of all time: http://fortune.com/2013/05/21/5-worst-internet-acquisitions-of-all-time/Yahoo executives, who were responsible for buying Broadcast.com, were canned. Essentially, Cuban owes most of his wealth to winning a lottery. I’m not saying that Cuban is a lousy businessman. He was a small businessman. You probably know businessmen or entrepreneurs who created bigger companies than Cuban did. Cuban never created any hugely successful operation like Google, Apple, Qualcomm, Foxconn, Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Oracle, eBay, PayPal, Facebook, Tesla, etc., etc., etc. Not even close. Yet the media treats him like he has more business acumen than the entrepreneurs or executives from many of those companies I listed. Cuban, the successful businessman and investor, is completely a creation of the media. It's hugely fake news. Therefore, ignore anything that Cuban says or does. In regards to Mercury Protocol, their homepage starts off with: Decentralized
Not owned or controlled by any one party
More Secure
All data is tamper resistant and secured by the blockchain
Trustless
Verify messages and transactions without a trusted third party Application So what? The above are standard in every blockchain. Are they trying to fool newbies into thinking that they are the first to come up with these? It also says: Application Agnostic
Generalized protocol for all communication types Their first use case includes “messaging” and “large file size”. Are they going to put this onto the blockchain? If so, then this shows their ignorance. If they’ve run Bitcoin’s full node or Ethereum’s full node, they would know that these are already getting bogged down, and these 2 blockchains store small numbers or snippets of code. If Mercury Protocol puts messaging onto a blockchain, it might work for a year or less, before their blockchain grows to 200 GB. Then they will be more bogged down than Bitcoin. But it gets worse. I thought they were going to have their own blockchain. No. They’re going to put their stuff on the Ethereum blockchain. This means that their application will be bogged down on day one, and everyone else’s application on Ethereum will get bogged down. For Ethereum's sake and the dozens of tokens on Ethereum, let's hope Mercury Protocol does not put its messaging on Ethereum. The Ethereum foundation should ban it. Mark Cuban was on television a couple of days ago, bragging about how he was a “technology guy”. He's definitely not a blockchain guy. He never was much of a technology guy. Their team has 15 members and 2 advisors. With that many people, they should’ve built 6 prototypes or products by now. This shows that they stacked their team with useless people, in order to impress you. Also, there are no LinkedIn profiles to verify that these people are real, or have any work experience. |
|
|
|
Corupt countries?  ? Then avoid the USA and Europe. Thats were all the high tech people live. You will find the higherest number of hackers per capita there. There are lots of ICOs from non USA and non European countries. If all the high tech people live in the USA and Europe, then what you're implying is that many ICOs are started by people who do not understand technology. I agree with that. |
|
|
|
Nice write up OP, i agree with most points. However, even if there are a few legitimate (and good) ICOs, i think we need to rethink the system as a whole and come up with better solutions to get these worthwhile projects off the ground... The company that solves this will be one of the most important groups in the crypto market.
Agreed. There are legitimate and good projects. But they're getting drowned out by two factors: - There are so many crap ICOs that investors probably give up searching for the good ones because they've lost patience or don't have the time.
- Investors are being distracted by ICOs with the most marketing. DomRaider comes to mind. This ICO is going after a tiny market. This market is so small that it is questionable that it can even support a small business. Yet DomRaider was running commercials everywhere, including on a Youtube video I was trying to watch. The uninformed viewer will think that DomRaider is onto something big, but the opposite is true.
If this problem isn't solved, then the following might happen in a few years when investors finally realize that they've lost a lot of money on crap ICOs: - The crypto space will get a bad reputation as being riddled with scammers and crap.
- With the bad reputation, legitimate and good projects will have a harder time raising money, which means fewer good products.
- ICOs will need to do much more work and spend more to prove that they are legitimate and not crap. Think of how much easier and cheaper it would be to build websites if you didn't have to worry about hackers.
- Governments and regulators are always looking for any excuse to label this space as riddled with money launderers, terrorists and drug dealers. They would love to get more excuses to clamp down on cryptocurrencies and ideally shut them down. Soon they'll have more justification. They can shut down ICOs by saying they're protecting investors. China has done this already. Many other governments will get around to it as well. Yes, investors will be protected, but the good ICOs will be shut down as well.
|
|
|
|
I agree that nowadays it's much more difficult to find really prospective ICO amoung the ton of low-quality projects and scams. But even if you find such project it doesn't mean that you'll get x2 and higher just after the listing on exchanges. I know that most of investors tries to sell there token asap, and only experienced can distinguish the potential of long term investment. But if you check the most successful ICOs, you'll see that most of them gave huge income for those who HODL.
“If you aren’t thinking about owning a stock for 10 years, don’t even think about owning it for 10 minutes.” -- Warren Buffett |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
