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Comment by RichardHeart | Hacker News Reader

Please stop pumping little mini Ponzi ICO's. Please stop shoving new tokens to get rich under the guise of "anti-spam." Please stop trying to get rich on tokens. Storj and it's stupid token preceded this stupid token.

Blockchains are useful for an extremely limited set of circumstances. They enhance trust at extreme throughput and expense. If you can solve trust almost any other way, its better. disclaimer, I'm long as fuck bitcoin, however I know that it's still risky, and has a rather unaddressed lists of vulnerabilities in it's wiki, and has very limited use cases beyond emergent ponzi value.

That being said, creating a digital scarcity to act as functional proxy for human productivity, thus money, is hampered by every new shitcoin. Digital scarcity can be ruined for a couple decades, and every new shitcoin enhances that negative outcome. Utility before pump and dump please.

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Here's some pricing. Storj is used here for "filecoin" appears to not yet have a price.

  +-------------------------------+------------+------+
  | Provider                      | $/GB/Month | $/GB |
  +-------------------------------+------------+------+
  | Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage    | 0.5¢       | 2¢   |
  +-------------------------------+------------+------+
  | Amazon S3 Storage             | 2.1¢       | 5¢   |
  +-------------------------------+------------+------+
  | Microsoft Azure Cloud Storage | 2.2¢       | 5¢   |
  +-------------------------------+------------+------+
  | Google Cloud Storage          | 2.6¢       | 8¢   |
  +-------------------------------+------------+------+
  | Storj                         | 1.5¢       | 5¢   |
  +-------------------------------+------------+------+

I guess some years ago you were calling Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme. HN has always been hard to change minds on this.

HN really needs to start cracking down on the coin pumping, out right ponzis have no place here.

100% agreed

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> creating a digital scarcity to act as functional proxy for human productivity, thus money, is hampered by every new shitcoin

This seems contradictory to me. Anyone can create a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. If people exercising that ability hurts scarcity, is there really any scarcity in the first place?

It sounds like you want to simulate scarcity through a gentleman's agreement, but it's not clear why the the creators of these "shitcoins" would cooperate.

All currencies are an agreed upon abstraction of estimated future value. Some are less gentlemanly than others (inflation gives more value to the people that receive the money first in the money multiplier cycle.) Inflating digital scarcity by creating endless new liquidity pools which are not fungible with the largest liquidity pool reduces consensus, liquidity, and cooperation. The trade is in the hopes that the other projects create something useful and good beyond their liquidity/currency value. So far, they've caused more harm than good. You can fork technolgy and lower margins to 0, you can't fork network effect/adoption which is why VC's care so very much for network effect in their investments. It's one of the few ways to beat a billion dollars out of a capitalist society built to reduce margins and pricing power over time.

Thus, it's amazing that digital scarcity is working at all, it was tried and failed before with Chaumian cash, this one is working, but it could driven to failure be endless fragmentation, or at least slowed greatly. Speaking a common language is great. Fungibility is great.

If you are building awesome tech, do it, you don't need a "new" token to side step fundraising regulations. This idea that you can avoid securities law by offering securities but calling them "coins" is pretty silly.

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