The Token Effect
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
And how are tokens on the Ethereum network capturing value in other networks? How is Filecoin better off with its own money versus people bidding for storage in Bitcoin, Monero, or Ethereum directly? And why should the value of Filecoin tokens spike up? How is having a speculative token beneficial for accurately pricing storage?
The liquidity aspects are just companies jumping around regulations. Nothing stops startups from listing all their shares on a website and letting anyone buy/sell/trade them. Well except for the legality aspect!
I say this as someone about to do a cryptocurrency fundraiser in the adult services space. Though we aren't issuing tokens, but shares - we take payment in cash or other cryptocoins. The main benefit is easily being able to crowdfund and return dividends while avoiding legal hurdles.
1 - Regulation. You can do ICOs and Token Sales legally. If your tokens are not securities, you can do ICOs open to everyone. If your tokens are considered securities, you can do so on Coinlist.
2 - Tokens natively track the value of the network. For these networks, its value is not tracked by company shares. Ethereum is a good example of this. Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit and all the value accrues to the token. You can also do a hybrid system or none. Depends on your specific use case.
3 - Funding. Internet Bug Bounty is a good example of this https://internetbugbounty.org/. If TCP/IP would have been able to capture a billionth of a cent for every request things it wouldn;t be needed. Maybe, our infrastructure would be really different today.
Cryptocurrencies haven't been able to do micropayments, this kind of system just isn't possible. Proponents will go on about payment channels such as lightning, but these have been 'just around the corner' for several years now and their effectiveness/practicality is highly debatable.
That's because it took the Bitcoin community several years to agree to activate SegWit, which is required for the lightning network to work. SegWit is finally locked in and will be activated on August 23.
In practice the model proposed for TCP/IP would not work because it's a decentralized crypto-currency.
In which case you're talking about consumables that have a high enough unit cost to "pay the price" of a single crypto txn.
Turns out we have this already! It's called bitcoin. Maybe you don't want to change your prices all the time so a new coin could be good on that end (letting markets manage the service cost). But that's just mental gymnastic, especially since ultimately everyone is pooling from fiat for a while (who's getting their salary in BTC or ETH?)
Also, plenty of companies in the space pay salaries in BTC and ETH. Check out BitWage for a provider.
This technology is deployed if you know where to look for it.
2. I'm not sure how you can say Filecoin's token is tracking the non-existent network. Even Ethereum is a bad example. All the Enterprise Ether announcements will use a private implementation of Ethereum. So how is that value accruing in ETH, other than people getting confused by misleading PR and thinking banks are actually going to be transacting on the public Ethereum chain so they should buy ETH?
3. What do you mean if "TCP/IP" would capture money for every request? Why not UTF-8 or ASCII capturing value for every character written? InternetBugBounty seems like a very bad example. Their examples of "The Internet" bugs are issues in Bash, TLS, and ImageMagick -- all very much not TCP/IP. That's like saying BTC's market cap should have prevented Ethereum's DAO bug.
Not trying to be mean, I just don't see how this makes any sense.
Tokens offer a different path to funding important infrastructure.
Right now, tokens clearly aren't doing a great job tracking underlying utility, so I won't make that claim. I do think that will improve as the space matures though.
Tokens offer a different path, mostly because you can buy and sell them so freely. It's link pink sheets on steroids.
Though there is something interesting there- protocols with funding sharing with others built atop to increase network effects.
Interestingly enough I had always considered the token concept similar to the corporate structure of a non-profit, that is there are: incorporators (the ico/smart contract authors); members that usually buy into the non profit (token holders); but there is otherwise no ownership of a nonprofit entity. Though I have never seen nonprofit membership artificially limited in the hopes of the membership rate increasing and for purposes of reselling the membership in secondary markets. It does begin to muddy the waters, but the framing of network value is a very interesting concept.
Filecoin is to be a purpose-built tool which will provide a distributed way to make the guarantees rather than paying a single provider or using an expensive and still trust-requiring escrow service.
Things like proof of storage, refunds with an extra payment for failing to prove storage and a completely distributed storage pricing model will be built in with Filecoin in a way that could only be done by a single provider using another cryptocurrency.
With Ethereum we have decentralized compute. With IPFS we get decentralized storage. Cryptographic keys give us self-sovereign identity. Build tools like Truffle make it easy to get started (think create-react-app for Ethereum). And libraries like Zepplin are helping standardize secure patterns.
And, to top it off, using web3.js we can write UIs _in the browser_ using JavaScript and the libraries we're already familiar with (Angular, React, Vue).
By the way, [shameless plug], if you're a web developer and you're looking to get started programming cryptocurrency and distributed apps, I have some introductory tutorials here => https://newline.co/
If you use a catchall, create an address for that service. It it does something you don't like, cancel later.
You don't know what email address I'm giving you; I generate single-use emails for just about everything I sign up for, so when I start getting spam for it - like I actually did about 20 minutes ago - I can go straight to the source and start asking whether they got hacked, or sold me out.
So is not trusting the Federal Wallet Inspector on the subway.
So why give a 20 lines explanation of what you provide instead of correcting the error. This could have been done more cleaner: Have all the free courses available on-site. Have the purchase page available on-site too and from the free courses. Clean. Simple. No BS.
You know, if I was invested in eg IPFS I would post night and day in all forums subtle not too obvious hints how great IPFS is (pump) and then I would dump them.
Or to be clear, any discussion about crypto might be motivated by financial incentives which makes a meaningful technical discussion quite hard.
Let's start with @jashmenn, are you invested in Ethereum and IPFS?
Edit: downvoters please explain why
I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that you would suggest any ICO investor might let their financial position influence the way they talk about cryptocurrencies. These people are visionary investors who selflessly pour their resources into ICOs, not mere speculators looking to make a quick buck on a greater fool. /s
You make a really good point. I'm genuinely excited about blockchains and cryptocurrencies, but it's so hard to find writing about it that isn't thinly veiled asset pumping.
Credibility is much more apparent than you may think on sites like HN/Reddit. Shameless self-promotion without any substance won't get you far.
Fortunately software doesn't live or die on name recognition via random posts on social media but on whether people actually find it useful.
If this was someone's plan to make money on their investments they are wasting their time. Unless, maybe, they are a minor celebrity with a lot of reach.
Disclaimers on whether you own some tokens in a company is of marginal interest to me (authoring news stories is another matter), I'll judge the value of it by the proposition being made. Otherwise I'm pretty sure anyone who's been on the internet for a long enough time knows better than to take any recommendation at face value from comment threads. And being an investor is a sign of confidence, it doesn't automatically mean you are deluded by the idea or are only motivated in pumping it up for a cheap profit.
Either way if someone's plan is to engage in pump and dump schemes they'll always be at a high risk of being in a race to the bottom trying to exit before everyone else with the same half-baked idea of getting rich quick. It's not as clever as you make it out to be. There is always a far higher probability that they were the actual 'bigger fool' in any scheme than they people they hoped to recruit.
Then why is the comment at the top of this thread, which says nothing of substance (for the HN crowd at least), the top voted comment so far?
No? That seems like a silly question. If I'm the kind of person to hype something so that I benefit at your expense, then I'm unlikely to be the kind of person to tell you about the trap I set.
> Or to be clear, any discussion about crypto might be motivated by financial incentives which makes a meaningful technical discussion quite hard.
In general, anything dealing with other humans introduces ambiguity of motive. A good technical argument should deal with concrete facts, which can be verified and evaluated on their own terms, independent of the motive of the person that provided them. Take it as a given that you can't completely trust anyone else's motives.
Maybe because there is no "investing in IPFS". I mean there is Filecoin on top of IPFS, but you can love IPFS even if you don't give a damn about Filecoin, as it has been a well maintained project for the last ~2(?) years.
Disclaimer: I don't hold any file coin, but I enjoyed using IPFS for some hobby projects.
It's not exponential! Heck, the footnote is citing an article which correctly says the effect is quadratic in the first sentence.
I know this may be a lost cause in the general media, but to see this misuse of terms in this context is really frustrating.
(At least this isn't a case of talking about the "knee" of an exponential curve! When I taught calculus, I tried demonstrating how rescaling the y-axis shifts the curve horizontally, moving the "knee".)
It looks so attractive. And is right up my "theory of the firm" alleyway.
But there are two issues kind of intertwined. The current crop of businesses - both coin based and normal, are about allocation of scarce resource (bedrooms, taxis, hard drive space)
Now that is really all about ownership of scarce resource.
The fact that Airbnb users make money by selling rooms they don't actually have ownership of (i.e. They don't have full rights to sell, either cos it's their rented apartment or cos local law says hotel rooms need fire extinguishers) is kind of glossed over in this egalitarian rush. If the "real" owners got their full allocation this would be a boring story of more efficient returns to capital.
Almost all of the internet is like this - YouTube does not pay IP owners, Google does not pay me for my blog writing.
Perhaps coins will more accurately reward the owners of these resources - paid to blog, paid to drive taxis, paid to own IP rights - but this is just solidifying the status quo.
This leads to my second point - that those with nothing cannot grow in a world where rewards are efficiently returned to owners. Filecoin rewards those who are already rich enough to own a hard drive and electricity. And if the economics work those who own a data centre.
Without some egalitarian system built in, yes even government redistribution, then I can't see how tokens and coins can do anything but make Pikkety more right - more returns to the owners of capital.
If coins are just another currency, then they are just another way to measure capital - and I can't see how that is going to make the world into my utopia
But I do want to believe.
My fear I suppose is that for all their libertarian roots, coins are traceable and vastly favour the top billion humans right now - and we are solidifying the status quo - it's not as bad a world as it has been, but I don't want to be stuck with it.
I see it more as favouring the most intelligent. The real $$$ isn't in day-trading, it's in figuring out which cryptos have future merit. That means reading white-papers and distinguishing good ideas from hype.
It's a return to what investment is supposed to be: figuring out which ideas are worth capital.
Saying that the poorest billion in the world just need to be more intelligent and suddenly will be crypto-rich is ... well actually quite offensive.
The real and genuine divides between the richest and poorest in the world will not be bridged by coins, no matter their other benefits.
[1]: https://medium.com/token-economy/the-analysis-filecoin-doesn...
My take: $200M worth of investors in the ICO disagree with that assessment.
Why not just earn dollars? Theory of pricing arbitrage already takes into account coordination irrespective of the currency. What is the distinct advantage of earning Filecoin tokens over dollars?
Ok so lets just say I bought Filecoin (I didn't). How do I liquidate my position? Do I just need to find a buyer like every other security or can Filecoin buy it back?
In other words, is it currency or a bond?
These ICOs provide a sizable improvement in terms of liquidity. Unlike traditional companies, you can represent the value of your assets in terms of tokens that are liquid and tradeable from day one.
Apparently not, I looked through this filecoin sale file [1] and it has a vesting period for investors! Now don't that beat all? So it's an asset of some kind, it doesn't make clear in what class of asset it is. That looks suuuuper fishy to me but maybe I'm missing something.
When I got into Bitcoin when it first came out I thought it was a great concept, but had no future as a legitimate international currency because of politics. This crypto currency wave takes that into overdrive and I'm not exactly sure where the value is behind it.
Or maybe I'm just totally missing the value here, I would love to see it explained better than this article does.
[1]https://coinlist.co/static/media/Filecoin-Sale-Economics.0ae...
Ok, but dollars can also be used for speculation and immediate liquidity. Why is a corporate run token system better than the cash coming from the US Banking system? I mean practically, not philosophically.
sell a US stock to usd takes 7 business days
T+3 is usually just 3. So I don't know what second tier brokerage you're using but I can ACH stock liquidation cash from a vanguard account in 3 days.
Who is the account holder? The Filecoin inventors? What happens if someone blackmails them for the account password? What happens if they die?
To build Filecoin on USD you'd have to put all your trust in the Filecoin corporation.
The point of cryptocurrencies is you don't have to put your trust in any single entity.
On Fidelity or Schwab it takes 3, unless I'm confused
A decentralized trustless blockchain can't interact with dollars.
Basically here is how I interpret the logic:
1. Filecoin wants to take advantage of unused storage by distributing data to it
2. To incentive the storage holder, they want to pay them
3. They want to ledger payment to storage holders through blockchain
4. Since you obviously can't do blockchain with dollars, they needed(?) to create their own digital currency
What I am getting hung up on, and is the crux of your argument, is why they want to pay through a decentralized trustless blockchain. Why for the average storage holder, would blockchain based digital currency be better than just getting a few cents per MB used.
If you said, they are anarchists (the good kind) that want to democratize currency, and are doing it on the back of a useful case, ok that's a great argument and one we can make. However that can't have been the pitch for the 200M they raised.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/paypal-ex-coo-bitcoin-crypto-...
blockchain - decentralized (.)payments paypal, many others - centralized (.)payments
nothing disruptively new here re: payment part, just the decntralized part
But the benefit of a trustless decentralized system is that it can run without depending on a company. Once it's going, you as a user don't have to worry about the company going out of business, making changes to try to squeeze profit out, or getting bought out by a company who doesn't care about keeping the system running. You don't have to worry that it will get censored: you don't have to worry the company may decide they don't like content with nudity being hosted through it, that the company decides content has to all be reviewed for copyright infringement, that the company gets pressured legally to not do business with your country, that the company closes its APIs and cuts off your business built around helping others use the system in specific ways, etc. A system completely fragile to the whims of a single company can never become a standard like HTTP.
(Though obviously right now the company is pretty central as the system doesn't exist yet. They're necessary to get it developed, make the tooling, do marketing to get the initial users in, and throw man-hours at making sure the system is good. Maybe they'll code in a small fee that goes toward themselves and people will accept it. Once the system is working in a fully decentralized way, people could choose to move to a fork that disables the fee if people thought the company was taking too much or was pushing for bad changes.)
Still the country can pressure you not to do business with the network, e.g. if you happen to live there, e.g. because they don't like your way of thinking.
There is no counterparty risk of Filecoin not paying out - since the payment mechanism is embedded in the smart contract that is immutable.
>Ok so lets just say I bought Filecoin (I didn't). How do I liquidate my position? Do I just need to find a buyer like every other security or can Filecoin buy it back?
You sell it on an exchange for another currency like BTC or USD
Smart contracts, escrow and dispute mediation ARE already possible with Bitcoin with CHECKMULTISIGVERIFY.
And there haven't been has many issues in Bitcoin core than in Ethereum.
You can probably write Facebook in a low-level language but it may not be the best choice...
Bitcoin's conservative rate of change is one of its big features, plus the network effects of its existing userbase. Bitcoin users are less likely to lose money because of an issue in Bitcoin or because of reliance on a fragile contract encouraged by the Bitcoin software. The Bitcoin network is less likely to have its transaction history rolled back, or have significant changes made to its money supply which could strongly affect the value of present bitcoins.
by the way Ethereum scalability problems are much greater than Bitcoin.
That said, the SEC has also said that in many cases these ICO tokens can be classified as securities, and therefor going forward, could be subject to all the same laws and regulations [0]. This turns ICO's from something a startup can offer fairly easily, to something that requires a team of expensive lawyers to do properly.
Maybe Lawyers should take note that this could be a promising opportunity for future business?
Both are fundraising mechanisms: one sells liquid tokens on the open market, the other sells illiquid shares to VCs.
Does YC plan to address competition from tokens, and if so, how?
2 - Great investors provide more than just access to capital.
My point of view is similar to Fred Wilson's. More here http://avc.com/2017/06/icos-and-vcs/
Like what?
Game over, illiquid equity.
If you had shares in Company X and it got acquired, you would be entitled to a share of the sale price.
If you have tokens in FileCoin, EOS, whatever - and they sell the underlying company or IPO - your tokens might have appreciated independently of that, but you get 0% of the underlying company sale.
So a company issuing tokens, compared to VC funding, is essentially getting free money with few strings attached.
What is fixed and scarce however is land (you can claim plots and build houses, shops etc). Would having a server with land tied to a token make sense or is it a bad idea?
If A is worth 10x in an auction you pay 10x as much in fees. This works best if players buying and selling is a regular part of game play such as a complex crafting system where sub components are traded and someone can focus on making them.
Alternatively, professions can have some useful waste for another profession. ie: Making an epic sword needs 10 blue and makes 5 green, an epic boot needs 10 green and makes 5 blue. Meanwhile you get 1 red and 1 blues per ore. So, now your weapon makers and your armor makers will be trading their waste. Downside is guilds can become self sufficient.
PS: As an analogy, the USD has value because people must pay taxes on value created in USD. This instantly creates trillions of dollars worth of demand each and every year and continues to scale with the economy.
Really now?
[0] https://science.tokenhub.com/2017/08/03/startup-incubator-sc...
Edit: stephengillie, can't currently use reply. Think I'm being throttled b/c of my VPN.
I guess Bing is your friend here! I've not been keeping an eye out for that particular type of thing (soz).
Since blockchains appear to be the future of both transactions and applications, I was wondering if any incubators will offer advice, coaching, and support for a Blockchain-as-a-(Platform|Service) startup. Like the Lyft to Etherium's Uber-like presence.
What do you think will happen wrt token sales & US regulation, in the near term?
the immutability, is unique.
"Harmony is a new blockchain base document technology that works with your existing imaging or document management solution to create a secure, transparent, unalterable record for the final loan documents." https://www.factom.com/products/harmony
This still has a currency, Factoid or something. I don't know that anyone has created a consensus mechanism that doesn't use a coin
gpg already solves that as well, again without blockchains.
Blockchains do no more for identity gpg. Whether they're more or less usable is debatable.
It achieves this because cryptographic signatures exist fine without blockchains
The claim I'm refuting is that digital identity was impossible before the blockchain (Edit: or more difficult, either way, point stands). Digital identity is a cryptographic thing and a distributed thing. That doesn't mean it needs a blockchain.
People have been proving digital ownership and identities for longer than the blockchain, and the blockchain brings nothing new or interesting to the table in terms of identity.
> Are there any concrete uses of a blockchain that have clear advantages than to using a standard database other than cryptocurrencies?
Seems you're refuting something no one said, as far as I can tell.
Edit:
> Digital identity is a cryptographic thing and a distributed thing
How is it distributed? I assumed it was some company's servers -- maybe in multiple data centres around the world. But nothing like 24k nodes (& possibly more in the future).
---
Edit (reply to your edit):
I think the claim is that the identity system will be more resilient, not that it will be easier to implement. Censorship resistance.
I'd imagine it'll be harder to implement & cost more. A trade-off.
Which is along the lines of what I originally asked,
> Is Keybase resilient against the country's government in which it resides?
You said that gpg was. But didn't mention the computers. I asked about the servers & the ppl. (We didn't talk about the team).
The need wasn't specified. I'm presuming it's censorship resistance. Governments can't meddle with identities. Wipe someone off the face of the earth.
How is this any different than the wild west days of stock sales prior to the regulations that came about during the great depression in the US?
The ecosystem will eventually mature and follow some guidelines learned in the past decades by angels and VCs i.e Doing a small seed round first, proving you are building something people want and then, if you achieve your milestones, you can get to a series A and so on.
The ironic thing is that these milestones and progressive rounds are easier to achieve and track with tokens. If the milestone is not met, the smart contract automatically returns the funds to investors.
That can't work that way. The only way the smart contract can return the funds is if they are locked somehow, but what's the point of raising money then? People raise money to spend them, so they by definition don't have that money and it can't be returned, much less "automatically".
There are currently less than 30k ethereum nodes. And it is not clear if they are all "full nodes" (ie: verify the transactions). Millions is two orders of magnitude exaggeration.
While bitcoin has its implementation issues and politics, it solves that problem in a way that wasn't solved before.
A better token for Cash is incredibly valuable in and of itself.. dare I say it revolutionary.
[ I say "largely solves", because a) small blocksize and data management issues are preventing it from scaling now and in the medium term and b) a linear blockchain might not scale beyond every user on the planet buying coffee... or it might, we haven't really begun to optimize it, imo ]
If I just want to send funds from A to B, the current value of bitcoin in fiat [ USD / GBP / JPY ] is less important than being able to exchange it for the local fiat at each end.
If I hold those funds for a while at B - your absolutely right, extreme volatility is a concern. I would argue that as more people use bitcoin the volatility will go down [ large trades will be able to move the market far less, as the market will be so much larger ]
Do you mean using bitcoin as an intermediary to send value across the globe; Ie. by exchanging your local currency to bitcoin and then sending it to the receiver (who might exchange it again)? I think for such a use case the traditional banking systems are superior.
> Some people see that as a feature - a deflationary rare resource, which a government can't simply print more of.
The problem with deflationary resources is that most people will never want to spend them - making them unusable as a medium of exchange. If you look at bitcoin forums, they are full of posts cautioning other users to hodl (hold on to their coins and not sell them). But if bitcoin is not used as a medium of exchange then what is it used for? Other blockchains (like ethereum described in the blog) imho offer much more interesting features.