This is just insane. No code yet, closed to investors with at least 250k income or 1M in the bank (Per SEC rules), coins given to friends before investors could get in on it.
And what do you need this much money for?
And what do you need this much money for?
For example, who are the poeple lending that much money ? Why are they doing it ? Is this whole thing some kind of money laundering or tax evading scheme ? Is it related to central banks having 0% interest rates, etc..
You only know what happens after some time, but you always end up knowing.
Back then, solely founding a bank to 'jump on the bandwagon' earlier than others was seen as something much much more important than to have that bank functioning properly. Now, none of those first wave banks remain prominent. Out of roughly 2000, only 20 function today.
Bitcoin and other crypto-coins are also created without the gold or silver backing of course... they just aren't issued in quite the same way.
And maybe filecoin is an exception - most ICOs seem a little scammy at best, with value based purely on speculation and scarcity.
The ability to "shape shift" your declining currency to better ones assumes you can out-speculate the market in knowing when to exit, and which coins to buy.
Libertarians should be thrilled. Fractional Reserve Banking represents millions of individual decisions around the world to lend money, which does not require the Federal Government. Anarcho-Capitalists should be pressing for zero regulation and allowing anyone and their mom to issue any amount of credit money.
In the age of technology, this doesn't sound as scary as it would have been in the past, when you had to keep the relative credit of 100000 currencies in your head. For example, the Trustlines network, or Interledger protocol, or Lightning network, will allow people to transact using Trustlines between each other. VISA and other financial merchants may use Trustlines as well.
Think about VISA issuing banks, etc. They give you a credit card and they don't know how much you're going to spend on a given day. That credit line is yours. That card is not fiat so the stores don't have to accept it. But now, many do, because they believe the VISA system and the issuing bank will make good on the purchase and exchange their "VISA currency" for money. Same with PayPal, WeChat, AliPay, Venmo, etc. They all have fiat reserves.
I personally think regulation is a welcome response to the Free Banking Era and wildcat money, but either way, many communities would benefit from issuing their own currency: Detroit, Greece, etc. Bristol Dollars have Pound reserves and Bristol issues its own currency.
I think that it would be really cool if communities could issue their own currencies. Read this: https://qbix.com/blog/
The linked blog mentions Detroit, but doesn't go into much detail.
Depends on your definition of "fake"? Anyone can ICO a new "real" crypto coin, but what gives those coins value beyond speculation?
If I make "klipt-coin" (which would cost me nothing but a little time) will you buy it just because it uses cryptography? If so, I have a crypto-bridge to sell you.
It's absolutely dead in India, for instance, a market of 1.4B people who would, presumably, be Bitcoin's target customers
Here is an attempt at the payment side of things: https://coinjournal.net/ripple-opens-new-office-india-eyes-m...
Localbitcoin volume in India is sharply increasing: https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/INR
Other "trading platforms are witnessing unexpectedly high traffic and seem to be growing at an exponential rate" http://www.dqindia.com/growth-and-future-of-bitcoin-in-india...
Activity is such that the Indian government is looking into (finally!) regulating it: https://cointelegraph.com/news/suddenly-bitcoin-to-be-offici...
Bitcoin in India is in no way "absolutely dead."
I can't recall the last time I saw an Indian website accept Bitcoin
«I can't recall the last time I saw an Indian website accept Bitcoin»
One of the best use case of Bitcoin is for informal person-to-person payments, eg. sending money to friend/family. No merchants involved.
Either they are stupid and abused , in such a large number that you can witness million dollars ICO every week (which means a really large scam is actually being organized), or there's another fact we're not aware of.
The only person i know that trades crypto currencies do it with pocket money. But the sums we're talking about here are about something a bit different (i suppose).
"Many individuals grew suddenly rich. A golden bait hung temptingly out before the people, and, one after the other, they rushed to the tulip marts, like flies around a honey-pot. Every one imagined that the passion for tulips would last for ever, and that the wealthy from every part of the world would send to Holland, and pay whatever prices were asked for them. The riches of Europe would be concentrated on the shores of the Zuyder Zee, and poverty banished from the favoured clime of Holland. Nobles, citizens, farmers, mechanics, seamen, footmen, maidservants, even chimney sweeps and old clotheswomen, dabbled in tulips."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania#Mackay.27s_Madness...
"His account was largely sourced from a 1797 work by Johann Beckmann titled A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins.[11] In fact, Beckmann's account, and thus Mackay's by derivation, was primarily sourced to three anonymous pamphlets published in 1637 with an anti-speculative agenda.[36] Mackay's vivid book was popular among generations of economists and stock market participants. His popular but flawed description of tulip mania as a speculative bubble remains prominent, even though since the 1980s economists have debunked many aspects of his account."
Also see the "Modern views" section. Basically, as far as anyone can tell Mackay's account of tulip mania is mostly bullshit.
https://qz.com/114753/meet-the-family-who-lost-100000-when-t...
Yes, money is very cheap right now which creates a rush to invest in anything - see for example [1].
[1] http://alphahistory.com/weimarrepublic/1923-hyperinflation/
How popular? Who uses it?
Not saying everyone does this, but I doubt my behaviour is rare and I wouldn't read too much into github stars as they are too cheap to create. Look for actual use.
The most stared project I helped create has +5k stars from hitting the HN frontpage a few times, and there are very few actual users (by now probably none).
IPFS has compared to that much healthier growth, and for the number of stars they have a pretty decent userbase from what I can gather.
My biggest client at the minute is dtube.video but there are audio "clones" and document based clones in development that I'm aware of too.
Especially for a new a fairly new protocol, I'd say IPFS is popular.
Instead of proof of work mining that burns tons of electricity, storing and distributing files will become a new kind of useful mining.
That's a big deal.
I'm not saying they're necessarily dishonest but it shows that the current ICO system is rather broken. Instead of slowly building up investments in rounds as your technology proves itself ICOs incentivize you to raise ridiculous amounts of money right at the start.
There seems to be zero interest in creating something new and open like bitcoin but instead make as much money as possible.
Functionally it's basically BitTorrent with magnet links.
Also, it's not actually finished or production quality yet.
This is why people are putting as much money as they can. The total crypto market cap is 160B, which is basically nothing. There are now future Apple, Google and Microsoft stocks in crypto traded for pennies.
In the investor groups I am in totally anonymous strangers are pooling multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars for ICO funds, all based on trust. The idea is to send as much money as possible as a single transaction with insanely high transaction fees to get ahead of everyone else before the hard cap is reached.
If you have some amount of money you don't mind losing just buy some BTC, ETH, LTC, NEO, GAS, OMG, PAY, XMR, BAT, LSK, ARK and forget about them for a few years. November will be a good time to buy in because the uncertainty about the BTC hard fork will make people exit to fiat.
Thank me later.
As for Filecoin - their ICO cap is unreasonable, this is too much money, as soon as their tokens hit the markets the price will drop to nothing.
Is this just purely speculation?
For "B", the coins are highly divisible and the costs of usage will be driven the market. You probably won't need $1k to use the network, the same way you don't need ~$4500 to use Bitcoin.
We're building OpenBazaar on top of IPFS to distribute user's stores. But that relies on people visiting and seeding each others stores. With Filecoin, vendors will be able to pay other users to seed with reliability.
Disclosure: We work closely with Protocol Labs but I do not own any Filecoin and don't plan to until it can used for applications like ours.