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Comment by WikipediasBad | Hacker News Reader

>Everything blockchain-related is at best a Ponzi scheme and usually, outright fraud, except the structures that provide technical means for these frauds, like Ethereum itself.

Oh please. Quit your whining. Yes, there are criminals and fraudsters in crypto trying to squeeze money and run since it's not regulated, but "everything blockchain-related is at best a Ponzi-scheme"?? That's like saying facebook stock is a Ponzi scheme because Peter Thiel got it 100,000x less in price than the people who bought it today on the exchange.

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No, Bitcoin valuation is fine! Until some better crypto - which will really solve scalability problem - replaces it.

What's not fine is that all or nearly all 'entrepreneurial' activity in blockchain space is aimed at pulling money out of pockets of clueless people, presenting it as 'investment', but really gambling. People who are building nearly all projects just know they aren't going to even start building anything, they are just after collecting money. Those limited who do, have no chance because their tokens will inevitably collapse too once this Ponzi scheme explodes, people will just sell every kind of shitcoin when they know it was a scam, and even 'investors' in those who aren't scams, will inevitably lose money too.

There are plenty examples of responsibly run ICO's. OMG for example.

Facebook's stock value is dictated/grounded by a relative amount of real value they've captured (along with predictable future potential), e.g. value they're already providing.

What real world value? What does that even mean to have "real value"? Selling advertising now has "real world value"? How? FB allowing people to bid on eyeballs of random people surfing their site has as much real world value as pieces of paper with dead presidents on them (or imaginary coins on a blockchain). The only reason it has value is because we agree it's valuable.

Well Facebook stock actually means owning a part of Facebook. Owning coins mean nothing and that is openly stated in every ICO whitepaper.

Also Facebook makes real world revenue and profit. Almost no blockchain startup has, or even builds, or even plans to build, a product, and almost all of their declared products are at the very least, impossible due to network scalability limits, or for the most part, even ridiculous by themselves. Plain fakes, exist only as words.

"What real world value? What does that even mean to have "real value"?"

The credibility of their business to generate future profits as decided upon by investors who investigate their markets, the credibility of their team and execs, etc. etc..

Most ICOs are done because those companies would not stand a chance at raising actual money - by people doing real due diligence.

Doing an ICO is in fact, a pretty string signal that there is something not good about the situation.

In Kik's case, well, they have maybe 3 million daily actives, and it's slowly dying, nearly zero revenues. Can't do an IPO. Should make you wonder about putting money into a currency that is dependent on their 'ecosystem'.

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