How Floyd Mayweather Helped Two Young Guys from Miami Get Rich in ICO
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I feel a little bad for people with blind loyalty that will lose money, but hopefully they learn their lesson.
"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -Ronald ReaganI looked up Centra, Stox, Hubii, and while they all look somewhat generic, I don't see any crazy promises, especially to the investors.
From what I see the ICO hype is driven entirely by the investors and the FOMO. Many people missed most of the cryptocurrency exponential rise, and they think it's the second chance.
Skimmed the Stox white paper [1]. Its Risk Factors (page 49) seem like an honest if deficient effort. They gloss over important factors, e.g. conflicts of interest between the founding team and the investor or any disclosures regarding Stox Ltd. (who get 27.5% of the tokens "to bring strategic partners to the Stox ecosystem, and as operational reserve").
There also seems to have been little effort to restrict these sales to accredited investors [2]. Besides being illegal, I doubt an accredited investor's lawyer would have signed off on the Risk Factors as presented.
[1] https://www.stox.com/assets/stox-whitepaper.pdf
[2] https://www.investor.gov/additional-resources/news-alerts/al...
Maybe it's healthy to refresh cultural memory like this. If everyone who invests in ICOs lose their money to fraud, it is unlikely to prompt a systemic crisis. A complacent population repealing the Securities Act of 1933 [1], perhaps using many of the same arguments used to defend ICOs against said Act, would.
Thats just because of overexposure. Benign routine frauds are masqueraded as international news just because ico/blockchain/bitcoin is involved in some capacity.
I guarantee you there were ten times more 30 million $ frauds over the same amount of time, buried within SEC enforcement circulars, DOJ enforcement circulars, FTC enforcement circulars, let alone amongst state agencies, let alone in other countries worldwide.
If there are 10x more frauds in the rest of the world, then that's not very good. The blockchain world having 9% of total major fraud is a lot given that it's not even 0.009% of total economic activity.
haha, I gave an example of numbers there's nothing quantitative to run with.
99.9999% of transactions on/involving a blockchain are not fraudulent or part of fraudulent projects.
That is a value greater than 0 as long as I exist. Now multiply me by 10,000 and the answer is yes?
Allure + Shenanigans => Informed Users? This might turn out as its greatest long-term effect, in a future with even greater use of cryptographic tools and tool users.
They were either too lazy or out of money after hiring Mayweather that they don't even put a pretense of a "whitepaper".
The rudimentary "roadmap" page here: https://centra.tech/roadmap/ There it says partnership with major bank and registration with Fincen is completed. But I skimmed and there doesn't seem to be anything there. Not on their blog @medium: https://medium.com/@Centra. I could be wrong so someone can correct me on this, if they find this information.
The funniest part is the products page: https://centra.tech/products/index.html Everything says "Click Below to get more details today!" but there no button at all. So there is no way to know what spending 500 or 100 ETH will get you.
From the looks of it, the product is so called "wallet" and a centralised one at that. So I am sure interested in the first step of their roadmap "Concept of connecting digital currencies to fiat". What did they figure out? ;)
Another one for the "shameless swindle" column of ICO. At this point I can't tell if any ICO has actually been real and has delivered back its funding in value.
I am reminded of that adage (maybe a quote?) from past stock mania: when the shoeshine boys are talking stocks it's time to sell. Is this peak ICO?
And I can't say I blame them. Seeing the prices now, I wish I'd taken a deeper interest when I first started playing around with it, and hung on more tightly to my wallet(s).
When other celebs s.a Dan Arieli or Whitfield Diffie are offered seats in boards for what is essentially the exact same PR, only targeting a different demographic, no-one calls BS on that.
This doesn't fly when you're selling securities. Floyd Mayweather does not appear to be a registered representative of a broker-dealer. He appears to have "engaged in the business of effecting transactions in securities for the account of others," the general definition of a "broker" under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 [1]. He also appears to have received transaction-related compensation, the gold standard the SEC uses for identifying brokers under the Exchange Act [2].
We made these rules to ensure people selling securities, particularly those getting a commission for it, are incentivized to do basic diligence on what they sell.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/about/laws/sea34.pdf § 3(a)(4)(A), page 4
[2] https://www.sec.gov/reportspubs/investor-publications/divisi...
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not securities, investment nor any other kind of advice.
On the other hand, you're probably right. I'm just the target demographic to give undue weight to Diffie's opinion.
Basically it seems to go like this:
1. People listen to an author because they have some interest in the topic they agree with.
2. The listener thinks the author is an authority on this topic through exposure to authority signaling behavior from the author, irrespective of how related it is to other fields.
3. The author speaks on a topic that is outside of their field of expertise or how they gained the original authority.
4. The authority, in the minds of the reader leaps fields and is assumed that they have authority on the second field.
It's this leap in authority that I am credulous to and I am unsure why it is so pervasive that people think this.
I would never expect Peter Higgs to be competent in Machine Learning or Yann Lecun to be competent in finance by virtue of their eminence in their respective fields. So why should I listen to what the eminent boxer of our day has to advise about Cryptocurrency without proof that they are eminent in blockchain/crypto?
> “What’s important is Centra is being endorsed and they have a product,” a Reddit user named islandsurf wrote back to the critics, explaining his own investment. “That’s what matters to investors!”
Investors thought other people would care about endorsements. Once they see others not caring, the cycle stops almost overnight.
> Ms. Hilton deleted the post after Forbes reporters uncovered the checkered legal past of the founder of Lydian Coin, who had aimed to raise $100 million.
It's interesting to see the celebrities distancing themselves quickly once journalists are on their back.
Wonder how much they got paid for these endorsements?