Tezos founders push for legal bailout from Swiss foundation
reuters.com
reuters.com
2. What are the damages if they just give the money/coins back? That's the easiest solution for these ICOs: a 100 days buy back/escrow period?
3. Another easy solution is to have these ICOs hold the proceeds in escrow and release of funds quarterly for five years to the startups/projects and giving the investors the ability to refund half or 75% of their remaining commitment (i.e. a 25-50% penalty for leaving the project early).
had the founder on recently https://youtu.be/rdRSUJkvmxM -- seems like people who invested knew what they were doing going in.
just had coinlist on the show as well.... they did filecoin's $200m+ ICO http://thisweekinstartups.com/andy-bromberg-coinlist/
Looking forward to more crypto-focused podcasts. It's always preferable to hear from more technical guests who aren't just trying to sell something.
What happens when a US judge allocates damages for certain actions? They declare personal bankruptcy? US judgements are also not always enforceable abroad, so is it imaginable the foundation gets to keep the money regardless of the outcome of any lawsuit? I would guess so.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/500-million-business_crypto-pig...
1. Tokenizing non-profit foundations (stiftungs), while traditional "stiftung foundation has no shares or members" [1]
2. Pretending that token allocations are unrelated to donations/contributions.
3. Using nonprofit foundations for clearly for-profit speculative activity.
It is not an ideal construction, but can make sense. The foundation is used as a funding vehicle for a common prpject, but it is still non-profit.
It's not fun for them, but after raising a couple of hundred million dollars, I don't feel too sorry for them either.
I've seen something similar to this in another ICO. They set up an ethereum smart contract that would distribute 90% of funds raised to the project over 4 years. If an investor wanted out, they could send their tokens to the contract and (iirc) it would burn them and refund the investor with ETH at a 10% haircut to the original buy price. Alas can't quite remember the ICO or the exact details (it was in a random whitepaper I read).
When you know enough rich people, you can raise a lot of money on a PDF of promises.
With all the money Tezos has, they're probably going to do what Theranos did with Walgreens: pay their way into a fancy big partnership that gives the impression that there's something actually going on.
- They raised from the public
- Founder comp tied to release of a product that works
- They are focused on making a product that works, not on optical theatrics (in fact one of their biggest weaknesses is they've been horrible at optics)
Who decides what is a "product that works"?
Is bad optics the new 'fake news' because it seems like the Breitmans have been focused on who controls the billion dollars they have.
Not quite right. They raised from their own investors and the public, which may be part of the problem.
If their own investors bought into their own ICO to "seed" it, which tricked the public into thinking there was genuine demand, that might constitute fraud.
Some of them without even making money... actually loosing money!
The difference between a biotech startup and many ICOs is that the former typically has years of validated and peer-reviewed scientific research backing up the hope of eventually having a product.
It's even more absurd because Tezos was one of the few ICOs that had some actual technology, not just PR technobabble.
Whether or not that means that the project will ultimately release, I have no idea (nor vested interest in).
Oh, yes? What have they done?
Everything else can be implemented by m-of-n multisig and off-chain oracles. This is something anyone about to invest in smart contract technology should think long and hard about.
Does he have a good explanation for this? Because I fail to see how something as simple as spending limits requires Turing completeness.
In my understanding it is just a Bitcoin copy that has a voting feature to decide protocol changes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7bdm1g/so_can_we_...
Taking the risk to appeal to some developer elitism here, it is still important to realize the different needs of those who will build future products on the technology as opposed to those about to turn a quick buck on a use case that already exists.
I guess we will never know for sure as there is nothing that can differentiate democratic voting from Sybil attacks without identity.
That's the main value, yes. It sounds kind of minor but let's not forget that's actually a huge step in the right direction and would solve a lot of problems we've seen in other blockchains. Even if thier's never really materializes, it is a great idea that should live on in future blockchains.
This feature alone is probably worth a billion dollars given the value unlocked by various cryptocurrency forks.
https://www.cardanohub.org/en/what-is-cardano/
In the interest of full disclosure, I do own some Cardano.
Here is a good whiteboard summary of Cardano[2], by Charles Hoskinson, who is co-creator of Ethereum as well as Cardano and other associated notable works.
[1] - https://iohk.io/team/
As it happens, he's also the creator or Ethereum Classic, a hard fork of Ethereum, not unlike what Bcash is to Bitcoin (i.e. an attempt at co-opting the brand and capturing value by confusing newcomers).
Apparently he tried to inflate the ETC coin supply by 20% and give the new coins to his company IOHK, which of course didn't sit well with the ETC community:
https://medium.com/@classicether/an-analysis-of-charles-hosk...
However, certain ICOs are actually bringing products to market that would never otherwise exist. Some of them are trying to fundamentally change how some industries operate. Others are fundamentally improving blockchain technology. But in order for their products to operate they need enough stakeholders to make them viable. And this is where ICOs come in. There were many of us who believed that Tezos was one of those ICOs. Their product could still be greatly useful if executed correctly. Given that they have raised more money then they could ever have hoped for, it is incredible that they are being silly enough to embark on a public dispute between themselves and get involved in lawsuits with their investors. Just getting back to work and executing their initial vision (which they can do many times over with that amount of funds) seems like an obvious thing to do. They would lose a lot more money (or worse) by continuing on this trajectory. It is incredible how short-term greedy they seem from the outside.
Or maybe I am missing some information that would explain this stupidity. I would love to know more.
You can say Ethereum, but it wasn't an ICO properly speaking. Even if it was, a single good example in hundreds isn't enough.
Ripple didn't have an ICO, Bitcoin Cash didn't, Zcash didn't, Monero didn't, Stellar didn't.
Arguably that was the model for all other ICOs and the platform for the vast majority.
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sal...
Basic Attention Tokens are already integrated in Brave browser: https://basicattentiontoken.org/
And Ethereum did a crowdsale. On Counterparty and Ommi. It’s literally in the first paragraph of their Wikipedia article:
>> Ethereum was proposed in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, a cryptocurrency researcher and programmer. Development was funded by an online crowdsale between July and August 2014.[5] The system went live on 30 July 2015, with 11.9 million coins "premined" for the crowdsale.[6] This accounts for approximately 13 percent of the total circulating supply
The incentives for token sales are to raise as much Eth as you can, spend as little of it as possible on the actual project while watching its value appreciate, then either have a product launch that semi-fails or have some good excuse why the project just couldn't work for some reason while minimizing the chance that people bring legal action against the project.
There are a ton of ways to find and secure proper, reliable stakeholders who are committed to your technology or your cause/product. (Private ICO being one of the ways. Keep things under wrap, develop the technology, have a proof of concept, sell some product, and then MAYBE if it makes sense, go public.) A public ICO blasting across the internet when there is no product, no plan, and no real engineering already done is nothing but a cash grab, and I am not at all surprised that they are embroiled in lawsuits.
Is this really a property of ICOs? the behavior you describe may be very common nowadays, but from what I understand there is nothing intrinsic in this kind of funding model to be necessarily like that. Maybe after a crash the market will get a bit more mature and start using public ICOs for real stuff, and I think that could evolve into something really interesting :)
This case sounds like #3 - where they have an idea, but immature company structure, poor legal structure, and no governance that is supposed to bind a team together - in this case they are fighting about the money ...
As always - in the end it's all people. Public ICO is a tool, and it's really NOT the tool to use if you want to find a real base of support and well-intentioned stakeholders (who won't turn around and sue you the moment the ico completes :)
One hostile contributor doesn't tell you anything about the intentions of the rest.
They raised some money - they now want to extract that money. Obviously, they can't for some reason, either being blocked by investors or other members of their company who are disputing it (or want the money for themselves too).
It's super transparent, and in the end, people are people. An ICO or blockchain, or any technology isn't going to change that fact.
Personally I would do it quietly, with good legal backing, and as a single entity or with a small group of investors rather than a large class action - and reach an early settlement to get our own investment back without causing too much of a stir for other investors.
"Futures" because they are just a pile of tokens bought by the exchange, and you can't sell your own tokens before release, so no way to get them into the exchange and no functioning market.