A $232M Cryptocurrency Fight Comes to a Close | Hacker News Reader

A $232M Cryptocurrency Fight Comes to a Close

wsj.com

36 pointsfrisco39 comments

Such hilarity:

""" The Breitmans began Tezos, which is a software platform, four years ago in a bid to address some of the governance issues that have surrounded other cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin....

The ensuing dispute over control of the $232 million ... """

It's funny though, but understandable. The platform must be built in a world where the problem platform is trying to solve exists.

That's like laughing at Seamless for being unable to order food for its employees, but Seamless hasn't launched yet.

I think it’s more like “Seamless team gets taken out by food poisoning from Seamless delivery”.

Exactly my first thought. A coin to address governance issues lacks access to its own funds due to governance issues.

Poe's law in full display.

They're the foundation's funds, the developers were never supposed to have access to them.

The Breitmans took over the project less than a year before the ICO. Proof can be found on twitter, where the original paper's author posted that he is handing the project over.

Leah M Goodman is the journalist who wrote the Newsweek article about Dorian Nakamoto.

It is also a pen name used by the Breitman as a joke.

I stand corrected!

If governance issues are important for you in cryptocurrencies, you should take a look at Decred,

Pretty amazing how they managed to raise this much money, i thought it would just fizzle out after they have raised such absorbident amounts of money they would run out of incentive. its not like a traditional acquisition where they are contractually obliged to make good on their ICO promises, ICO participants often forget they are in a sense buying part of a company that is up for sale (why?).

For a legitimate Crypto company that hasn't ICO'ed or raised money checkout my company https://bitbank.nz which is forecasting cryptocurrency prices :)

Can someone explain how one foundation (that manages a BILLION dollars) can simply be replaced by a new foundation?

Having talked to some lawyers in this space during the last weeks I have come to understand how much money is involved here in compensation/fees/listing-fees/advisor-compensation/etc. It is insane. So not really surprised any more regarding their internal conflicts for $$$.

I still don't understand how so much money gets raised for these ICOs in the first place.

Then I remember people are often stupid and many other people like taking advantage of stupidity.

And then you look at Ethereum which is a $90B valuation and also wonder if it can have competitors. Tezos is a full fledged Eth competitor with its own USPs.

>tezos is a full fledged Eth competitor

This is inaccurate

No it is not. Read about tezos and then come back.

I'm back, and forgive me if we're going in circles here, but I still am confident in my assertion. Is there something specific that you know that the general public does not?

It is fine. I don't want to feed ignorance here. It is pretty clear you have no idea what Tezos is and haven't done any bit of cursory research on it. And, to folks like you, my only advise is to wait and watch for the token to be released and then you will witness how it competes with Eth ecosystem.

You resort to personal attacks; is this to say that you’re unable to factually substantiate your assertions?

It is not an attack. I just don't want to spend my educating folks who aren't willing to help themselves. Just read their whitepaper or any of the 100s of youtube videos on tezos and you will discover that it is a full fledged Ethereum competitor.

Ethereum has competition. Look at NEO (https://neo.org/).

Given that Ethereum is open source, the real value comes from their ecosystem (broadly defined).

What if Microsoft branched Ethereum and created MicroCoins, and moved a few hundred developers and researchers from Microsoft Research onto the project, and then created incentives to rapidly scale up miners and other parts of the ecosystem. Would they create $xx billion in value?

Crypto prices could continue to rise, and since I own a few coins and tokens for fun, I guess I should hope they do. But I've never understood how valuations so high can be supported given the relatively low barriers to entry (relative to multi-billion dollar valuations). I'd define myself as soft skeptic - I acknowledge I could be wrong and undervaluing first-mover advantage. I just don't understand how or why.

I think a lot of people invested just because FOMO

While there are surely FOMO investors in any ICO, there's a really rational case for Tezos. It potentially solves the governance issues bitcoin had as well as offering provable smart contracts, which helps alleviate the constantly-hacked problem with ethereum smart contracts. In terms of the amount raised, I invested because the coldly rational math of what a market-cap competitive with wither of those would mean for the token value gave really great pot-odds to a "donation."

This was the first project I ever saw where the developer pitched the source code to hacker news fore review, rather than a whitepaper to a coin sale.

This is fantastic news. I think there is definite potential in both the token itself (given that it holds about a billion dollars now) and in the language backing it.

but why is it worth a billion dollars? none of this shit makes any sense.

Because they hold a billion worth of ETH and BTC.

http://archive.is/M9XLp

(It would be nice if more people would start doing this. It seems to be the closest we can get to something that just works at the moment.)

Or we could let the publisher make money... subscribe or skip the article.

I just tried to subscribe. Their registration is broken.

Make WSJ & NYTimes Great Again:

https://github.com/njuljsong/wsjUnblock

Add “outline.com/“ to the front of the url — it also gets past the paywall.

Thanks!

Outline is even better. https://outline.com/YgWtxK

Let's hope the SEC throws these two scam artists in jail soon.

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