>we can go back to building valuable companies
Like what?
>with a whole new way of funding them.
What's wrong with US Dollars?
Like what?
>with a whole new way of funding them.
What's wrong with US Dollars?
What company people are going to build is anyone's guess, but mine is that there's going to be a lot of them. Silicon Valley is only but a small dot on the face of the Earth. A lof of potential is going to be unlocked.
Honestly, I can see an "regulated"[0] crypto securites derivative market being deeper than the underlying crypto securites themselves since they'll trade more OTC.
[0] To the same degree that any government can regulate trade of their currency/debt on global markets.
But essentially, the paper the shares are printed on doesn't provide any legal guarantees by itself either. The fact that ownership is tokenized doesn't prevent companies from issuing guarantees to token holders.
See my comment on the comment next to yours for more:
On top of that, smart contract mediated investments can have much more additional guarantees. Projects like Aragon are creating DAO governance UIs that are on-chain, usable (from a UX perspective) and transparent for token holders. They allow holders to vote on transfers of funds, or monthly capital allocation, with the possibility to withdraw funds if they deem the operation of companies irresponsible. This a programmable financial infrastructure: the tools are there to build whatever you can come up with in terms of governance.
Besides DAO governance platforms, what will compel executives, for the cases where this applies, is the same thing that compels them right now: financial incentives, and the threat of prosecution. Are the guarantees comparable to those you get from a CEO on a NYSE traded company? Not by a long shot, this is the wild west right now.
But in keeping with the "Internet of Money" metaphor from my other comment, lack of controls and accountability didn't prevent Wikipedia from displacing the Encyclopedia Britannica.
I looked at your comment history and it seems you are assuming that people with a so called "pro blockchain" angle are all missing the point. I assure you not everyone in the space is an idiot, and you might be missing some points yourself.
Perhaps, but the SEC is pretty centralized, when two people can't come to an agreement then securities law enforced by the legal system determines the outcome of the dispute not smart-contract rules enforced by blockchain consensus.
> * I assure you not everyone in the space is an idiot, and you might be missing some points yourself.*
I don't think they're idiots, I think they're financially and emotionally invested in a fascinating technology that's not very useful. I don't think anything is wrong with that, and maybe one day I'll be proven wrong, but I have worked in this space (backend engineer for an exchange) and continue to follow it closely but skeptically and with good reason if you're intellectually honest about the track record of this industry.
> What's wrong with US Dollars?
It's not a good store of value over the long haul:
https://visual.ly/community/infographic/economy/purchasing-p...
Well sure, but no one is storing their wealth in USD. You use it to purchase assets. What store of value can you purchase with BTC without first converting to USD?
>”Binance made more money than Deutsche Bank last year. They funded growth with an ICO.”
Concentrated more wealth, you mean. What, exactly, did they contribute to the economy? At the very least, banks provide liquidity. The furthest I can gather of any crypto company mission is “make money”.
Is this actually solving a real problem that someone has?
One of the reason VC has its characteristic geographical distribution is because exit opportunities are extremely localized. No more.
This in turn unlocks a ton of talent-capital synergy opportunities for a myriad of projects outside of the large tech hubs.
You could do the same thing with normal investments, if trading houses and banks didn't do any KYC checks.
No regulation exists now in conventional banking that prevents me from doing that investment without crypto. It's just not practical and therefore unviable. I would need to surf through 3 different bureaucracies in 3 different languages and currencies. If you are doing this kind of thing, it's in your best interest to always do KYC, mostly not for AML - just for general due diligence purposes.
The fundamental thing is disintermediation, not deregulation. Regulation might be able to kill the space, but it would really be a triumph of the incumbents over a real progress opportunity.
PS I'm going at it from the investor angle here but it goes without saying that enabling investment enables entrepreneurship.
And why will this never hold for similar transactions done on the blockchain?
Blockchain is expensive and slow. Centralize it and be a business that provides a good customer experience.
Do you think they will actually represent shares?
As far as I can tell, all current ICOs have not represented any ownership or share of anything, other than the token itself.
On the other end of the discreetness spectrum, The DAO was a security ICO and it was the largest crowdsourced project in history at the time.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/13/exit-scammers-run-off-with...
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/18/another-day-another-50-mil...
https://cointelegraph.com/news/unpacking-the-5-biggest-crypt...
Do you need more?
Where you got the idea that I'm denying the existence of ICO scams, I'll never know.
> What store of value can you purchase with BTC without first converting to USD?
Switching out to gold from BTC is pretty painless.
People just hope that someone else will use it as a sure if value, so that the price rises and they get rich off it. Ie, speculation.
Many people who started using Bitcoin last year lost a lot of their value.
My grandma did. 10,000 dollars when I was born into a bank account for college.
I think it was worth ~11k 27 years later since I ended up paying for college with work.
Ended up spending it on my house. If that 10k was invested... whew...
"Deutsche Bank reports pre-tax profit of 1.3 billion euros and net loss of 0.5 billion euros for 2017"
Its controlled by the Federal Reserve which is partly controlled by the government.
Basically your USD is worth what the central bank says they are worth. A new war? Your dollar loses value. Out of control debt? Print more money.
Bitcoin has 21,000,000 solutions ever ever ever.
If WWIII breaks out, I’m betting the Internet (in its current open and international form) will be an early casualty. How’s that going to work out for bitcoin exactly?
The only reason consumer goods are the same cost is because the exponential increase in technology and productivity.
Tomorrow there will be more USD than yesterday. This isnt true for BTC.
I think it would be very beneficial for everyone(especially HN crowd) to learn this.
Your sentence isnt important.
In the same token, I can easily say that the only reason you are in favor of these things is because you've forgotten the last couple hundred years of economic history.