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Comment by fivedogit | Hacker News Reader

News flash: it already popped. 70‰ from top. ICOs dried up.

Blockchain market cap is about $300 billion now. Should the next major tech wave be worth half a Facebook? IMO, yes, and more.

Blockchain has already proven 2 major use cases (e-gold and ICOs) and several minor ones (unstoppable casinos, prediction markets). Doubters are in for a bunch of regret.

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How many people do you know with savings in physical gold? How big do you think the consumer market is for that?

The major holders of gold bullion are banks and governments – they are not going to pile in to a pyramid scheme style system where by a small number of early adopters become worth the GDP of a small country.

Nobody has savings in physical gold because it's a PITA to acquire and store. Digital gold obviously doesn't suffer from these problems.

After all, it's not like people breaking into computers and stealing stuff from them is anywhere near as common as people breaking into houses or bank vaults.

I don't have the stats, but I actually would guess that robbery is way more common than hacking personal computers which results in the retrieval of useful information.

I make it a habit not to bet. But if I were a betting man I'd take you up on that. Hacking personal computers is a huge blackmarket industry and it costs society a lot of money. The average person (i.e. not you or me) don't even know they've been hacked and are just joined to some botnet without their knowledge. But a hacked computer is a hacked computer and if the hacker want's the bitcoin wallet they can get it.

Good luck getting the bitcoin back after that.

Hardware wallets?

yeah, the market already popped as far as ICOs are concerned. many down 75-95% from highs and have no viable products

They deserve that drop. A lot of them were scams and a lot of them were well intentioned but badly executed. That happens with startups in the same way though: many (most?) funded startups go bust. In ICOs this is just far more public record as you can follow their demise publicly. If startups would do that in the same way, no one would be so surprised or shouting scam as much. A lot of startups I did competitor analysis on or who we talked with for acquisition or merger had nothing to do with blockchain but also got millions on vague promises and never delivered while burning through the millions. Some of them actually being obvious scams (easy to point out which ones if you are in my industry). Why would that be different for blockchain projects? Are there statistics to show fiat vc funded startups failures vs ico failures? Kickstarter etc failures vs ico failures? XXX scams vs ico scams?

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