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Comment by javier123454321 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, most (if not all with the exception of bitcoin) of the 'crypto' projects function effectively like a startup with the coin as the stock. There are some differences from securities, but mostly similarities. You are buying something with the hope that the development team will deliver on promised value in the future. This will at least clarify the regulatory landscape going forward.

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Except with a startup or a company's stock, you ostensibly care that what the company is building or doing could potentially have value in the future. With the crypto projects over the past few years, it's purely been about whether or not you hop in early enough in the pyramid to resell your tokens to a greater fool before it collapses.

It's like a company "Stocks, Inc" that just issues their own stocks as a product. When you put it that way, it definitely sounds suspect.

Do not look into SPACs; you may not like what you find.

The product of a SPAC is 'selling' another company the rights to be traded on a stock exchange.

That's, in theory, a non-trivial product, given how much IPO underwriters tend to charge.

SEC changed the rules. SPACs are much more difficult now.

Yes: there is no product.

Stock gives you rights to the company. Tokens do not; there is nothing that links the value of the token to the performance of the company or group, unlike stock.

That is the ways in which they are different. Both can give yield, even if one is through equity and the other through ownership of the underlying resource. The idea is that the dev teams will deliver the computational platform of choice for future apps, and you are owning some of the fuel that allows you to use that computational platform. It's like AWS raised money through selling credits to use their servers.

That's more like a Kickstarter.

The number of crypto projects that ever turned into a profitable enterprise for the investors by doing something outside the crypto space seems to be near zero.

Is there even a single project that qualifies under those requirements?

Filecoin I suppose, in that it actually does something useful, and early adopters could have made a decent profit if they sold during the bubble.

If you go to the Filecoin site, and follow the links for buying storage, you end up here.[1] That's is an onboarding B2B page with no pricing. Enter your email and phone; maybe they'll call.

They're not serious about the storage business. If they were, they'd have visible pricing and comparison tables with other cloud storage providers.

[1] https://hub.filecoin.io/form-data-client-onboarding

In comparison, to be honest, the AWS pricing pages aren't much better when you really want to dig into how much things are going to cost. That's a big reason why companies like Wasabi have much simpler pricing models.

Filecoin is a relatively new and complex beast that not many people understand today. It'll take time to settle into better pricing schemes. I can tell you, this is coming.

https://storage.market/ has some Filecoin price comparisons

Storj is a product in a similar niche that actually works.

Selling high isn't "a profitable enterprise". I can buy any money losing penny stock and sell it higher than I bought it and I'll pocket some money, but in no way that means I was an investor of a profitable enterprise.

Tell that to, uh, every VC fund? That business model is to invest into an early stage business, (buying low) wait for them to develop a useful product, and then sell high.

Even there the price is probably completely uncorrelated with any usage/profit metrics. If Filecoin never shipped anything, early adopters could have made a decent profit if they sold during the bubble.

I suspect that is a big reason why the price can't seem to move upwards these days as well. Chinese miners continuously dumping their early gains on the market after getting to the 180 day lockup period.

No rights with tokens. It's Kickstarter. And was designed this way so maybe the scams would get in less legal trouble and avoid being securities. Didn't work out that way it seems

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