Old vs. new money. It's a lot easier to get money from 15.000 people who got so rich with BTC and ETH, they have money to spare, than to find and convince 15 Venture Capitalists to put up 1.4 million.
58 karma · joined August 7, 2017
Futures for Tezos are already trading at 6x the amount people invested during ICO.
> It makes no sense.
In the short term it makes a lot of sense (600% ROI). In the long term: An Ethereum based on OCaml has an interesting potential.
> You have no guarantee that they won't just run off with the money
If the developers are not anonymous, while no guarantee, it makes it less likely. When you cross the road you also have no guarantee that the cars won't run you over. Some amount of trust is needed, whether for money or your entire life. Benefit of crypto is that you don't necessarily need to rely on trust. I doubt Tezos has contractual access to all the money they received, or are allowed to dump their shares as soon as it starts trading for real.
Edit: No specific sources for what Numerai is using, but in general: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.06918 "Learning to Protect Communications with Adversarial Neural Cryptography".
Edit2: Yes, in general. I would say "yes, this is a valid form of encryption". But I do agree that their marketing was perhaps a bit too optimistic. I have no problem calling it "obfuscation" either (I just think their method of "obfuscation" is way more advanced than removing headers and normalizing within 0-1).
> Just a few months ago this package was released by Louis Aslett at Oxford http://www.louisaslett.com/HomomorphicEncryption/. Louis helped me use his package to do Fan and Vercauteren homomorphic encryption on my dataset. Because the ciphertexts are polynomials it's not too easy for an average data scientist to use the data. That's why I came up with more chill ways of encrypting Numerai's data that the article mentions like order-preserving encryption. There's a security vs easy of use trade off, for sure. But homomorphic encryption is a real thing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/3zvuge/enc...
Louis Aslett authored https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06574
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
> We demonstrate CryptoNets on the MNIST optical character recognition tasks. CryptoNets achieve 99% accuracy and can make more than 51000 predictions per hour on a single PC. Therefore, they allow high throughput, accurate, and private predictions.
> The strategy is able to nearly double the investment in less than 60 day period when run against real data trace.
http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2015/029_report.pdf "Algorithmic Trading of Cryptocurrency Based on Twitter Sentiment Analysis"
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... "When Bitcoin encounters information in an online forum: Using text mining to analyse user opinions and predict value fluctuation"
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e065/3631b4a476abf5276a264f... "Automated Bitcoin Trading via Machine Learning Algorithms"
Anecdotally, but you can also see the trends in wallet increases, nearly everybody I know under 30 owns crypto.
Will there be a bubble bursting? Sure, much like the dotcom bubble, crypto will see its downtrend too. But look where we are now. Businesses like pets.com could thrive.
Not all early internet developers got rich. People who bought domains like pets.com and pizza.com got rich, and they did not need a lot of technical know-how. If they did, the internet would have always been the playground of highly technical people, and would not have seen wide adoption or eternal Septembers.
I first got into Bitcoin around 2013 after lots of articles were posted about it on Hackernews. Second stint in 2015. Finally started again two months back. There is still (a lot of) money to be made. Some people say I missed the boat by not buying the outlier BTC when it was 1$, but I could have also bought it at 50$ or 200$. Heck, you think Bitcoin is going to stay at 3300$ forever? Ethereum was 1$ 2 years back. That's a 200x-300x ROI there. I have no doubt some newer coins will do an easy 5x in 12 months. Past two months for me have been life-changing (possibly life-changing for my family too).
Some of these crypto companies are going to be the next Google's. Or they will use their winnings (or ICO) to bootstrap a competitor.
Are there scammers, hackers, hoaxers? Yes, it is still very much the wild west. Compare your email box around 2000, and the amounts of spam you had to sift through. Some less tech savy and/or naive people will get suckered in and some people will invest more than they can stand to lose. This is unfortunate, but beyond my control. I may even make some money of their irrational behavior. But people who read HackerNews? I've no doubt they can sift through the crap to find the diamond mines in the making. To spot if a team is technically advanced or just faking their marketing and headcount.
About the blockchain. To me it is like the early days of the internet ~1997, but for the financial world. It has the potential to disrupt Central Banks, FinTech, Money Transfer, Micropayments, Identity & Privacy, Money lending, Smart Contracts, Provenance, IOT, ... Far from boring, far from bubble.
This month will see the third wave of large-scale Bitcoin interest. I've spoken to web developers that are learning blockchain and smart contracts to prepare 3-5 years out. People are actually betting their livelihood on this technology. Is that a guarantee that the crypto market cap will increase? No, but it is a sign of the times we live in and the sweet spot that Bitcoin hit this month.