Block.one’s sale of its digital tokens dwarfs other coin sales | Hacker News Reader

Block.one’s sale of its digital tokens dwarfs other coin sales

wsj.com

30 pointsCrafty_Gurl28 comments

Read the history of the South Sea Bubble.[1]

"For example; one company floated was to buy the Irish Bogs, another to manufacture a gun to fire square cannon balls and the most ludicrous of all “For carrying-on an undertaking of great advantage but no-one to know what it is!!” Unbelievably £2000 was invested in this one!"

"Then the ‘bubble’ in London burst. The stocks crashed and people all over the country lost all of their money. Porters and ladies maids who had bought their own carriages became destitute almost overnight. The Clergy, Bishops and the Gentry lost their life savings; the whole country suffered a catastrophic loss of money and property."

"Suicides became a daily occurrence. The gullible mob whose innate greed had lain behind this mass hysteria for wealth, demanded vengeance. The Postmaster General took poison and his son, who was the Secretary of State, avoided disaster by fortuitously contracting smallpox and died!"

"The South Sea Company Directors were arrested and their estates forfeited. There were 462 members of the House of Commons and 112 Peers in the South Sea Company who were involved in the crash. Frantic bankers thronged the lobbies at Parliament and the Riot Act was read to restore order."

We're getting close to that point.

[1] https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/South...

"Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" is well worth reading on this and other bubbles and pre-20th-Century memes.

More recently (90s) the Albanian pyramid schemes collapsed the economy and prompted a UN intervention to restore order in the country.

There are so many things to note about this ICO:

a. This is one of the longest running ICO. It started last year somewhere during summer.

b. EOS's terms are rather ominous:

block.one is building the EOS.IO Software but it will not configure and/or launch any public blockchain platform adopting the open source EOS.IO Software (the “EOS Platform”). Any launch of an EOS Platform will occur by members of the community unrelated to block.one. Third parties launching the EOS Platform may delete, modify or supplement the EOS.IO Software prior to, during or after launching the EOS Platform.

The EOS Tokens do not have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features, express or implied, including, without limitation, any uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features on the EOS Platform.

Some argue this keeps EOS from being sued by SEC. But given the way Bitshares launch was handled by the same guy I think this might be a problem.

c. The CTO or the head tech honcho for this is a guy called Daniel Larimer, who has been pumping out one coin after another - Bitshares, Steemit and now EOS.

Every coin has some new fangled Proof forumla:

Bitshares had DPoS

Steemit has "Proof-of-Brain" (I kid you not)

And everyone of them is touted as the next big thing. AFAIK this is unique in cryptocurrency world where people tend to evangelize one particular coin.

They should use the 4 billion to buy a crypto portfilio of coins with actual value. Litecoin and Ethereum would be a good start.

They're building EOS, they're probably going to be dumping Ethereum for the forseeable future. Pretty interesting strategy to be honest.

Imagine raising your capital with the stock of another public company, then your proceed to continuously devalue said public company by dumping your shares in order to gain liquid capital to build your product.

Edit: The most interesting thing to come out of the cryptocurrency is that the lines between equity and currency have become very blurred

That's why some of the more progressive platforms opt for a dual token model, separating the governance token from the utility token. The founders of one of these used the example that you wouldn't go into an Apple Store to buy an Apple product with Apple shares.

I assume you're talking about NEO :P

I work on this

https://o3.network/

NEO was one of the first, but there are many now. The dual token model is also popular with commodity tokens and stable coins. The separation of concerns does help prevent certain conflicts of interest.

I'll try to check out the mobile wallet sometime.

Why couldn't you though. The ONLY reason now is that it's not as liquid as cash, but that's sort of the point and what's so exciting about the layer of automation that the crypto platforms are bringing. If it has value you can use it directly in a trade, and if the receiver wants to hold there value in a different token, the exchange can be completely automated. This brings freedom to the holder, they can hold there value in anything they want, it's not longer determined by what the buyer will accept.

>actual value

No.

Litecoin and Ethereum don't have value either.

Nor does any currency with your "argument".

Try not paying your taxes with Dollars.

The value of Ethereum is determined by the supposed token utility. Which means it'll depend on what it is eventually used for.

Am I an idiot for not understanding blockchain and ICO sales at all? Like, I get them somewhat in theory, but not understanding how they would actually be used?

Purchasers generally use them to get early and cheap access to potential speculative bubbles. Most "investors" fully intend to sell them as soon as it makes sense.

In other words there's no utility at all.

There are a few (e.g. Kik, Brave) that claim the coins will be used in some sort of platform, that presumably will sustain the value of the currency.

However one should always be hesitant to believe these claims because there are no regulatory agencies currently protecting investors in the case of ICO fraud.

Is there any reason to believe 99.9% of the “purchases” are not just fake self-dealing?

Is there actually $4B USD equivalent tied up in Ethereum escrow somewhere, proof of stake style, or can the issuer not just “buy” their own tokens, tumble the “proceeds” for a bit, and “buy” some more?

>EOSIO is an Operating System on which scalable Decentralized Autonomous Communities “DACs” can easily be built, launched, and governed. Made possible through asynchronous smart contract communication, EOSIO is designed to empower communities to create the next era of disruptive organizations.

Oh no. I really hope they fork an existing OS.

(Source: https://block.one)

It's not an OS in the conventional sense, it's more of a platform - definitely not like any existing non-crypto software, closest only to things like the etherum DAO.

Is there a way around the wsj paywall?

Click on the web link on the comment page.

http://archive.li/DZUzb

make the domain name fullwsj.com instead of wsj.com

Outline is pretty useful for this: https://outline.com/aWgDS2

Facebook redirect works, http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/inv...

Here's a bookmarklet

  javascript:location.href='http://facebook.com/l.php?u='+location.href

or replace the wsj.com with fullwsj.com

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