Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Companies that raised money through ICOs are not so much startups as boiler room scams.

If you want to raise money by selling stock to non-Americans, there are European crowdfunding platforms that let you do exactly that. Real companies with actual products[1] have raised millions on these platforms, whereas every ICO ever is stuck in "plausible deniability R&D mode" where they pretend to be implementing their magic-powered whitepaper but nobody actually uses any of the stuff.

[1] BrewDog, Monzo, Revolut spring to mind as UK examples.

View on HN

Ethereum and Cosmos did ICOs and they have been quite successful, delivering on their promises. Maybe 99/100 ICOs fail but the same can be said about VC-backed startups.

No, 99/100 VC-backed startsup don't fail, and the rate of actual scams in them is FAR lower than in crypto.

Ethereum is basically an ICO pyramid scam, since the only use case for it has been to enable more ICOs.

Anything else has failed miserably because the network can't handle the traffic. Of course they're promising a scaling fix Real Soon Now (see above for "plausible deniability R&D mode").

USDC is a stablecoin backed one-for-one with US dollars, audited by Grant Thornton and operated by Circle and Coinbase, which are regulated and above-board legal cryptocurrency exchanges. As of this writing, $327 million has been converted into it, and any amount of money can be transferred globally within seconds. Over 250,000 transactions have occurred since September 2018 when it launched. This is a legitimate use-case that has been enabled by Ethereum. Wiring money or using ACH is more expensive, slower, and more cumbersome than USDC.

https://www.circle.com/en/usdc

https://etherscan.io/token/0xa0b86991c6218b36c1d19d4a2e9eb0c...

> Wiring money or using ACH is more expensive, slower, and more cumbersome that USDC

Wiring is free and instantaneous for anyone sending moderate sums. Fidelity, for example, does this.

How long and how expensive is it to wire $10,000,000 from Nigeria to South Korea? With USDC, it takes seconds and costs about 2 cents.

How does one convert $10M dollars in a Nigerian bank account into USDC? That seems like a necessary first step.

I show a legitimate use case other than “ICO pyramid scams” and you move the goal posts. It shows that you have an opinion about cryptocurrency that cannot be changed by logic, and are essentially a troll.

You claim that one can wire 10 million dollars from Nigeria in two seconds. If you’re not even going to answer the most obvious question about how someone could do this, it’s hardly a real world use case.

I’m not sure if you understand how the boring old SWIFT-addressed wire competes here. I haven’t sent 10 million, but hundreds of thousands anyway. It costs no more than $25, is settled within hours, and has all sorts of safeguards that don’t exist in crypto. The funds are immediately available for use rather than USDC which AFAIK isn’t accepted for payment on anything, anywhere.

> Wiring is free and instantaneous for anyone sending moderate sums. Fidelity, for example, does this.

What counts as a "moderate sum"? Last time I tried to wire money, every option I could find charged a $XX fee no matter how much I sent.

Define successful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com