There was a $30MM ICO which ended May 25th. The price of ETH was $177 at the time. Not bad! Dropbox’ first seed round was only $15,000.
I don't get it. Don't understand why people want to get a lot of money, put a ton of pressure on themselves, and then put out a shoddy half-baked, half-finished product. You see this with almost all software now but the cryptocurrency craze has made it endemic. People who have shown nothing are getting 30 million dollars in funding. Shouldn't you earn it first? Isn't that healthy?
You guys don't need $30 million dollars to do stuff like this. You're lying to yourself if believe you do. This is $30k effort. How about putting your head down, shutting your mouth, building something great, and then showing the world? Is that crazy? You can only assume these people are more about $$$ than what they are building.
Are you asking why people take $30m in uncollateralized funding and release broken software instead of taking $30k with some (albeit very little) governance and attempt to release quality, value creating products?
99% of crypto is about speculation, not investment; there's less and less talk about real utility as the bubble inflates and the need for real code (or even real ideas) to support the narrative decreases. I'm reminded of 1999 when the proverbial shoeshine boys were buying every IPO with ".com" in the name, driven by the reliable twin engines of fear (of missing out) and greed (money for nothing). Look at the bright colored icons and fun-sounding names on coinmarketcap: it's a 24/7/365 global penny stock arcade. When you view coins and ICOs through this lens the current state of the industry starts to make a lot more sense.
Gordon Hall quit the team shortly after the funding completed. Same with several other Storj engineers, and their COO. A few days before the sale the CEO was demoted and kicked off of the board. They still don't have a replacement.
hi, i'm gordon. and yeah, unfortunately i might be the only person who understands the entirety of the core library. yeah, that's scary. but i wouldn't bet any storj tokens on it because the payoff wouldn't be so great.
i'm not listed on the team anymore, because i - along with several others left the project during and after the token sale (empty handed, mind you) for various reasons.
i agree, storj didn't need $30mm (but did need more than $30k though, to be fair).
> You can only assume these people are more about $$$ than what they are building.
a reasonable assumption, but let's draw the line between those building and those profiting, because this assumption is not fair (or accurate) in describing the people who actually did the building.
Thanks for the response Gordon. Sorry to paint you with that brush. You've got my respect, if it means anything, probably took a lot of talent and effort to build. Good luck and keep fighting the good fight.
Unfortunately for the author of this amazing (and cringeworthy) exercise, skeptics often put in a lot of effort, but receive practically no reward compared to the con artist.
Even the people who agree with and appreciate the effort of the skeptics are few compared to the number of irrational people who gladly follow the cons.
This is a bit radical (and probably outside the interest of HN), but if we somehow could remove personal financial need from society, imagine where our technologies might be driven?... instead of where they typically get hijacked and driven.
Television was once lauded as the future best thing to ever happen to education, but we know how that turned out. Same with the internet and web. And so on. Blockchain technologies are now the hottest and most ideal way to build a scam, because the audience is greedy and the technology is well beyond the comprehension of the average person.
Build great stuff and don't be greedy - set an example. Make those greedy over mediocrity look bad. Build for the sake of building, because that's reward enough.
This naive approach likely leads to the head-down artist or creator being exploited by the greedy manager/agent/parasite/whatever, not some sort of life changing event for those who see this person's work and suffering with profit left on the table.
Maybe that's enough of a reward for you, but personally I work because I like to get paid. The fact that I enjoy my work immensely is just a happy accident. There are things I enjoy doing even more than my work - much more so! - and if I did not need to get paid, I'd be doing those things instead.
Just wondering: If you got so rich from crypto currency that you could retire, would you retire? Start your own company? Just do fun stuff? Or keep working?
I myself work, to occupy myself with interesting problems, so I would keep doing this, regardless of my wealth.
Wealthy enough to really never work again? Yes, I'd absolutely "retire." I'd still "work", in the sense that, say, angel investors work, or people own real estate; I'd also still write software in my free time.
But for the most part, no I wouldn't continue doing what I do now because I'd stop consulting and I would never again be an individual contributor. I'd probably devote "professional focus" to investing and academic research in math and cryptography while traveling all over the world like Tom from Myspace.
I think in conversations like this the dimension people like myself are talking about is freedom. I'd still work on what I'm passionate about even if I was wealthy, I would just cease doing it in a way that I don't have total control and direction over my work. That circles back to my original point - my passion for my work is not nearly enough of an incentive for me to do it if I'm not doing it with total autonomy.
There's an SF writer I really like for his books in the vein of this. His name is L. E. Modesitt, and some of his books that discuss this are the "Parafaith War" and probably the best "Adiamante."
In Douglas Adams's books the president of the universe is completely powerless because anyone who wants to be president should absolutely not be given any real authority.
The real ruler is a man living in a shack in the middle of nowhere who only cares about his cat and an occasional glass of whiskey.
Greed appears to me to be fundamentally intrinsic to human behavior and culture. I don't think it's realistic to try to get rid of it. Rather I think it would be more effective to use it as an incentive and actively limit its negative externalities.
Greed as we see it today is a symptom of our economics system. The system encourages greedy behavior, you win if you act greedy. I'm currently working on simulations attacking this problem, focusing on systems that discourage competitive actions and encourage cooperation and equality. A resulting society based on a more egalitarian economic system wouldn't be a utopia, but I hypothesize that we can create a much better world by attacking the root of all out systems and what types of behaviors it rewards.
If we removed financial (that is, material) need from society, we'd be in an utopia of endless plenty. This has been dreamed about for millennia. While not theoretically impossible, some children a society has a number of practical problems, like the human psychology. (Reworking humans is in the same ballpark. Being replaced by by other species, or machines, might be good — for them.)
True. I also think that it becomes a scam when you give up, and keep the money that's left. Say what you will about Secret (anyone remember that app?), but they returned money when they stopped. ICO funded projects? Who knows? Maybe just buy lambos as the author said.
I don't think true personal financial need drives much of this. Anybody smart enough to pull off a con like this could get an adequate job and make enough to live comfortably on.
I think the problem comes from people who won't stop there. Some are just sucking voids of desire; they always want more. Others want to be on top, to be number one. In my view, these people are broken.
So personally, I wonder about how we keep broken people in check, and how we rework society to produce fewer broken people.
There's a great bit in Iain Banks's Player of Games where the main character, who is from a post-scarcity utopia, visits a classic stellar empire, one clearly a stand-in for the worst parts of our current culture. The rich, imperial upper class types he's talking with have a hard time understanding the main character's lack of interest in owning. They ask, "Could you have a planet?" His take was roughly, "Well, I'm sure you could find an empty planet and land on it, but what would you do with it?"
It's something I think of often when I'm dealing with people trapped in a scarcity mentality.
Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital … Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by … the sense of having.
You see this everywhere. Rich people who don't have time to be home buying up vast swathes of land, locking up public gardens for personal perusal.
I followed the storj reddit for a while, since I bought into the crowdsale with Bitcoin. (Since sold. There was some kind of pump the other week on bittrex.) After the crowdsale, they appeared to be really rather disorganised. They took the $30m, sent everybody receipts, and then... nothing. No newsletters, no mails, no nothing, aside from occasional promises on reddit from one of the founders that things would improve. But they never really did. Couldn't even be bothered to wipe their noses and put their pants back on for long enough to click 'send' on a form email ;) Top marks for actually having a product, though...
BTC and ETH have appreciated significantly since the crowdsale finished, so heaven knows how much that $30m is worth now, and/or what they're going to do with it...
The fundraiser itself may well have been a violation of "qualified investor" rules. The SEC may well catch up with them eventually if they remain in the US.
I don't think so, it's pretty much up to the investors to do their due diligence. On that note, what I'm really curious about is who these people are that keep pouring money into these half-assed projects...
The commit pulse will tell me the frequency of code changes... Why has the activity stopped? My best guess is that funds have been raised. Why code when you can buy lambos?
To be fair this is how most pre-release software looks. I'm sure it works great on their test servers, but it takes time to document and fix all of the edge cases.
I invested in Storj, and I also put some resources behind farming. First, there are lots of issues, but that's to be expected with an early product. At least there is a product. Second, this is a very different project than Dropbox, a centralized cloud storage originally built on AWS. Comparing the two is exactly fair, and the long term value proposition of Story is very different from Dropbox. Third, They are building the platform, and as it improves, the clients will get better, simpler, and a community will form; give it more time. Fourth, Dropbox was founded in 2007; it took substantial time to get the front end polished and working well. This product is more about the AWS side of the Dropbox equation than the Dropbox side.
Finally, some results on my Storj farming. Not super easy to use, not super efficient, but working, and I expect it will get better. I have farmed about 15TB of data (storage) since the ICO. Its growing too; so there are real paying users using it.
I don't think there is a path to break even for storage alone, today. The real earnings seem to be in the transfer rates, but traffic is too low to ever consider it as anything other than an experiment. I heard Storj was going to prioritize farmers by latency and bandwidth; now that I've been reading about the turmoil, I'm not confident it will happen anytime soon.
My payout last month was ~$5 and I was in the top 30 by payout, if I remember correctly, but I had only received a couple of TB of data. This month has been much better, so maybe ~$100 but mostly because of data transfer. I've seen peak bandwidth of over 400Mbps in and out (800Mbps combined).
Interestingly, a number of the top earners have been trying to game the system by uploading a small amount of data until the shard ends up on their node and then doing the massive transfer to generate more Storj than the cost of the transit.
There was that SEC report a while back that sounded like it was gonna end the wild west era of ICOs, and though I don't keep up with ICO news I haven't heard of any big new launches in a while.
My impression is that it has accelerated if anything. Random teams are raising 5-10m$ daily, and people who missed out on the first wave a few months ago are now gearing up to be a part of the second wave.
Not all of them will raise successfully, but the percentage is way higher than you would expect. Not to mention some of the longer ongoing sales, such as EOS, with 200m+$ raises. Either way, it's still quite insane out there.
I think in this case it's more that they already have various governments breathing down their necks, so a show of regulation is just the thing - and trying to blame the terrible assets they're trading, rather than being blamed themselves for putting them up for trading.
It also has one of the only dev teams in the decentralized storage space that truly understand the power (and more importantly, the limitations) of blockchain.
How many technically challenging products have been overnight successes?
One thing that is really confounding about all the anti-blockchain rhetoric on HN is that people seem to expect these products to be finished instantaneously. Building great products takes years.
Blockchain has had eight years to come up with a use case that isn't a cryptocurrency. (And cryptocurrency has had eight years to come up with a use case that isn't illicit goods.) At this point, it's entirely reasonable to ask where the beef is.
This. Developers really must spend a lot more time and mental energy on UX if they intend things to be used by anyone other than developers with lots of time in their hands.
What bugs me the most about the whole ICO game is that it casts a long dark shadow about the whole blockchain stuff. Storj as well as other ideas in the realm are based on great ideas and I'd love to see them succeed. However, that Storj was able to obtain $30M in funding is really just awful. Sooner or later the cryptocoin market will crash and when this day comes and those projects still have no inherent value a lot of people will be pissed and leave the whole blockchain thing.
People didn't leave the Internet because of the dot com bubble burst. If blockchain has an advantage over more centralized approaches, it will bounce back as well.
In the dotcom bust investors lost their money, not the users. In the crypto world you are an user when you are invested (in smaller or larger extent). I agree, if blockchain apps really prove to be more powerful a possible bust won't really hurt, but in this state we are right now (no real world adoption for most of the stuff) a bust would be toxic.
Unless you're an active investor who is nuanced on the details of the protocols, just don't worry about it. You'll wake up one day, back up your files to the new cloud, you'll pay using some crypto app - and you'll have no idea that decentralization was ever involved.
Says the guy posting via HTTP over TCP. Like I said, just don't worry about it. It'll be kid proof in 10 years.
The rules for being a smart investor haven't changed. If you want low risk safe investments then no one is selling you on ICOs. It's like people on the sideline want "some of that Internet money" without taking any risk. That's not how high risk ventures work. So explain to me what people are complaining about?
Because the money was defrauded. That's a huge point.
The fact that "money will keep circulating" is irrelevant.
It's like saying, "Sure, the thief took your money, but you shouldn't say it's 'gone'. He spent the money on booze and cigarettes, and then the store owner spent it on rent and food. So you see? The money isn't really gone, it's circulating and increasing value for everyone!"
I understand the appeal of ICOs and cryptocurrencies and distributed storage that is automatically shared, decentralized, etc etc. But a part of me says "is this complexity necessary?". The appeal of a service like Dropbox is that it is simple. Most engineer friends I had at the time when services like Box and Dropbox started popping up, laughed at the idea... "It is just a fancy ftp". Now they all use these services in one way or another.
Simplicity is often an important overlooked killer feature.
And this is exactly the polar oppossite of that!
A friend of mine that has been doing ICOs behind the scenes (there is an entire methodology that makes them successful that include some questionable marketing techniques) has been pushing me to do an ICO. But one of the requirements is that the service you provide is directly tied to the currency itself. This file storage service is a perfect example of that. A cryptocurrency looking for a service that works with a paradigm vs a service that just centers on being useful for customers. I am just not interested in doing that...
I can't deny that this has been useful and profitable for him. Here has been doing successful multimilliondollar ICOs where he charges 100k a pop. To me, it just seems like such a scam to take advantage of this bubble, that I'd rather just build a healthy successful business "the old way"
So they're basically an ICO consultant or contractor? It looks like it's just as profitable to him as it sounds.
As far as those marketing techniques go, I'm aware of a lot of them such as paying for press releases or articles and paying users to shill their ICO everywhere, buying twitter followers, etc, but I wonder how much worse it gets. I guess it depends on the ICO and those behind it, some obviously 'just' use shady tactics while others completely lie and defraud investors.
sadly much worse. Without getting into many details, part of the tactics involves writing a pseudo paper and then getting endorsements from high profile people within a specific community. It is legal, but shady as hell IMHO.
> Simplicity is often an important overlooked killer feature.
> And this is exactly the polar oppossite of that!
I totally agree but this project seems to be still in alpha state. Have they advertised any kind of stable end-user friendly release yet? It doesn't look like it and therefor attacking the user-friendliness of the project seems a bit pre-mature, I'm sure the first alpha version of dropbox was unusable too by common people it's just that this project is open source and therefor anyone can give it a try before it gets stable.
Does anybody here know of a good video/tech-talk that gives an in-depth introduction to blockchain technology? Something at academic level, and good for a Sunday afternoon? Thanks in advance!
This is much more basic than academic level, for which you could maybe start with the original Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin white paper? - but this video is a fantastic introduction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_160oMzblY8
What's the likelihood that ISPs will levy higher rates on bandwidth for things like Storj and Filecoin? This 'next-generation' model of enabling people to profit off of cheap/unlimited internet packages seems like a juicy target.
A blockchain is at the end of the day nothing else than a distributed database where everyone can run nodes.
This is a hell of an effort and everyone who is using this 'feature' needs a very good reason and use case which justifies the costs.
Every new ICO should answer the question if a distributed BFT database is required. If yes is the benefit big enough? If not then just forget it. Or invest and sell the first minute this scam is on an exchange.
About Storj and similar coins: why do I want a decentral Dropbox? If I want to host my files in the cloud, what is the benefit of having a distributed decentral BFT db?
An ICO makes sense for crowdfunding in very limited conditions:
* if you have a technical problem that requires decentralised, cryptographically verified tokens (if it doesn’t need tokens, they shouldn’t be bolted on);
* if the tokens are directly usable on the platform itself;
* if at least a proof-of-concept of the technology verifiably exists;
* it also helps if the idea is even plausible as a business.
Unsurprisingly, most ICOs don’t meet these criteria.
The closest I've seen is Civic, which tried quite hard to meet the first three. However, for the fourth, it's still using a blockchain to solve a problem that only exists if you use a blockchain.
The easiest reason I can think of is privacy and anti-censorship. From current events, some groups may experience more and more trouble hosting their content on "public" providers like Google, Dropbox, or Amazon.
As far as I can see their idea is to incentivise people to "rent out" hard drive space to the Storj network, and get StorjTokens in return, although it's not quite clear from the website what you can do with these coins or what value they hold.
I think it's interesting, I guess protocols like BitTorrent don't work for personal files as you need seeders to be available at all times....I'm half inclined to think Storj might suffer from the same issue if every node that is storing replicas of your blocks goes away - or will the financial "incentive" be enough for people to keep their nodes alive.
What happens if the value of Storj just drops to the floor?
No idea how command chaining could be involved in that (would love to know though!) but if somebody mistakenly takes down a production service from lack of command chaining, let's just say command chaining would probably be the least of my concerns.
I'm still curious as to how is this profitable to whoever created it. There is a shit ton of code in this project - this same amount of code written for an employer or commercial project would net the author quite a bit of money - so what's the benefit creating this abomination (that doesn't even work) versus just working on something actually useful?
Ive been looking for more 'technical skeptic' posts about cash-grab cryptos, so this author better post more articles like this.
Got tired of hearing about some new amazing, world changing crypto coming out and then spending hours researching only to end up with a bad taste in my mouth. Both for the community and the tech itself.
This one has done whole lot more for their money than vast majority of other ICO 'startups' that have nothing but nice site and a water-filled, meaningless whitepaper.
I'm the author and didn't notice this post on HN. I have reviewed another blockchain product! The review will be live on shitcoin.com at around 7 AM EST on Monday.
138 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadWhat relation does he have with the project? He's not even listed on the team:
https://storj.io/team.html
There was a $30MM ICO which ended May 25th. The price of ETH was $177 at the time. Not bad! Dropbox’ first seed round was only $15,000.
I don't get it. Don't understand why people want to get a lot of money, put a ton of pressure on themselves, and then put out a shoddy half-baked, half-finished product. You see this with almost all software now but the cryptocurrency craze has made it endemic. People who have shown nothing are getting 30 million dollars in funding. Shouldn't you earn it first? Isn't that healthy?
You guys don't need $30 million dollars to do stuff like this. You're lying to yourself if believe you do. This is $30k effort. How about putting your head down, shutting your mouth, building something great, and then showing the world? Is that crazy? You can only assume these people are more about $$$ than what they are building.
Bingo.
i'm not listed on the team anymore, because i - along with several others left the project during and after the token sale (empty handed, mind you) for various reasons.
i agree, storj didn't need $30mm (but did need more than $30k though, to be fair).
> You can only assume these people are more about $$$ than what they are building.
a reasonable assumption, but let's draw the line between those building and those profiting, because this assumption is not fair (or accurate) in describing the people who actually did the building.
They can honestly say that Storj lead developer left of personal reasons and no one else can take over.
There is no obligation on their part to pay anything back.
Like the author I have been following crypto currencies (and doing small time mining) since 2011. I have seen several boom-crash cycles.
Still I boggle at the madness of the crowds.
https://www.reddit.com/r/storj/comments/6llxpn/so_long_frien...
Other way round: produce a half-baked product, get a lot of money, hope your investors are too libertarian to set law enforcement on you.
> Shouldn't you earn it first? Isn't that healthy?
Have you heard of this thing called "capitalism"?
Even the people who agree with and appreciate the effort of the skeptics are few compared to the number of irrational people who gladly follow the cons.
This is a bit radical (and probably outside the interest of HN), but if we somehow could remove personal financial need from society, imagine where our technologies might be driven?... instead of where they typically get hijacked and driven.
Television was once lauded as the future best thing to ever happen to education, but we know how that turned out. Same with the internet and web. And so on. Blockchain technologies are now the hottest and most ideal way to build a scam, because the audience is greedy and the technology is well beyond the comprehension of the average person.
The more we can decrease it in society – the more freedom we'll all get.
You're making $140k a year. Nice. How much of your time and attention and energy are you trading for that? Is it worth it?
I myself work, to occupy myself with interesting problems, so I would keep doing this, regardless of my wealth.
But for the most part, no I wouldn't continue doing what I do now because I'd stop consulting and I would never again be an individual contributor. I'd probably devote "professional focus" to investing and academic research in math and cryptography while traveling all over the world like Tom from Myspace.
I think in conversations like this the dimension people like myself are talking about is freedom. I'd still work on what I'm passionate about even if I was wealthy, I would just cease doing it in a way that I don't have total control and direction over my work. That circles back to my original point - my passion for my work is not nearly enough of an incentive for me to do it if I'm not doing it with total autonomy.
My daughter can't eat the sake of building.
The real ruler is a man living in a shack in the middle of nowhere who only cares about his cat and an occasional glass of whiskey.
Bad actors will corrupt any system out of greed for wealth and power.
After they took a couple mil for themselves :) [0]
[0]: http://www.businessinsider.com/secret-founders-pocket-6-mill...
I think the problem comes from people who won't stop there. Some are just sucking voids of desire; they always want more. Others want to be on top, to be number one. In my view, these people are broken.
So personally, I wonder about how we keep broken people in check, and how we rework society to produce fewer broken people.
There's a great bit in Iain Banks's Player of Games where the main character, who is from a post-scarcity utopia, visits a classic stellar empire, one clearly a stand-in for the worst parts of our current culture. The rich, imperial upper class types he's talking with have a hard time understanding the main character's lack of interest in owning. They ask, "Could you have a planet?" His take was roughly, "Well, I'm sure you could find an empty planet and land on it, but what would you do with it?"
It's something I think of often when I'm dealing with people trapped in a scarcity mentality.
Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital … Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by … the sense of having.
You see this everywhere. Rich people who don't have time to be home buying up vast swathes of land, locking up public gardens for personal perusal.
If we are peaceful, suddenly existence doesn't make any sense. And we are just better off killing our existence.
Fighting for existence is what pushed humans (or living creatures) to exist up to this day.
I followed the storj reddit for a while, since I bought into the crowdsale with Bitcoin. (Since sold. There was some kind of pump the other week on bittrex.) After the crowdsale, they appeared to be really rather disorganised. They took the $30m, sent everybody receipts, and then... nothing. No newsletters, no mails, no nothing, aside from occasional promises on reddit from one of the founders that things would improve. But they never really did. Couldn't even be bothered to wipe their noses and put their pants back on for long enough to click 'send' on a form email ;) Top marks for actually having a product, though...
BTC and ETH have appreciated significantly since the crowdsale finished, so heaven knows how much that $30m is worth now, and/or what they're going to do with it...
I understand there's a thin line between a failed business venture and outright fraud/lying, but stories like this seem so slimy.
It looks like their early investors are unhappy for other reasons too: https://safenetforum.org/t/storj-screws-their-ico-token-hold...
The commit pulse will tell me the frequency of code changes... Why has the activity stopped? My best guess is that funds have been raised. Why code when you can buy lambos?
(yes, they actually bothered trying to promote their thing on /r/buttcoin)
Pay no attention to the glaring lack of actual dev work behind the curtain!
I invested in Storj, and I also put some resources behind farming. First, there are lots of issues, but that's to be expected with an early product. At least there is a product. Second, this is a very different project than Dropbox, a centralized cloud storage originally built on AWS. Comparing the two is exactly fair, and the long term value proposition of Story is very different from Dropbox. Third, They are building the platform, and as it improves, the clients will get better, simpler, and a community will form; give it more time. Fourth, Dropbox was founded in 2007; it took substantial time to get the front end polished and working well. This product is more about the AWS side of the Dropbox equation than the Dropbox side.
Finally, some results on my Storj farming. Not super easy to use, not super efficient, but working, and I expect it will get better. I have farmed about 15TB of data (storage) since the ICO. Its growing too; so there are real paying users using it.
My payout last month was ~$5 and I was in the top 30 by payout, if I remember correctly, but I had only received a couple of TB of data. This month has been much better, so maybe ~$100 but mostly because of data transfer. I've seen peak bandwidth of over 400Mbps in and out (800Mbps combined).
Interestingly, a number of the top earners have been trying to game the system by uploading a small amount of data until the shard ends up on their node and then doing the massive transfer to generate more Storj than the cost of the transit.
https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/storj/
The level of fraud and stupidity in the ICO world is pretty shocking. It's not going to be pretty when the bubble bursts.
How many ICOs have you heard of with anonymous-only distribution?
A good overview of the amount of these things is here: https://www.icoalert.com/
Not all of them will raise successfully, but the percentage is way higher than you would expect. Not to mention some of the longer ongoing sales, such as EOS, with 200m+$ raises. Either way, it's still quite insane out there.
http://news.8btc.com/okcoin-ceo-host-non-public-ico-regulati...
It works, they have an active development team, and the network keeps growing: https://siahub.info/map
One thing that is really confounding about all the anti-blockchain rhetoric on HN is that people seem to expect these products to be finished instantaneously. Building great products takes years.
This. Developers really must spend a lot more time and mental energy on UX if they intend things to be used by anyone other than developers with lots of time in their hands.
The rules for being a smart investor haven't changed. If you want low risk safe investments then no one is selling you on ICOs. It's like people on the sideline want "some of that Internet money" without taking any risk. That's not how high risk ventures work. So explain to me what people are complaining about?
The fact that "money will keep circulating" is irrelevant. It's like saying, "Sure, the thief took your money, but you shouldn't say it's 'gone'. He spent the money on booze and cigarettes, and then the store owner spent it on rent and food. So you see? The money isn't really gone, it's circulating and increasing value for everyone!"
Simplicity is often an important overlooked killer feature.
And this is exactly the polar oppossite of that!
A friend of mine that has been doing ICOs behind the scenes (there is an entire methodology that makes them successful that include some questionable marketing techniques) has been pushing me to do an ICO. But one of the requirements is that the service you provide is directly tied to the currency itself. This file storage service is a perfect example of that. A cryptocurrency looking for a service that works with a paradigm vs a service that just centers on being useful for customers. I am just not interested in doing that...
I can't deny that this has been useful and profitable for him. Here has been doing successful multimilliondollar ICOs where he charges 100k a pop. To me, it just seems like such a scam to take advantage of this bubble, that I'd rather just build a healthy successful business "the old way"
As far as those marketing techniques go, I'm aware of a lot of them such as paying for press releases or articles and paying users to shill their ICO everywhere, buying twitter followers, etc, but I wonder how much worse it gets. I guess it depends on the ICO and those behind it, some obviously 'just' use shady tactics while others completely lie and defraud investors.
> And this is exactly the polar oppossite of that!
I totally agree but this project seems to be still in alpha state. Have they advertised any kind of stable end-user friendly release yet? It doesn't look like it and therefor attacking the user-friendliness of the project seems a bit pre-mature, I'm sure the first alpha version of dropbox was unusable too by common people it's just that this project is open source and therefor anyone can give it a try before it gets stable.
This is a hell of an effort and everyone who is using this 'feature' needs a very good reason and use case which justifies the costs.
Every new ICO should answer the question if a distributed BFT database is required. If yes is the benefit big enough? If not then just forget it. Or invest and sell the first minute this scam is on an exchange.
About Storj and similar coins: why do I want a decentral Dropbox? If I want to host my files in the cloud, what is the benefit of having a distributed decentral BFT db?
* if you have a technical problem that requires decentralised, cryptographically verified tokens (if it doesn’t need tokens, they shouldn’t be bolted on);
* if the tokens are directly usable on the platform itself;
* if at least a proof-of-concept of the technology verifiably exists;
* it also helps if the idea is even plausible as a business.
Unsurprisingly, most ICOs don’t meet these criteria.
The closest I've seen is Civic, which tried quite hard to meet the first three. However, for the fourth, it's still using a blockchain to solve a problem that only exists if you use a blockchain.
The easiest reason I can think of is privacy and anti-censorship. From current events, some groups may experience more and more trouble hosting their content on "public" providers like Google, Dropbox, or Amazon.
Decentralization is an astute counter.
I think it's interesting, I guess protocols like BitTorrent don't work for personal files as you need seeders to be available at all times....I'm half inclined to think Storj might suffer from the same issue if every node that is storing replicas of your blocks goes away - or will the financial "incentive" be enough for people to keep their nodes alive.
What happens if the value of Storj just drops to the floor?
Life imitating fiction imitating life...
Got tired of hearing about some new amazing, world changing crypto coming out and then spending hours researching only to end up with a bad taste in my mouth. Both for the community and the tech itself.
https://upspin.io