Estonia's gov is famous for adapting new things. I still remember their initiative on e-visa. Actually China is trying to do that too. But crypto coins are made to decentralize things, I wonder how these gov-lead coins will play any parts.
I have an Estonian e-Residency. It does not allow you to reside in or enter the country. Even opening a bank account is non-trivial (as far as I've read, I tried it but gave up after a couple of hours), which makes me question the value of the e-Residency.
Is not a e-visa...it called e-residency and simply is an ID card for use all the estonian services(like: open a company, pay taxes, open a bank account etc...)
It NOT GIVE a work permit in EU and of course not give a permission to travel in schengeng.
It's simply an ID card. The main difference is that:
- Normally in other EU countries for have an ID card for services, you must live there, while with e-residency you can do have and do all the stuff remotely.
- It's pretty useless, you can google it and see how had a lot of hype, but in real case uses, it's useless (example: yes you can open a company remotely, but if you don't live in estonia, is a mess with taxes...and having an e-residency, doesn't give you a valid visa for live+work there...so often you can't move to estonia to work, even if you have a company opened in estonia)
>It's pretty useless, you can google it and see how had a lot of hype, but in real case uses, it's useless (example: yes you can open a company remotely, but if you don't live in estonia, is a mess with taxes...
Pheew, I thought I was the only one with this opinion, given the hype there is about this thing all over the net.
To me the whole stuff seems a lot like the plans of the gnomes in South Park (but in five steps):
1) get an e-residency (please read as "pay us some little money")
2) establish an Estonia company (please read as "pay us some more money")
3) open a bank account in this or that bank (please read as "give our friends a little more money")
4) ?
5) Profit.
The only practical use I can see is to create a new sort of Double Irish:
You definitely aren't the only one with that opinion. If you've visited the card's homepage or tried to register for one, you'll have realized it confers almost no privileges.
The PRC leadership could "own" a cryptocurrency by securing a majority of nodes in the graph under their control, either physically or by mandating the use of their software, and disallowing the exchange of user-forks off their own coin-base.
While users would always be able to use their own forks, the gov would only allow taxes and retail trade to happen with their branch, thus de-legitimizing user forks and reducing their utility (and hence value).
Also given that most cryptocurrencies are only pseudonymous, means they could "follow the money" and quite easily charge someone for handling a disallowed cryptocurrency. This is why I feel Monero is undervalued compared to BTC - as Monero has greater utility for Bitcoin's original mainstream activity: online black-market purchasing.
Wishful thinking. This will probably not, in the short term, add sanity. It will, however, provide a buying opportunity for a week/month perhaps.
China will make some announcement in the future that softens or reverses this one, and we'll see a spike in crypto prices.
Hopefully there will be some sane regulation (or at least guidance) on ICOs to make it more difficult for scammy types to use ICOs as tools to bilk unsaavy "investors" (which includes most humans).
I think it is safe to say that this is because it is something the party can't control (in the somewhat more overt sense rather than the regulatory sense).
It probably has a lot more to do with the country regulating its own fiat currency, foreign change and savings quite aggressively. That made any previously unregulated (because new) alternative the _de facto_ change mechanism.
This is one of the things about bitcoin nobody has ever explained to me adequately. Governments use monetary policy & other economic tools to regulate the economy. Assuming we're all Keynsians here, this is a pretty important feature that govts will not give up, so how is Bitcoin ever supposed to supplant fiat currency?
The idea of Bitcoin replacing fiat is a vision, not a plan.
People assume, or just like to believe, that as Bitcoin adoption grows, the advantages of Bitcoin will far surpass fiat and people will gradually start moving to it as a de facto currency. This will/would be an organic process, likely to last a few decades at least.
I'd disagree. What Bitcoin fans want is "digital gold", not the gold standard.
The gold standard is a system where paper currency is backed by a guarantee that it is redeemable for a given amount of gold. Of course the govt can rescind this promise at any time.
What Bitcoin fans want is something more akin to gold coins, where the value of the currency is independent of any state.
Fair enough, but effectively it has the same economical implications as the gold standard, except maybe made stronger by the fact that the government can't do anything at all to change the way it works, doesn't it?
I think the pro and cons of the gold standard (as listed by Wikipedia) seem to apply fairly well to the Bitcoin economy.
I hold many assets in this space including ETH and NEO. There are tons of scams and money grabs with ICOs. While this announcement has been pretty brutal for me, I think it is ultimately a good thing for the industry as a whole.
I think ICOs can be extremely beneficial for teams to raise money. But a lot of people buying these tokens do not understand what they're getting in return. I'd like to see it become easier to actually own equity or a % of a company's revenue by holding tokens. Hopefully these future regulations will build trust in the ecosystem by minimizing scams and providing clarity. More trust yields more people converting fiat -> crypto... which should yield a healthier less volatile ecosystem.
How so? It has a lot of ties to industry already, good development, and plenty of evidence of delivering on their roadmap. That's already better than most crypto-currencies.
Like what? Every partnership or "tie" that I've ever heard of ends up being a rumor bordering on outright falsehood - like Microsoft (x2). 2 out of 3 ICOs they had announced prior to the ban ended up being delayed by 6 months or more, quite likely due to platform immaturity.
> good development
For an alpha / early stage crypto project, maybe. However they lack all the features that NEO actually brags about and the codebase is an untestable C# mess where core modules are more or less opaque to everyone but the main developer. It's a security nightmare waiting to happen, and a usability nightmare in the moment : building & publishing the simplest dapp on the platform is basically a non starter right now.
> plenty of evidence of delivering on their roadmap
Again, like what? The platform doesn't actually do anything yet. It basically consists of a few centralized servers and a centrally mined (and centrally owned) token. They're nowhere close to even delivering on dBFT itself, let alone high-concept stuff like mapping physical goods to a "digital identity".
> That's already better than most crypto-currencies.
Not if you compare it to other "currencies" in anything close to the same price range. Its valuation is far and away driven by clever marketing and uninformed speculation.
Is their website neo.org? Because that website won't load for me after about 5 minutes. Not exactly inspiring a lot of trust for someone who wants to learn about them.
But without ICOs, China will now see nasty missing-file images for all of its programs, since many users still use Windows XP, which doesn't support PNG icons.
People should really learn to define acronyms before using them in all writing mediums. I don't care if the author has used the term 10,000 with colleagues, he should still define them upon their first use in the article body.
It's important to note that ICOs are a mechanism rather than a financial instrument and it's the nature of the underlying financial instrument that generally influences the legality.
For example if it's used as pre-sale (i.e. currency that will be used in product for a future product) then that's likely legal in most places, if it's used as a proxy for equity then it's likely illegal in most countries (most countries prohibit unregulated share offerings to non-sophisticated consumers).
Although in some cases ICOs might get considered as gambling if the purpose is primarily considered to be for speculation rather than whatever the underlying product is.
not a lawyer but be careful, some "products" like a club membership for example, have been ruled as actually securities
in short, any "product" can be a security if there is even a hint of speculative investment activity (and a motivated prosecutor)
really it is less about logic and definitions...this audience wants to parse things and recompile. in law and moreso in regulatory affairs, it is far more about guiding behavior by carrots or sticks to a particular philosophical/moral/politial/economic subjective end goal
A lot of people already knew about that and was able to profit in the weekend. Some coins just jumped nowhere and now will crash. Hshare has passed 1 billion market cap and will be probably be evaluated less than 10 million at the end of the day. Walton, Loopring, NAV...
Finally somebody in position of power stepped in to stop this mad online casino. I was not expecting this sensible move from China, was hoping EU or US would lead the way on regulating this crypto fraud. I hope Fed/ECB follow the Chinese Central Bank and ban ICOs too and start regulating crypto and enforcing some basic rules.
That SEC memo was weak. They should have made much more forceful statement. Thousands (likely tens of thousands) of US citizens are still investing in ICOs, there needs to be much stronger action taken to stop their gambling.
Because you and the SEC know much better than all of them?
You know we're talking about the same SEC that didn't saw the real estate bubble coming in 2007/08 (size > trillions, CDOs are obviously fine) or the dotcom bubble in 2000 (size > trillions, they approved the IPOs, right)?
If so, please give me reasons (instead of opinions or references to SEC "authority") as to why the ICOs in a 175 bn market are "dangerous".
My opinion is not important. The issue is lots of unsophisticated investors are betting their savings / money they can't afford to lose on cryptocurrency in hopes to flip their investment quickly and get rich. This is something which should be regulated so you can't just randomly dump your IRA/401k to buy some random cryptocurrency generated over a weekend by some person in a garage with shell company in Cayman Islands.
If someone has the knowledge to create a cryptocurrency in a weekend, in a garage, and have the foresight to operate from a friendly jurisdiction, and convinces people to buy it; then please let me know who that person is so I can invest in them. I'd love to get them out of a garage and into an office to see what they can really do.
I can create a new cryptocurrency over a weekend. It's not really that hard and most of these ICOs are just copycats with few parameter changes. Projects which actually develop something new are very few so kudos to them. Majority are just quick copies of existing code and rebranding.
This doesn't appear to be an accurate description of the ICO market as it exists. The hardest work in ICOs is the marketing. At the back end, they literally put in the fine print that the thing you just bought is worthless.
And EOS has been one of the biggest ICOs. Also, despite the "no US citizens" bit, it's been advertising to the general public in the US (and in the UK). They are selling an ERC-20 magic bean to be traded on the bubble machines, and both buyers and sellers are going nod-nod wink-wink.
No it is still the same as Bitcoin clones in 2013.
These days ICOs are cloning the same smart contract template and just making small edits to it.
Most of the time they barely have any other code than just the slightly edited smart contract template and white paper which is also pretty much a copy paste with buzz words relevant to their niche.
And based on that they are raising millions of dollars.
Of course there are couple of exceptions of projects that actually seem to have some tech foundation (like Sia for example) but these are rare. Scam copy cats without any tech are majority of ICOs.
Their reasoning is "we have an idea, let's raise millions of dollars and we will hire bunch of devs to write the software". Mostly founders are non technical "idea people" so I would doubt their ability to even know if their idea is feasible.
Projects which start with strong technical foundations and don't try to raise money to build their tech (putting cart in front of the horse) are the solid ones. Projects which have no tech and raise money first, those are not likely to succeed imho.
> Nowadays ICOs I'm seeing involve a lot of very hard work.
For example? What ICO idea is not a previously failed startup? Distributed file storage that's been built a few times and each time turned out to be painfully slow and impractical? An iOS and Android port of the wallet software? Yet another browser?
At the moment, the convincing doesn't seem to need to be very much, particularly where ICOs are involved. Copy someone else's white paper, post in a few forums with the word ICO splashed around liberally, and Bob's your uncle.
I think that's kinda why people are welcoming this move - there's a lot of trash coins and trash ICOs with no hope of anything ever coming from them, with a relatively low input of time and effort. But because they offer trade-able tokens and some of them might take off, and at least some of them might get a hype-cycle and increase in value whether there's any underlying value or not, and it's all new, shiny, crypto-magic-money...
I'm not sure this argument holds much weight. All investments have inherent risk. It's the job of the investors to assume how much risk they're taking. You cannot ban all digital currencies simply because a large amount of ICOs are poorly thought through, if not malicious. That would block a huge amount of innovation in a technology with huge potential to revolutionize many markets, if not all markets.
It's the equivalent of banning startups to protect investors from stupid/malicious founders, which has obvious negative effects on the economy. And with crowdfunding making its way to startup investment, it's not a reach to compare the two.
In this subthread I am arguing that someone who can create an altcoin or ICO from their home in a weekend is not necessarily a financial genius who should be paid millions, as it's fairly easy to do.
In other subthreads I am saying why I think the ban on ICOs might be welcomed, even if it could take the good down with the bad. I'm not arguing in any thread for an outright ban on digital currencies.
You only argued a portion of the point I was making. Simply making a cryptocurrency isn't enough. Differentiating in a way where I would be convinced to buy it, now that will obviously take genius since the mere creation of a cryptocurrency is commodity code. And it's not fair to say that just launching an ICO will mean an influx of money either, that is, token buyers are just shoving money into anything, because I can show you failed ICOs as well.
>> Differentiating in a way where I would be convinced to buy it, now that will obviously take genius
Evidently it doesn't really though, because we're in a stage where these are magic, and people are investing based on a little bit of hype which becomes self-sustaining.
There are lots of altcoins out there, most with not much value, but slowly trickling along. And there have been lots of ICOs of dubious value.
I obviously don't know what it takes to persuade you, personally, to invest. But it seems not to take much for the crypto-currency world at large to dive in right now.
Most of these ICOs are utter garbage and the only reason people "invest" in a garbage coin is because they think there is some greater fool that will buy it off them.
To give them credit people have made many times their money buying and reselling but it would be idiotic to let this madness continue.
So now you are going to decide what consenting adults can do with their money, by deciding they can't invest in ICOs and other scam^H^H^H^H unregulated schemes until they have put enough away to satisfy you.
I'm not sure this is qualitatively different to a ban, really.
I'm really not sure I see a difference, if you're going to start from the absolutist position that the state needs to butt out.
Either way, bans or forcing provision for retirement etc, you're taking the position that someone else does know best, and that they need protecting from their own spending behaviour. After that it's just a matter of degree.
My position is that there should be no social safety net provided at the taxpayer's expense. If one is going to argue that we ought to provide a safety net, and ought to limit people's right to decide how to live their own life to prevent this safety net from being unduly burdened, then I would respond that even if one were to accept that assumption, a less disruptive way of meeting this goal would be with a forced saving mandate, rather than trying to prevent them from bankrupting themselves in a roundabout way, through laws that prevent spending on allegedly frivolous/addictive ends.
But of course I don't accept their underlying argument at all. Just making the point that even if one did, their solution is not optimal.
Personally I don't want to live in a society without a safety net, or the other niceties of a modern civil society.
I also don't really consider it a trade-off - regardless of a social safety net, we ought to be restricting borderline scams. A lot of people aren't very smart, or are only smart in very specific directions. And they don't know they're not that smart. They can be taken in, scammed and fleeced, and this creates a problem not just for them but for lots of others too. This is why we restrict things like pyramid schemes.
I would love voluntary safety nets. I just don't like compulsory ones paid for at the taxpayers expense. It reduces choice, breeds corruption and unaccountability, and does not offer people the option to opt-out. But this is not really the forum to debate that, as it can get quite detailed.
As for those not capable of fending for themselves in a free market: maybe it would be a better idea to have a new class of citizen that, after passing a rationality test, is allowed to buy/invest-in whatever they want, while making the rest of the population in some sense wards of the state, with safety guards on their smartphones and PCs, and a state-appointed counseler greenlighting all of their financial transactions, or at least all of the entities they are allowed to transact with.
As for token sales, you can't categorise them all as borderline scams. It depends on the token sale.
I don't think voluntary safety nets work - it's precisely the people who wouldn't pay into one that are most in need of doing so.
Almost all citizens are badly informed and easily taken in by one thing or other. We look after each other in various ways. Civil safety nets and criminal law are part of those.
>> As for token sales, you can't categorise them all as borderline scams. It depends on the token sale.
Indeed, and many of them are without substance, riding the wave of interest in ICO tokens, and are borderline scams. I did not say all are, but enough that regulation in this space is more or less inevitable, and will be warmly welcomed by many.
There are a f*ckton of laws around IPOs and share trading, for good reasons.
I don't like the idea of a safety net that depends mostly on the contributions of those who least want to be party to it.
Regarding looking out for each other with bans on dangerous goods/services, I have no problem with a voluntary program that people enroll in to be looked after in this manner. We could have a state-backed coop that we voluntarily cede some of our rights to for a predetermined amount of time (e.g. 5 years), and over that timeframe, we are obliged to use the government's software guards on our smartphones/PCs, that prevents us from transacting with entities not on the government's whitelist.
But people should be able to live without those protections if they so choose. Accepting anything otherwise is accepting a servile existence for oneself and everyone else.
>> I don't like the idea of a safety net that depends mostly on the contributions of those who least want to be party to it.
Yet without such things we end up with millions in penury, risking starvation, because they never thought they'd be the one to hit hard times.
As for the rest, yes I get that you're a libertarian. I'm not. I understand its appeal, but it's a recipe for literal social darwinism, with those who are poor, unlucky or ill getting to die, free, in the streets.
Perhaps you could create a thread in an appropriate forum and we could debate the issue, because I don't agree at all that absent pillaging the rich with redistributive taxes, we'd see a worsening of poverty.
And even if we could save the poor with such acts, it seems like a very shortsighted approach that can't possibly be sustained over any significant timescale, given it depends on ignoring the will of an entire segment of the population. What kind of society could we possibly hope to create with such an adversarial approach?
The context was unsophisticated investors were being exploited without appreciating the risks involved. They thought they were investing when they were essentially gambling and the underlying security was essentially worthless.
that's very optimistic if not naive. the ones who usually benefit are the oppressors, the rest are left to their own devices if they aren't causing problems - real or perceived - or even are deemed to cause problems in the future even if they do nothing wrong right now. the collective benefits only in utopia circumstances, ie. never.
Well this is really the same for all kinds of libertarian/capitalist regimes. Branding China as an "oppressive regime" is really just political propaganda speech. If you say China is an oppressive regime so is US, and the US might be even more of a slave state really.
China nowadays has even more reckless capitalism than that in the US, and the gap between the rich and the poor is expanding incredibly fast.
Nah that kind of view is just naive. First I don't think a simple moniker of "oppressive regime" makes any sense except for political propaganda purposes. If you say China is an oppressive regime so is the US, and the US might be even more of a state basically based on slavery really.
Second, the truth is the capitalism in China is even wilder and more libertarian in a sense than that in the US. It's just that the central authority still acts quickly enough. The rich people are still basically in the same bunch, whether it's the officials or the businessmen, and the gap between the rich and poor is widening ridiculously fast.
That's just naive and wishful thinking. The brand of capitalism in China is more reckless than that in the US and the business interests are really interwined with the government policies. It's just that the government still has a bit more of a final say but that doesn't mean the rich politicians and businessmen aren't in the same boat.
It's not sensible at all. It's none of anyone's business what two consenting adults do with their money. The idea of a third party dictating the range of acceptable contractual engagements is absolutely terrible and has profound negative unintended consequences, with the worst of them being licensing barriers to create rent-seeking opportunities (only one new bank created in the UK over the last 100 years).
>The bank was the brainchild of Anthony Thomson, who set up Metro Bank in 2009, which was the first new banking organisation to open in the UK since the end of the 19th century.
>In April 2016, Atom launched its banking app after regulators lifted a restriction on its authorisation.
It's not just ComputerWeekly. 'First new banking license issued in the UK since the 19th century' gets a lot of hits on Google. I'm pretty sure it would have been corrected if it were incorrect.
When the coalition came in, one of Osborne's first acts was to push the banking regulators to issue more banking licenses, due to that 100 year+ stagnation. Since the coalition, there have been a variety of new licenses issued, so the problem is now resolved.
I think what CryptoPunk refers to is that (allegedly) Metro is the only "high street", i.e. with many physical branches, bank created in the UK in the last 100+ years.
Given we're in a thread talking about ICOs and tech startups, I would side with you and say this is an irrelevant classification and the claim is wrong. :-P
Still interesting though, but given the veritable plethora of recently founded remote-only banks of various innovativenesses, I wouldn't say excessive regulation is to blame, if we think this is a Bad Thing.
Well, having physical branches it really not that important these days. If they give you a way to do usual tasks (change address etc) online or via phone there can be massive savings and increases in efficiency by getting rid of all physical branches.
All that real estate that is now occupied by bank branches can be give to some other businesses that actually need physical space (fashion/clothes, sports, restaurant, gyms etc) to use it more efficiently.
The only reason I had to go to a physical branch this year was to change my address and that is only because my old bank where my main account is doesn't have a way to do this online (seriously I don't understand why is it so difficult to make this a feature of online banking...).
I am using Monzo as my secondary bank and once they give me current account later this year, if it works smoothly and there are no issues I might get rid of my old bank account.
There are a couple of digital banks like Monzo. Atom, Tandem, Starling and more (there's another one for digital nomads, I don't remember their name).
Then there are also other banks like Tesco/Sainsbury's which are definitely not 100 years old. More like started in 90s (but perhaps these reused some old banking licenses from other banks so don't count as "new").
Especially lately there has been a boom in fintech and lots of new challenger banks are appearing and getting banking licenses so that claim is definitely not true today, perhaps it was true a decade or two ago.
I think Tesco, Sainsbury's etc are just resellers of banking services. Actual banking licenses are the thing there have been none of for 100 years iirc, I don't think GP comment just pulled that assertion out of thin air.
Monzo and Starling have secured full banking licenses for sure. Though recently, I think it was only this year. Tandem I think lost their license because of problems with funding.
So that claim might have been true few years ago before fintech boom started. Lots of new digital banks already got or are in process of getting banking license.
Banking industry in U.K. is getting shaken up currently, lots of fintech challengers.
We have a regulation against fraud already. New proposed regulations are about banning unvetted token sales, to preempt possible scams, which is limiting people's contracting rights when there is no evidence of a crime - only a possibility of a scam based on a generalisation.
>Problem: stock booms result in massive fraud and a great deal of economic damage.
>Solution: regulate the stock market.
If people want to trade the price of a digital token into bubble territory, that's really their business. No one else is forced to buy up that token. Which governing authority will know it's a bubble anyway? It's not like it's possible to know if something is overvalued. If it were, one could reliably short every bubble and make a profit, and in fact do so so much and at such scale that their market shorting prevents bubbles from ever forming (since a short adds pressure on the sell-side).
I believe in freedom of association, I also believe that the market is driven by reputation, therefor bad actors (in this case scammers) cannot thrive (see how bad vendors get eliminated by the market on ebay or amazon without government help, just bad reputation).
If the scam is very well executed, it will thrives for a bit longer even with laws against scams, as your link shows. However, once publicly exposed, the scammer's bad reputation will ensure no one will trust doing business with him again in his field, much more so than any anti-scamming laws that punished him with those 22 months in jail.
They don't, but if it happens with a few ICOs people won't trust ICOs anymore and these kinds of scams won't repeat much.
Anyway, has there been any verified ICO scams yet? Seems to me like it's not much different from startups promising BS/bad ideas to gullible VCs who end up losing millions. In this case, ICOs are selling these ideas to the little guy through crowd funding which is different but the little guy usually invest a few bucks in these ICOs so if the ICO fails to delivers it's not as big a deal unless one invests his/her life's saving in said ICO but then that's a pretty risky idea one needs to take responsibility for.
Your experience at the farmer's market is surely equivalent to what most people would experience in Walmart.
Many humans will do anything it takes to make a profit and not care about who they are screwing over. If you think that's okay that's fine, but then go to Somalia and see how a lawless country works in practice.
Food safety in particular was mandated by populae request. I cannot wrap my head around free market believers like you who apparently think that humans are omniscient beings who have access to all information about every product and every seller they encounter so they can make informed purchasing decisions. That's just bullshit. You are a religious cult at this point.
Any market given the space to develop becomes highly vetted. Somalia's during its civil war didn't work because there was no central authority providing security and preventing raiders from pillaging markets, so markets didn't have the opportunity to become highly developed.
There is no chance that supermarket shelves would be stocked with toxic/fraudulent food products in our world of secure private property rights, with or withouy food safety regulations. There is an elaborate chain of private interests involved in food production/distribution that would self-organize to prevent such an outcome. McDonalds uses higher standards for its beef than the USDA for example. Automobile manufacturers have higher safety standards than regulations require.
>>That's just bullshit. You are a religious cult at this point.
I recommend that you realise your arguments for a totally free market are exactly as useful as the arguments for a state controlled economy. It doesn't work because people will always screw each other over. This is the reason communism is not viable, and it is the reason libertarianism is not viable either.
I hope you realise that todays "strict" food safety laws were born out of a world where people did exactly what you say they wouldn't. They cut bread with sawdust to make money. They skimped on hygiene. They advertised other meats than they used etc etc etc. Today these things have real consequences. You're saying we should just let people do that? I cannot fathom what drives you to that position.
"Oh, but people won't buy their products as soon as they have been ousted as being cheats" yeah well. People don't buy Nestle products even though they use child slavery and caused mass malnutrion of poor children? It's just so naive to think that this actually happens.
We can mostly agree what is good and bad, but as soon as you have to pay 20 cents extra for fairtrade bread that goes out the window. You know it.
>Somalia's during its civil war didn't work because there was no central authority providing security and preventing raiders from pillaging markets, so markets didn't have the opportunity to become highly developed.
So there was no central authority and therefore the system failed. Isn't a weaker central authority what you want? Governments generally want stability, and guess what. Regulating markets helps stability.
Anyway, this discussion is pointless if you cannot see that total free market idealism is as extreme as pure communism and equally flawed. The optimum is somewhere in the middle.
>>I recommend that you realise your arguments for a totally free market are exactly as useful as the arguments for a state controlled economy. It doesn't work because people will always screw each other over. This is the reason communism is not viable, and it is the reason libertarianism is not viable either.
I believe people will screw each other over no matter what system you use. In a regulated economy people will screw other people by lobbying for regulations that protect their industry from competition. In other words, centralized control via regulatory guardrails doesn't preclude exploitation: look at the opioid epidemic for example. It can in large part be traced back to doctors prescribing opioids as a result of pharmaceutical marketing. The industry is highly regulated and thus profitable for the pharmaceutical giants. The Drug War has been going on for a hundred years and drug abuse is worse now that it's ever been. I doubt that we would be any worse off in terms of drug abuse with a free market in drugs, and I'm sure there would be more competition and lower costs for drugs.
>>I hope you realise that todays "strict" food safety laws were born out of a world where people did exactly what you say they wouldn't. They cut bread with sawdust to make money. They skimped on hygiene. They advertised other meats than they used etc etc etc. Today these things have real consequences. You're saying we should just let people do that? I cannot fathom what drives you to that position.
People do that today as well. With a mandatory safety standard, you can probably raise quality in the short term, but there is a trade-off, in increasing costs and reducing innovation.
Regarding cost: it's not a given that reducing the incidence of food fraud is always worth the increase in food costs. I know it's not a intuitive idea, but sometimes the public welfare effect of increasing costs outweighs the public welfare effects of increasing quality. In a free market people will make a decision on what trade-off is best for them based on their own circumstance. Because it really does depend on the circumstances. Someone who values food safety more than low prices can always opt to buy a reputable label with a strong reputation for food safety. But for others, the lower cost of less reputable brands is more important for them than minimizing the risk of contracting foodborne illnesses or ingesting harmful additives.
With regard to innovation, regulation harms it because it replaces diversity with uniformity. Imagine a thousand food producers, each producing food of varying quality. With regulations, you get them all to use the same food safety procedures. This might mean that 70% of them raise their standards, but it also means the 10% creating innovative ways to maintain high quality standards at lower costs will stop exploring these avenues.
A modern day example would be how Uber found a more cost-effective way of assuring a high quality taxi service with its rating system than the regulatory approach of the medallion system that municipalities use. Taxi regulations, by imposing uniformity in procedures (the licensing process) on the taxi sector, caused the procedures used by taxi companies to stagnate and not evolve for decades. The quality difference between Uber and the regulated taxi services is night and day.
One other point I'd add is that the effect of reducing the rate of innovation is compounding. Over the long run, of 50-100 years, society will lose out immensely from trading recurring increases in innovation from a competitive free market for a one-time boost in quality from imposing a uniform standard for quality assurance.
The greatest force for improved quality and increased affordability is, in the long run, competition between entities free to innovate without the artificial constraint of mandates on their procedures.
Another reason to oppose regulations against the free market is that regulations are subject to being shaped by special i...
I believe people will screw each other over no matter what system you use. In a regulated economy people will screw other people by lobbying for regulations that protect their industry from competition.
Just like people will always abuse the system. People hae learned to do this, especially in the US. Your solution is simply to make it easier for companies to screw people. Why don't people boycott companies TODAY when they do this? If they did, then I might support your argument. The fact is that there is no evidence for people doing this.
>People do that today as well. With a mandatory safety standard, you can probably raise quality in the short term, but there is a trade-off, in increasing costs and reducing innovation.
If they do they are thrown in jail. Now usually the people really responsible are not because of a failing legal system. That problem is not solved by just letting them do it and get away scot free.
Regardings costs. Peopme are so amazingly bad at making decisions as a group. It is mathematically provable that if everyone acts in their own best interest everyone can easily be worse off as a result. This assumes everyone is a rational actor, and we know that people are not even close to that which makes it even worse.
>The greatest force for improved quality and increased affordability is, in the long run, competition between entities free to innovate without the artificial constraint of mandates on their procedures.
>A great many industries were kickstarted by government subsidy.
Another reason to oppose regulations against the free market is that regulations are subject to being shaped by special interests, who may deliberately push for them to be onerous to stamp out smaller competitors. Many small farmers blame food production regulations for the demise of their sector and the growing dominance of industrial farming.
This is indeed a problem, but your solution is essentially to just let companies do what they would otherwise be have to lobby for. Most lobbying cases are for laxed regulation or to allow companies to get away with monopolistic practices.
>Not categorically. I want a strong authority maintaining security and the right to freely contract, but I want that authority to not use its power to infringe upon those same contracting rights
We can argue the word "freely" then. I don't believe people freely enter contractual relationships when one side has a clear power advantage and actively tries to manipulate you.
And by the way, it's not a fallacy to appeal to moderation when overdosing kills you.
Since you believe that everyone should make their own decisons and we should just live with that. Perhaps you should consider that the system we have to day was born out of people making their decison to not have 100% libertarianism because they were smart enough. By your logic this would be all the reason you would ever need.
At some point you just have to realise that the requirements necessary for the system you want to outperform what we have are opposite to how people actually behave in real life. I hope you are young, then it is fine to be a bit idealistic. We all realise why things don't work sooner or later.
>>Your solution is simply to make it easier for companies to screw people. Why don't people boycott companies TODAY when they do this?
In the previous comment I explained why I don't think this will make it any easier, on the balance, for companies to screw people over. Please go over my previous comment again as I explain what I see as the trade-offs of more regulations, and how they are slanted toward people being screwed over more.
>If they do they are thrown in jail.
If they're caught. And that applies to a world without food regulations as well. Just because there's no regulatory requirement to have the food certified by the USDA doesn't mean it becomes legal to sell goop marketed as milk. That's still fraud, because it's a violation of basic contracting law:
>>Regardings costs. Peopme are so amazingly bad at making decisions as a group.
I disagree completely. I think the market is a marvellous way to bring our collective intelligence to bear to guide product development, and is resulting in consumer food purchases becoming healthier and consumer options becoming more diverse over time. Consumer choice is the reason organic foods have seen their market share grow so much over the decades. It's the reason product diversity in supermarkets has grown so much. People are willing to pay for quality, and as society becomes more prosperous, we'll see more value-added food of higher quality.
>>>A great many industries were kickstarted by government subsidy.
Government subsidies can indeed kickstart an industry by bringing about advances in basic science and by incubating new industries, but that's not relevant to the debate of whether we should be restricting market choices with regulations, and whether industries will evolve faster with or without such regulations.
>>This is indeed a problem, but your solution is essentially to just let companies do what they would otherwise be have to lobby for. Most lobbying cases are for laxed regulation or to allow companies to get away with monopolistic practices.
My solution is to let the companies be regulated by consumer choice. Seems like the least corruptible and best incentivized system of development for an industry.
As for monopolistic practices, I endorse public funding of public options in monopolistic sectors, instead of regulations that violate the right of private market participants to act freely.
>We can argue the word "freely" then. I don't believe people freely enter contractual relationships when one side has a clear power advantage and actively tries to manipulate you.
A court of law, made up of a jury of our peers, should be determining what contract was entered into freely, not a sweeping snap judgement about an entire class of contracts without looking at the specific details of each case.
I strongly disagree with your notion that any agreement between parties of unequal wealth levels is nonconsensual, and I believe any court of law would disagree with you as well, as being inconsistent with established and legal understandings of consent.
I think one should take ideology out of these considerations and defer to the courts on issues of contract law. That's essentially what I'm endorsing by promoting the free market.
>>Perhaps you should consider that the system we have to day was born out of people making their decison to not have 100% libertarianism because they were smart enough. By your logic this would be all the reason you would ever need.
I don't believe people are smart when it comes to macro issues like economics, and thus I believe they collectively impose incredibly destructive economic policies like socialism, anti-free-market regulations, etc. through the political process, which lets the mob forcefully impose its will on ...
I know, and I wish there were more things consenting adults would not be allowed to do, even free and willing. In an ideal world, adults should not be allowed to do anything without asking permission from government first. Hopefully we'll get there someday.
The right to act on our own irrationalities and commit our own mistakes is one of our most important right (the right to eat what you want, date who you want etc, these things used be illegal not so long ago to make sure you didn't act irrational, turns out letting people make their own choice even when irrational trumps the lack of freedom to do so because what seems irrational may actually not be and vice versa, as long as it's consensual I say live and let live).
This only works in the world where a person's choices only effect them. That's not the case. The case is it effects your family and a load of people losing their money causes the economy the crash.
I had a discussion about crypto currencies with a pretty high level EU diplomat from the trade commission. His point was simple, as soon as they will consider the crypto currencies as a medium to escape taxes and general "rules" (whatever it means) they will simply ban or regulate them to put them back into the control of a central authority.
And they will stop people from making bitcoin transactions how, exactly?
It's a bit silly to come in and dismissively say "the state will regulate it anyway" when the whole point of the technology is that it technologically prevents central actors (like a state) from interfering.
It's a bit like saying "nah, the MPAA and RIAA will shut down filesharing." Nope. They shut down Napster (which was centralized), but BitTorrent works just fine thank you very much and the media industry has fundamentally changed as a result.
No it's not a trick question. Tax fraud investigation relies on bank cooperation. Bitcoin doesn't cooperate with anybody. They can make toothless voluntary requests though.
More likely society evolves in the face of bitcoin to integrate or at least mitigate it rather than fight it, just like music delivery is chiefly now by streaming subscription services rather than album sales.
And they will stop people from making bitcoin transactions how, exactly?
By making convertibility to Yuan illegal. This is trivially easy to do and enforce, making the entire Bitcoin marketplace a black market for any transactions on the mainland. So your life would get real hard real quick the moment you try to turn Bitcoin into Yuan. Oh, that's ok you'll just do ALL your transactions with bitcoin. Ok so any shop owner that makes it even slightly known that they take bitcoin will be arrested. Too easy.
Forget big C communist ideology at the state level, you mess with provinces and their ability to collect money and you'll go down hard fast.
People will see the authoritarian aspect of this, but in my view the Chinese are particularly vulnerable to financial scams for cultural reasons.
- They have recent communist history/lack experience of crashes/associated fraud.
- Traditionally they actually worship money - By burning fake money.
- MLM scams are popular (at least in Taiwan).
- When I watched a video by Andreas - that Bitcoin guy - the audience (in US) was disproportionately east Asian.
The average Chinese person did not experience this. In 1997, China was nowhere near where it is now in terms of the average Chinese citizen's exposure to global markets, bubbles, and crashes. Even now, their ability to invest is supremely limited such that real estate is one of the only real investment options, fueling a nasty bubble. One of the people I manage in Shenzhen asked for a raise last year because they lost all their savings in a local stock market crash. Person is about 50 years old. Scams are common. China is not ready.
> Traditionally they actually worship money - By burning fake money.
Burning hell money is a symbolic offering to the deceased, not an act of worshipping money itself. Or do Westerners "actually worship flowers" because we place them on graves?
Good point and saying they 'worship money' was an unintended pejorative.
Still it is a bit more than that. Flowers are merely a gesture/ritual whereas burning money is an attempt to send money to the afterlife (if my understanding is correct), which inevitably does elevate it somewhat in the minds of believers. I feel the original point is partially intact, in that they definitely do have superstitions surrounding money e.g. red packets ... etc.
To a relative outsider, a lot of the current movement in the crypto-currency space seems to be about amplifying the holdings of those who already hold. The BCC fork, for instance, effectively gave current bitcoin holders an overnight boost in the 15-20% range.
ICOs appear to be a way to finance things in a kickstartetr type way, only with instantly trade-able coins in the form of a new crypto-currency, with buy-in conducted in ether. These provide a new speculation vehicle, often/usually totally divorced from the underlying activity of the company.
Both of these things neatly skip any sort of bootstrapping phase that might be inherent to a new crypto-currency, and serve insiders and the already crypto-wealthy rather than newcomers or those outside the existing bubble. The whole thing seems very tenuous, and speaks very much of an "in-crowd".
> Both of these things neatly skip any sort of bootstrapping phase
So true. That bootstrapping phase has been reduced to dream up a whitepaper and that's basically it. All what comes afterwards to pump the launch is clever marketing (I've seen Google ads, FB ads, celebs on Twitter etc etc). I cannot understand why it is legal to behave like that.
Unless fiscal policy of global CB's includes halting of QE-like initiatives and/or raising historically low interest rates, we're only going to see more of the same, regardless of legalities.
Does this spell trouble for Ethereum? Without ICOs (one of it's major features if not the most important one) what else will drive the price speculation?
I believe prices are inflated because of ICOs. People are buying tokens counting on ICO hype to increase their value so they can flip their initial invested principal with 2x/3x/4x return.
Without ICOs this speculative technique will not be possible so we will see how many people are actually interested in buying these worthless tokens because they believe in their "features", rather than speculate on their price.
I wonder though if the speculation will just move from China to other countries though and the bubble will continue until there is more action by regulators around the world against this.
It will slow the crazy growth if ICOs are regulated in some countries, but it may also prevents a total collapse of the whole unhealthy ICO bubble that we've seen this year.
You're also right with regards to speculation - it seems to me like most buyers of ICO tokens don't care about the project at all, they merely want to make a quick buck by selling the tokens after the crowdsale at a higher price.
Maybe in the short term, longer term it is no trouble. ICOs are far from the main use case for Ethereum. Speculation is driven by the price not close to matching the price if/when the technology matures. If anything, most ICOs pull money from Ethereum, they don't make the price go up.
Being interested in tokens for their "features" not the price is very archaic. This also does not happen with stocks anymore: People hold for a few months/days/minutes, then sell, they don't sit on stock for many years like we used to.
My guess: China will allow ICOs after drafting up proper legislation and regulation. It would not benefit China's economy to blanket ban a new emerging technology. They just want to prevent crypto as a way to move money out of China, take a cut of the profit.
Another guess: Regulation will be good for established players (like Ethereum and 2016/2017 ICOs), but bad for speculators and newcomers. It will thus shoot past its intended goal of protecting investors: Those who like to gamble with money they can't afford to lose will find other get-rich-quick schemes unrelated to crypto. In Las Vegas you are actually sure to eventually lose all your money.
it would benefit China's economy if a bubble were to pop and wipe out huge amounts of savings
my guess: China will not allow ICOs but maybe after 10 years or so, blockchains and smart contracts will quietly infiltrate boring business use cases and financial services. especially if they can turn it into a centralized tool for control.
what better authoritarian tool could there be than a centralized ledger of all economic transactions, run by the government. in the name of reducing fraud/laundering/crime you could have absolute visibility and regulatory control on all economic activity.
probably none. that is a different discussion. there were many better solutions than http for the web, hotly debated, but http became the defacto standard. betamax vs vhs. lots of reasons why inferior technology sometimes wins mind/market share
i dont drink the blockchain kool aid myself as a silver bullet for every problem, read IBM's hyperledger marketing materials and they try to make a case for centralized permissioned blockchain. ymmv.
but if millions of your citizens are using blockchains, as an authoritative regime, you probably will want to control its use. you arent particularly interested in the best tech solution to a problem. just control.
and lest anyone think i am abusive of china, i fully expect the US to highly regulate the hell out of this eventually ... if not now under the Tweeter in Chief, when the Dems get control again.
You are a Chinese miner with a rather large BTC or ETH balance. There's no retail acceptance of either for you to spend your cryptocurrency, and the closest you can get to converting it to cash is through Bitfinex in Taiwan and even that can be filed under "maybe" https://crushthestreet.com/articles/breaking-news/bitfinex-h...
ICOs are among the few remaining opportunities to achieve liquidity for large BTC/ETH account balances.
Lots of people dislike ICOs, some for good reasons. But ICOs is a general mechanism and the specifics differ. Are some ICOs ponzi schemes? Sure. But this move is about capital controls, little else. I am surprised so many people are defending this as a good thing. Do you want to outlaw all VC money too?
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadYou got a link to that how? How does that work with Schengen?
It NOT GIVE a work permit in EU and of course not give a permission to travel in schengeng.
It's simply an ID card. The main difference is that: - Normally in other EU countries for have an ID card for services, you must live there, while with e-residency you can do have and do all the stuff remotely. - It's pretty useless, you can google it and see how had a lot of hype, but in real case uses, it's useless (example: yes you can open a company remotely, but if you don't live in estonia, is a mess with taxes...and having an e-residency, doesn't give you a valid visa for live+work there...so often you can't move to estonia to work, even if you have a company opened in estonia)
Pheew, I thought I was the only one with this opinion, given the hype there is about this thing all over the net.
To me the whole stuff seems a lot like the plans of the gnomes in South Park (but in five steps):
1) get an e-residency (please read as "pay us some little money")
2) establish an Estonia company (please read as "pay us some more money")
3) open a bank account in this or that bank (please read as "give our friends a little more money")
4) ?
5) Profit.
The only practical use I can see is to create a new sort of Double Irish:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
but aimed to the single/poor instead of large corporations, but it has to be seen how the EU will take the idea ...
https://medium.com/e-residency-blog/estonia-could-offer-estc...
Previous (few) comments on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15071682
While users would always be able to use their own forks, the gov would only allow taxes and retail trade to happen with their branch, thus de-legitimizing user forks and reducing their utility (and hence value).
Also given that most cryptocurrencies are only pseudonymous, means they could "follow the money" and quite easily charge someone for handling a disallowed cryptocurrency. This is why I feel Monero is undervalued compared to BTC - as Monero has greater utility for Bitcoin's original mainstream activity: online black-market purchasing.
And if you think "stability and sanity will return" to a still mostly unregulated market, you are pretty naive.
I'd even say for stability and sanity to return, they had to be there at some point in the first place which they didn't. :-)
China will make some announcement in the future that softens or reverses this one, and we'll see a spike in crypto prices.
Hopefully there will be some sane regulation (or at least guidance) on ICOs to make it more difficult for scammy types to use ICOs as tools to bilk unsaavy "investors" (which includes most humans).
A lot of folks will lose their investment/money.
https://twitter.com/search?q=peak%20ico&src=typd
[1] https://twitter.com/LydianCoinLtd
People assume, or just like to believe, that as Bitcoin adoption grows, the advantages of Bitcoin will far surpass fiat and people will gradually start moving to it as a de facto currency. This will/would be an organic process, likely to last a few decades at least.
Actually I just noticed that the Wikipedia page on the gold standard has a section about bitcoin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard#Gold_standard_an...
[1] At those who bother to think about the long term economic consequences of Bitcoin instead of just trying to Get Rich Quick.
The gold standard is a system where paper currency is backed by a guarantee that it is redeemable for a given amount of gold. Of course the govt can rescind this promise at any time.
What Bitcoin fans want is something more akin to gold coins, where the value of the currency is independent of any state.
I think the pro and cons of the gold standard (as listed by Wikipedia) seem to apply fairly well to the Bitcoin economy.
The key book nailing down every dot of this is "The Politics of Bitcoin" by David Golumbia. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1517901804/
I think ICOs can be extremely beneficial for teams to raise money. But a lot of people buying these tokens do not understand what they're getting in return. I'd like to see it become easier to actually own equity or a % of a company's revenue by holding tokens. Hopefully these future regulations will build trust in the ecosystem by minimizing scams and providing clarity. More trust yields more people converting fiat -> crypto... which should yield a healthier less volatile ecosystem.
Case in point, NEO is probably one of the scammiest so-called "crypto" offerings out there
Like what? Every partnership or "tie" that I've ever heard of ends up being a rumor bordering on outright falsehood - like Microsoft (x2). 2 out of 3 ICOs they had announced prior to the ban ended up being delayed by 6 months or more, quite likely due to platform immaturity.
> good development
For an alpha / early stage crypto project, maybe. However they lack all the features that NEO actually brags about and the codebase is an untestable C# mess where core modules are more or less opaque to everyone but the main developer. It's a security nightmare waiting to happen, and a usability nightmare in the moment : building & publishing the simplest dapp on the platform is basically a non starter right now.
> plenty of evidence of delivering on their roadmap
Again, like what? The platform doesn't actually do anything yet. It basically consists of a few centralized servers and a centrally mined (and centrally owned) token. They're nowhere close to even delivering on dBFT itself, let alone high-concept stuff like mapping physical goods to a "digital identity".
> That's already better than most crypto-currencies.
Not if you compare it to other "currencies" in anything close to the same price range. Its valuation is far and away driven by clever marketing and uninformed speculation.
What?
that being said this does feel a lot like a throw back to 2014 and earlier with "China bans bitcoin"
Can you actually picture in your mind a criminal preparing to do something criminal and stopping because it's actually illegal too?
ICO (Initial Crypto-Token Offering) refers to financing through the issuance of encrypted tokens (Crypto-Token).
People should really learn to define acronyms before using them in all writing mediums. I don't care if the author has used the term 10,000 with colleagues, he should still define them upon their first use in the article body.
I read the whole article wondering what on earth it meant. Then I went on Wikipedia which is usually pretty good with TLAs (Three Letters Acronyms).
So I made a point in reading the whole article just to figure out if they were at least defining it loosly...
there's that:
>ICOs involve raising funding by creating and selling new crypto tokens — commonly based on Ethereum — to investors
Which is not really in depth. It got me wondering if the person writing it understood what it meant.
Please don't do that when you write, always assume the person you're writing for doesn't know what you're talking about.
For example if it's used as pre-sale (i.e. currency that will be used in product for a future product) then that's likely legal in most places, if it's used as a proxy for equity then it's likely illegal in most countries (most countries prohibit unregulated share offerings to non-sophisticated consumers).
Although in some cases ICOs might get considered as gambling if the purpose is primarily considered to be for speculation rather than whatever the underlying product is.
in short, any "product" can be a security if there is even a hint of speculative investment activity (and a motivated prosecutor)
really it is less about logic and definitions...this audience wants to parse things and recompile. in law and moreso in regulatory affairs, it is far more about guiding behavior by carrots or sticks to a particular philosophical/moral/politial/economic subjective end goal
The US doesn't have to ban ICOs as most of them are securities and unregistered selling of securities is already illegal.
You know we're talking about the same SEC that didn't saw the real estate bubble coming in 2007/08 (size > trillions, CDOs are obviously fine) or the dotcom bubble in 2000 (size > trillions, they approved the IPOs, right)?
If so, please give me reasons (instead of opinions or references to SEC "authority") as to why the ICOs in a 175 bn market are "dangerous".
The risk is that the teams may way under-estimate how much work it is (And I think that's what's going to cause them to fail)
but they are a lot more ambitious than you are characterizing.
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/icos-magic-beans-and-bu...
Look up the EOS fine print. They took down the PDF, but I kept a spare:
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/references/EOS%20Token%...
TODO this evening: write up a blog post on the ICO for (I am not making this up) synthetic rhino horn dick pills.
These days ICOs are cloning the same smart contract template and just making small edits to it.
Most of the time they barely have any other code than just the slightly edited smart contract template and white paper which is also pretty much a copy paste with buzz words relevant to their niche.
And based on that they are raising millions of dollars.
Of course there are couple of exceptions of projects that actually seem to have some tech foundation (like Sia for example) but these are rare. Scam copy cats without any tech are majority of ICOs.
Their reasoning is "we have an idea, let's raise millions of dollars and we will hire bunch of devs to write the software". Mostly founders are non technical "idea people" so I would doubt their ability to even know if their idea is feasible.
Projects which start with strong technical foundations and don't try to raise money to build their tech (putting cart in front of the horse) are the solid ones. Projects which have no tech and raise money first, those are not likely to succeed imho.
For example? What ICO idea is not a previously failed startup? Distributed file storage that's been built a few times and each time turned out to be painfully slow and impractical? An iOS and Android port of the wallet software? Yet another browser?
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15077117)
You can build an altcoin in basically no time, on-demand using a web frontend. How hard the shell company piece is I have no idea.
It really doesn't take a lot of talent or hard work to launch a coin from your garage these days.
I think that's kinda why people are welcoming this move - there's a lot of trash coins and trash ICOs with no hope of anything ever coming from them, with a relatively low input of time and effort. But because they offer trade-able tokens and some of them might take off, and at least some of them might get a hype-cycle and increase in value whether there's any underlying value or not, and it's all new, shiny, crypto-magic-money...
It's the equivalent of banning startups to protect investors from stupid/malicious founders, which has obvious negative effects on the economy. And with crowdfunding making its way to startup investment, it's not a reach to compare the two.
In other subthreads I am saying why I think the ban on ICOs might be welcomed, even if it could take the good down with the bad. I'm not arguing in any thread for an outright ban on digital currencies.
Evidently it doesn't really though, because we're in a stage where these are magic, and people are investing based on a little bit of hype which becomes self-sustaining.
There are lots of altcoins out there, most with not much value, but slowly trickling along. And there have been lots of ICOs of dubious value.
I obviously don't know what it takes to persuade you, personally, to invest. But it seems not to take much for the crypto-currency world at large to dive in right now.
To give them credit people have made many times their money buying and reselling but it would be idiotic to let this madness continue.
Why? Inevitably the fools will just run out of money.
This "problem" seems to take care of itself.
Then it becomes our problem again.
I'm not sure this is qualitatively different to a ban, really.
Either way, bans or forcing provision for retirement etc, you're taking the position that someone else does know best, and that they need protecting from their own spending behaviour. After that it's just a matter of degree.
But of course I don't accept their underlying argument at all. Just making the point that even if one did, their solution is not optimal.
I also don't really consider it a trade-off - regardless of a social safety net, we ought to be restricting borderline scams. A lot of people aren't very smart, or are only smart in very specific directions. And they don't know they're not that smart. They can be taken in, scammed and fleeced, and this creates a problem not just for them but for lots of others too. This is why we restrict things like pyramid schemes.
As for those not capable of fending for themselves in a free market: maybe it would be a better idea to have a new class of citizen that, after passing a rationality test, is allowed to buy/invest-in whatever they want, while making the rest of the population in some sense wards of the state, with safety guards on their smartphones and PCs, and a state-appointed counseler greenlighting all of their financial transactions, or at least all of the entities they are allowed to transact with.
As for token sales, you can't categorise them all as borderline scams. It depends on the token sale.
Almost all citizens are badly informed and easily taken in by one thing or other. We look after each other in various ways. Civil safety nets and criminal law are part of those.
>> As for token sales, you can't categorise them all as borderline scams. It depends on the token sale.
Indeed, and many of them are without substance, riding the wave of interest in ICO tokens, and are borderline scams. I did not say all are, but enough that regulation in this space is more or less inevitable, and will be warmly welcomed by many.
There are a f*ckton of laws around IPOs and share trading, for good reasons.
Regarding looking out for each other with bans on dangerous goods/services, I have no problem with a voluntary program that people enroll in to be looked after in this manner. We could have a state-backed coop that we voluntarily cede some of our rights to for a predetermined amount of time (e.g. 5 years), and over that timeframe, we are obliged to use the government's software guards on our smartphones/PCs, that prevents us from transacting with entities not on the government's whitelist.
But people should be able to live without those protections if they so choose. Accepting anything otherwise is accepting a servile existence for oneself and everyone else.
Yet without such things we end up with millions in penury, risking starvation, because they never thought they'd be the one to hit hard times.
As for the rest, yes I get that you're a libertarian. I'm not. I understand its appeal, but it's a recipe for literal social darwinism, with those who are poor, unlucky or ill getting to die, free, in the streets.
And even if we could save the poor with such acts, it seems like a very shortsighted approach that can't possibly be sustained over any significant timescale, given it depends on ignoring the will of an entire segment of the population. What kind of society could we possibly hope to create with such an adversarial approach?
There are not enough jobs at the bottom half of the economy for this.
We'd also have hoards of people starving in the street, as humans are not good at long term planning, or risk assessment.
So yeah, I'm all for "moral hazard".
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
The context was unsophisticated investors were being exploited without appreciating the risks involved. They thought they were investing when they were essentially gambling and the underlying security was essentially worthless.
It basically said "we are watching this space" which will frighten anybody who knows that the SEC isn't in a hurry to investigate.
They can get you for things from years past (IIRC 10), so they don't have to rush things.
China nowadays has even more reckless capitalism than that in the US, and the gap between the rich and the poor is expanding incredibly fast.
Second, the truth is the capitalism in China is even wilder and more libertarian in a sense than that in the US. It's just that the central authority still acts quickly enough. The rich people are still basically in the same bunch, whether it's the officials or the businessmen, and the gap between the rich and poor is widening ridiculously fast.
Venture Capitalists are all on board with a technology that forces them to compete with the masses during seed rounds...
and existing companies are all about upstart competitors having an easier way to get capital early on...
\s
You are quite mistaken here, from the top of my head, Tesco (late 90s) and Monzo (very recent) are 2 examples, and I'm not even into finance.
http://www.computerweekly.com/news/450400615/Digital-only-At...
>The bank was the brainchild of Anthony Thomson, who set up Metro Bank in 2009, which was the first new banking organisation to open in the UK since the end of the 19th century.
>In April 2016, Atom launched its banking app after regulators lifted a restriction on its authorisation.
Anyway, there's well over a hundred banks listed, and around forty building societies, so there's hardly a lack of competition.
When the coalition came in, one of Osborne's first acts was to push the banking regulators to issue more banking licenses, due to that 100 year+ stagnation. Since the coalition, there have been a variety of new licenses issued, so the problem is now resolved.
Given we're in a thread talking about ICOs and tech startups, I would side with you and say this is an irrelevant classification and the claim is wrong. :-P
Still interesting though, but given the veritable plethora of recently founded remote-only banks of various innovativenesses, I wouldn't say excessive regulation is to blame, if we think this is a Bad Thing.
All that real estate that is now occupied by bank branches can be give to some other businesses that actually need physical space (fashion/clothes, sports, restaurant, gyms etc) to use it more efficiently.
The only reason I had to go to a physical branch this year was to change my address and that is only because my old bank where my main account is doesn't have a way to do this online (seriously I don't understand why is it so difficult to make this a feature of online banking...).
I am using Monzo as my secondary bank and once they give me current account later this year, if it works smoothly and there are no issues I might get rid of my old bank account.
Then there are also other banks like Tesco/Sainsbury's which are definitely not 100 years old. More like started in 90s (but perhaps these reused some old banking licenses from other banks so don't count as "new").
Especially lately there has been a boom in fintech and lots of new challenger banks are appearing and getting banking licenses so that claim is definitely not true today, perhaps it was true a decade or two ago.
https://monzo.com/blog/2017/04/05/banking-licence/
https://www.thememo.com/2017/04/06/monzo-current-account-spe...
So that claim might have been true few years ago before fintech boom started. Lots of new digital banks already got or are in process of getting banking license.
Banking industry in U.K. is getting shaken up currently, lots of fintech challengers.
The point is ICOs are akin to scams. And there should be a regulations around it.
Solution: regulate the stock market.
Problem: cannot sell things we want to sell.
Solution: Derivatives.
Problem: CDOs cause massive economic damage.
Solution: don't do that.
Problem: cannot sell what we want to.
Solution: Etherium.
...
>Solution: regulate the stock market.
If people want to trade the price of a digital token into bubble territory, that's really their business. No one else is forced to buy up that token. Which governing authority will know it's a bubble anyway? It's not like it's possible to know if something is overvalued. If it were, one could reliably short every bubble and make a profit, and in fact do so so much and at such scale that their market shorting prevents bubbles from ever forming (since a short adds pressure on the sell-side).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Belfort
That doesn't like a problem for people who can fill a ~20 million ICO in half an hour, do they need to work (=be trusted) ever again?
Anyway, has there been any verified ICO scams yet? Seems to me like it's not much different from startups promising BS/bad ideas to gullible VCs who end up losing millions. In this case, ICOs are selling these ideas to the little guy through crowd funding which is different but the little guy usually invest a few bucks in these ICOs so if the ICO fails to delivers it's not as big a deal unless one invests his/her life's saving in said ICO but then that's a pretty risky idea one needs to take responsibility for.
By your approximation I should be dead by now. The salient point is that it's my human right to associate with whomever I please.
Many humans will do anything it takes to make a profit and not care about who they are screwing over. If you think that's okay that's fine, but then go to Somalia and see how a lawless country works in practice.
Food safety in particular was mandated by populae request. I cannot wrap my head around free market believers like you who apparently think that humans are omniscient beings who have access to all information about every product and every seller they encounter so they can make informed purchasing decisions. That's just bullshit. You are a religious cult at this point.
There is no chance that supermarket shelves would be stocked with toxic/fraudulent food products in our world of secure private property rights, with or withouy food safety regulations. There is an elaborate chain of private interests involved in food production/distribution that would self-organize to prevent such an outcome. McDonalds uses higher standards for its beef than the USDA for example. Automobile manufacturers have higher safety standards than regulations require.
>>That's just bullshit. You are a religious cult at this point.
I recommend some introspection.
I hope you realise that todays "strict" food safety laws were born out of a world where people did exactly what you say they wouldn't. They cut bread with sawdust to make money. They skimped on hygiene. They advertised other meats than they used etc etc etc. Today these things have real consequences. You're saying we should just let people do that? I cannot fathom what drives you to that position.
"Oh, but people won't buy their products as soon as they have been ousted as being cheats" yeah well. People don't buy Nestle products even though they use child slavery and caused mass malnutrion of poor children? It's just so naive to think that this actually happens.
We can mostly agree what is good and bad, but as soon as you have to pay 20 cents extra for fairtrade bread that goes out the window. You know it.
>Somalia's during its civil war didn't work because there was no central authority providing security and preventing raiders from pillaging markets, so markets didn't have the opportunity to become highly developed.
So there was no central authority and therefore the system failed. Isn't a weaker central authority what you want? Governments generally want stability, and guess what. Regulating markets helps stability.
Anyway, this discussion is pointless if you cannot see that total free market idealism is as extreme as pure communism and equally flawed. The optimum is somewhere in the middle.
I believe people will screw each other over no matter what system you use. In a regulated economy people will screw other people by lobbying for regulations that protect their industry from competition. In other words, centralized control via regulatory guardrails doesn't preclude exploitation: look at the opioid epidemic for example. It can in large part be traced back to doctors prescribing opioids as a result of pharmaceutical marketing. The industry is highly regulated and thus profitable for the pharmaceutical giants. The Drug War has been going on for a hundred years and drug abuse is worse now that it's ever been. I doubt that we would be any worse off in terms of drug abuse with a free market in drugs, and I'm sure there would be more competition and lower costs for drugs.
>>I hope you realise that todays "strict" food safety laws were born out of a world where people did exactly what you say they wouldn't. They cut bread with sawdust to make money. They skimped on hygiene. They advertised other meats than they used etc etc etc. Today these things have real consequences. You're saying we should just let people do that? I cannot fathom what drives you to that position.
People do that today as well. With a mandatory safety standard, you can probably raise quality in the short term, but there is a trade-off, in increasing costs and reducing innovation.
Regarding cost: it's not a given that reducing the incidence of food fraud is always worth the increase in food costs. I know it's not a intuitive idea, but sometimes the public welfare effect of increasing costs outweighs the public welfare effects of increasing quality. In a free market people will make a decision on what trade-off is best for them based on their own circumstance. Because it really does depend on the circumstances. Someone who values food safety more than low prices can always opt to buy a reputable label with a strong reputation for food safety. But for others, the lower cost of less reputable brands is more important for them than minimizing the risk of contracting foodborne illnesses or ingesting harmful additives.
With regard to innovation, regulation harms it because it replaces diversity with uniformity. Imagine a thousand food producers, each producing food of varying quality. With regulations, you get them all to use the same food safety procedures. This might mean that 70% of them raise their standards, but it also means the 10% creating innovative ways to maintain high quality standards at lower costs will stop exploring these avenues.
A modern day example would be how Uber found a more cost-effective way of assuring a high quality taxi service with its rating system than the regulatory approach of the medallion system that municipalities use. Taxi regulations, by imposing uniformity in procedures (the licensing process) on the taxi sector, caused the procedures used by taxi companies to stagnate and not evolve for decades. The quality difference between Uber and the regulated taxi services is night and day.
One other point I'd add is that the effect of reducing the rate of innovation is compounding. Over the long run, of 50-100 years, society will lose out immensely from trading recurring increases in innovation from a competitive free market for a one-time boost in quality from imposing a uniform standard for quality assurance.
The greatest force for improved quality and increased affordability is, in the long run, competition between entities free to innovate without the artificial constraint of mandates on their procedures.
Another reason to oppose regulations against the free market is that regulations are subject to being shaped by special i...
Just like people will always abuse the system. People hae learned to do this, especially in the US. Your solution is simply to make it easier for companies to screw people. Why don't people boycott companies TODAY when they do this? If they did, then I might support your argument. The fact is that there is no evidence for people doing this.
>People do that today as well. With a mandatory safety standard, you can probably raise quality in the short term, but there is a trade-off, in increasing costs and reducing innovation.
If they do they are thrown in jail. Now usually the people really responsible are not because of a failing legal system. That problem is not solved by just letting them do it and get away scot free.
Regardings costs. Peopme are so amazingly bad at making decisions as a group. It is mathematically provable that if everyone acts in their own best interest everyone can easily be worse off as a result. This assumes everyone is a rational actor, and we know that people are not even close to that which makes it even worse.
>The greatest force for improved quality and increased affordability is, in the long run, competition between entities free to innovate without the artificial constraint of mandates on their procedures.
>A great many industries were kickstarted by government subsidy. Another reason to oppose regulations against the free market is that regulations are subject to being shaped by special interests, who may deliberately push for them to be onerous to stamp out smaller competitors. Many small farmers blame food production regulations for the demise of their sector and the growing dominance of industrial farming.
This is indeed a problem, but your solution is essentially to just let companies do what they would otherwise be have to lobby for. Most lobbying cases are for laxed regulation or to allow companies to get away with monopolistic practices.
>Not categorically. I want a strong authority maintaining security and the right to freely contract, but I want that authority to not use its power to infringe upon those same contracting rights
We can argue the word "freely" then. I don't believe people freely enter contractual relationships when one side has a clear power advantage and actively tries to manipulate you.
And by the way, it's not a fallacy to appeal to moderation when overdosing kills you.
Since you believe that everyone should make their own decisons and we should just live with that. Perhaps you should consider that the system we have to day was born out of people making their decison to not have 100% libertarianism because they were smart enough. By your logic this would be all the reason you would ever need.
At some point you just have to realise that the requirements necessary for the system you want to outperform what we have are opposite to how people actually behave in real life. I hope you are young, then it is fine to be a bit idealistic. We all realise why things don't work sooner or later.
In the previous comment I explained why I don't think this will make it any easier, on the balance, for companies to screw people over. Please go over my previous comment again as I explain what I see as the trade-offs of more regulations, and how they are slanted toward people being screwed over more.
>If they do they are thrown in jail.
If they're caught. And that applies to a world without food regulations as well. Just because there's no regulatory requirement to have the food certified by the USDA doesn't mean it becomes legal to sell goop marketed as milk. That's still fraud, because it's a violation of basic contracting law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied-in-fact_contract
>>Regardings costs. Peopme are so amazingly bad at making decisions as a group.
I disagree completely. I think the market is a marvellous way to bring our collective intelligence to bear to guide product development, and is resulting in consumer food purchases becoming healthier and consumer options becoming more diverse over time. Consumer choice is the reason organic foods have seen their market share grow so much over the decades. It's the reason product diversity in supermarkets has grown so much. People are willing to pay for quality, and as society becomes more prosperous, we'll see more value-added food of higher quality.
>>>A great many industries were kickstarted by government subsidy.
Government subsidies can indeed kickstart an industry by bringing about advances in basic science and by incubating new industries, but that's not relevant to the debate of whether we should be restricting market choices with regulations, and whether industries will evolve faster with or without such regulations.
>>This is indeed a problem, but your solution is essentially to just let companies do what they would otherwise be have to lobby for. Most lobbying cases are for laxed regulation or to allow companies to get away with monopolistic practices.
My solution is to let the companies be regulated by consumer choice. Seems like the least corruptible and best incentivized system of development for an industry.
As for monopolistic practices, I endorse public funding of public options in monopolistic sectors, instead of regulations that violate the right of private market participants to act freely.
>We can argue the word "freely" then. I don't believe people freely enter contractual relationships when one side has a clear power advantage and actively tries to manipulate you.
A court of law, made up of a jury of our peers, should be determining what contract was entered into freely, not a sweeping snap judgement about an entire class of contracts without looking at the specific details of each case.
I strongly disagree with your notion that any agreement between parties of unequal wealth levels is nonconsensual, and I believe any court of law would disagree with you as well, as being inconsistent with established and legal understandings of consent.
I think one should take ideology out of these considerations and defer to the courts on issues of contract law. That's essentially what I'm endorsing by promoting the free market.
>>Perhaps you should consider that the system we have to day was born out of people making their decison to not have 100% libertarianism because they were smart enough. By your logic this would be all the reason you would ever need.
I don't believe people are smart when it comes to macro issues like economics, and thus I believe they collectively impose incredibly destructive economic policies like socialism, anti-free-market regulations, etc. through the political process, which lets the mob forcefully impose its will on ...
A state power isn't going to let some random currency come in and compete with their sovereign currency rules.
It's a bit silly to come in and dismissively say "the state will regulate it anyway" when the whole point of the technology is that it technologically prevents central actors (like a state) from interfering.
It's a bit like saying "nah, the MPAA and RIAA will shut down filesharing." Nope. They shut down Napster (which was centralized), but BitTorrent works just fine thank you very much and the media industry has fundamentally changed as a result.
More likely society evolves in the face of bitcoin to integrate or at least mitigate it rather than fight it, just like music delivery is chiefly now by streaming subscription services rather than album sales.
Go try and turn your Bitcoin into cash and then tell me how true this statement is.
Also I do local bitcoin transactions just fine thank you very much.
Therein lies the rub and the crux of my point. A government WONT LET IT see enough adoption that you can subvert the sovereign monetary system.
I think you underestimate how big of a deal it would be to move 100% of commerce off of the USD. Nations go to war for less.
By making convertibility to Yuan illegal. This is trivially easy to do and enforce, making the entire Bitcoin marketplace a black market for any transactions on the mainland. So your life would get real hard real quick the moment you try to turn Bitcoin into Yuan. Oh, that's ok you'll just do ALL your transactions with bitcoin. Ok so any shop owner that makes it even slightly known that they take bitcoin will be arrested. Too easy.
Forget big C communist ideology at the state level, you mess with provinces and their ability to collect money and you'll go down hard fast.
Then I remembered how it felt in 2000 where all you needed was a website for pet food and folks would throw money at you.
The Asian financial crisis was all these things.
Burning hell money is a symbolic offering to the deceased, not an act of worshipping money itself. Or do Westerners "actually worship flowers" because we place them on graves?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_money
Still it is a bit more than that. Flowers are merely a gesture/ritual whereas burning money is an attempt to send money to the afterlife (if my understanding is correct), which inevitably does elevate it somewhat in the minds of believers. I feel the original point is partially intact, in that they definitely do have superstitions surrounding money e.g. red packets ... etc.
To a relative outsider, a lot of the current movement in the crypto-currency space seems to be about amplifying the holdings of those who already hold. The BCC fork, for instance, effectively gave current bitcoin holders an overnight boost in the 15-20% range.
ICOs appear to be a way to finance things in a kickstartetr type way, only with instantly trade-able coins in the form of a new crypto-currency, with buy-in conducted in ether. These provide a new speculation vehicle, often/usually totally divorced from the underlying activity of the company.
Both of these things neatly skip any sort of bootstrapping phase that might be inherent to a new crypto-currency, and serve insiders and the already crypto-wealthy rather than newcomers or those outside the existing bubble. The whole thing seems very tenuous, and speaks very much of an "in-crowd".
So true. That bootstrapping phase has been reduced to dream up a whitepaper and that's basically it. All what comes afterwards to pump the launch is clever marketing (I've seen Google ads, FB ads, celebs on Twitter etc etc). I cannot understand why it is legal to behave like that.
I believe prices are inflated because of ICOs. People are buying tokens counting on ICO hype to increase their value so they can flip their initial invested principal with 2x/3x/4x return.
Without ICOs this speculative technique will not be possible so we will see how many people are actually interested in buying these worthless tokens because they believe in their "features", rather than speculate on their price.
I wonder though if the speculation will just move from China to other countries though and the bubble will continue until there is more action by regulators around the world against this.
Being interested in tokens for their "features" not the price is very archaic. This also does not happen with stocks anymore: People hold for a few months/days/minutes, then sell, they don't sit on stock for many years like we used to.
My guess: China will allow ICOs after drafting up proper legislation and regulation. It would not benefit China's economy to blanket ban a new emerging technology. They just want to prevent crypto as a way to move money out of China, take a cut of the profit.
Another guess: Regulation will be good for established players (like Ethereum and 2016/2017 ICOs), but bad for speculators and newcomers. It will thus shoot past its intended goal of protecting investors: Those who like to gamble with money they can't afford to lose will find other get-rich-quick schemes unrelated to crypto. In Las Vegas you are actually sure to eventually lose all your money.
my guess: China will not allow ICOs but maybe after 10 years or so, blockchains and smart contracts will quietly infiltrate boring business use cases and financial services. especially if they can turn it into a centralized tool for control.
what better authoritarian tool could there be than a centralized ledger of all economic transactions, run by the government. in the name of reducing fraud/laundering/crime you could have absolute visibility and regulatory control on all economic activity.
EDIT: spelling
i dont drink the blockchain kool aid myself as a silver bullet for every problem, read IBM's hyperledger marketing materials and they try to make a case for centralized permissioned blockchain. ymmv.
but if millions of your citizens are using blockchains, as an authoritative regime, you probably will want to control its use. you arent particularly interested in the best tech solution to a problem. just control.
and lest anyone think i am abusive of china, i fully expect the US to highly regulate the hell out of this eventually ... if not now under the Tweeter in Chief, when the Dems get control again.
ICOs are among the few remaining opportunities to achieve liquidity for large BTC/ETH account balances.
I don't see why projects such as "useless etherum token" https://uetoken.com/ should be banned.
You may want to ban trading the token to prevent money laundering but that would apply to all crypto coins.
Did they actually do an "ICO" or was it showing as "finished" from the get-go?
Let's find out!
30 seconds later.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170627123240/https://uetoken.c...
https://etherchain.org/account/0xbe5c1c298d0088886146a906cdf...
So they did but apparently nobody sent them any money, unless they also used some other addresses.
Another 60 seconds after that.
Actually they have a link on the current https://uetoken.com leading to https://etherchain.org/account/0xbe5c1c298d0088886146a906cdf... with 23562 txns total at the moment. Wonder if any of it was legit and if he got any money out of it.
250USD as in yesterday.