Can confirm. I’m friends with a group of very smart distributed systems engineers who were excited to launch an actually useful crypto project that gets talked about here from time to time.
As much as they’re excited about the technology itself, very few people are actually interested in using it. Instead, their business seems to revolve around the value of the utility tokens for their project.
Few people are buying the utility tokens to pay for the service. They’re buying them to horde so they can resell to other speculators when the price goes up. They have a lot of tokens in circulation, but only a small number of them get used to pay for the service. Many of them are sitting in the wallets of exchanges where they get traded back and forth but never come near the blockchain.
Investors only care about getting more press releases out so they can pump up the price of their discounted tokens, which have a shortened lockup period relative to something like stocks. It’s almost like a pump-and-dump scheme for investors.
Maybe their underlying project will become popular in the future, but the volatility of the token price makes it increasingly unattractive for companies that want to actually use it.
> 2. You aim to build a community, but in reality 90% of your telegram/discord are scammers and people asking why price is going down/accusations that you and your entire team should go to jail.
I'm consistently repulsed by the lack of thoughtful discussion in crypto communities. For a space littered with intriguing technology it's endlessly frustrating that there's no HN-like forum. Instead, any community that started off that way is now filled with speculators and shillers.
Take your pick for where to source your news: 1. crypto influencers on YouTube who are paid to shill, 2. forums likw Reddit filled with speculators and conmen, 3. pump and dump groups on Telegram.
The greed and FOMO on display in the crypto gold-rush is deeply depressing, and for the majority who join the craze at the peak of the bull run, it'll surely end in tears.
> it's endlessly frustrating that there's no HN-like forum
There are communities like this, such as the crypto dev discord, the daily gwei discord, ethereum cat herders discord, etc. You're just in the wrong communities. That's like spending time on 4chan and saying "the internet sucks, it's filled with horrible people and no thoughtful discussions."
> Take your pick for where to source your news [actual answers]:
1. Newsletters. One basic example is Bitcoin Optech. I've always been the kind of person who looks at any newsletter just about long enough to put it in Trash. But I've come to understand there are plenty of greatly curated and/or written ones out there.
2. Podcasts. I can recommend Unconfirmed and Zero Knowledge, for example.
3. Discord (I know I miss out by not going here but the noise-to-signal ration and complete lack of privacy/anonymity/anything like that are both too much. It makes me a bit sad that this is where the action is even for infrastructure and supposedly open/freedom-asserting projects.)
Can be non-trivial to find the good ones for whatever angle/topic you are interested in, of course.
> The greed and FOMO on display in the crypto gold-rush is deeply depressing
Absolutely agree and I couldn't agree more with the comment you're replying to.
I’ve been thinking about forking HN to have crypto discussions, I really wish there was a board like this which only talked about technical stuff of crypto
I think this depends on the coin. The IOTA discord is quite interesting, and people using the tech. Not sure IOTA will be a thing though, but I still like reading the discussions in the Discord.
As someone interested in all of cryptography, I cringe every single time when we call blockchain "crypto".
Sure, there's cryptography in it. But you don't call a mail or http server "crypto". There's similar tech in git, we don't call it "crypto", we call it VCS.
Calling this "crypto" is just trying to add a mystic aura for stuff people don't understand, to further muddy the waters.
We have a word for this technology. It's not "crypto". It's blockchain.
Sure, it's your shorthand for "cryptocoin" or "cryptovalue". Which are again newspeak for blockchain, and we could argue that given its limits and usage of the last years they should be called crypto-investment, at best.
Which is still like ordering a pizza and forcefully referring to it only as "food". I want a pepperoni-food please.
Sorry for the rant, but it really feels like it's just a way to further embellish something with dubious values like the post points out
Regardless of the "crypto" shorthand, blockchains are distinct from cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency can exist without using a blockchain to record balance changes, and likewise, a blockchain can exist which is not used for recording accounts or spendable outputs.
The "crypto" shorthand emerged from the cryptocurrency side, which by and large, uses cryptographic primitives in order to spend and receive value. One further bit worth adding is that the market demand for cryptocurrencies broadly has directed massive amounts of resources towards the development of novel cryptographic primitives.
As someone who works on stuff that involves cryptography but not cryptocurrency, I agree, but at this point I consider it a lost cause. Cryptocurrencies have taken over so much of the popular imagination that even when I say "cryptography" I get responses like "oh you mean like Bitcoin?"
It's like people will create their own desired footpaths over fields when the sidewalks are not in the right place, so it seems the word "crypto" is just a shortcut because there aren't any shorter words to describe blockchain.
A new one was created to convey a shared concept (aka the purpose of language) and will always be more popular than the thing you invested way too much time into to change.
It’ll sting at first but time to accept that and update your lexicon.
"crypto" means hidden/concealed, if we're going to go there. I sometimes use the term "cryptoracist" but I had to stop because most people don't know what κρυπτός means.
> 16. And my personal pet peeve is that, by and large, most of crypto actually does want Bitcoin to die. Perhaps not in a "I want Bitcoin to go to zero", but in a, "Bitcoin doesn't do anything and so I want its value to be rightly distributed to my project, which has real utility".
This is the most frustrating thing about crypto and has been since at least 2016. Most of the projects with the highest market cap in the space either don't do anything, don't plan on doing anything and don't have any purpose.
And then you have a myriad of projects that are rewriting the traditional finance playbooks. Or blockchain infrastructure projects that are laying the foundations of what could be a fully decentralized and anonymous web. And they're worth a 100th of DOGE's market cap. Granted, they might still very well be grossly overvalued. Especially at this stage of the bull market. But the fact that there's such assymetry with projects that are at best vaporware and at worse outright scams is by far the most frustrating part of crypto.
> Most of the projects with the highest market cap in the space either don't do anything, don't plan on doing anything and don't have any purpose.
The second most valued crypto-currency is Ethereum. And the entire ecosystem around it does plan on doing a lot of things, starting with decentralised finance.
There are also efforts to layer a network on top of Bitcoin in a bid to counter-act Ethereum. And competing networks like Diem (Facebook, Spotify, Uber...), CENTRE (Coinbase / Circle...), Stellar (Stripe...) that aim to replace the current payments infrastructure.
Then there are cross-chains like Polkadot, Cosmos, Polygon et al that try to make all of these disparate blockchains inter-programmable.
Agree that pump and dump schemes seem like the norm, but that's like saying Internet has no utility and is crap because there's porn, spam, and malware all around.
"4. You realize that most of the "influencer" network of crypto is actually a cartel of individuals who all know each other and collude in pumping the same bags. They all cost around $20k-30k for a review, btw."
This is the sad truth about all these people on Youtube / Twitch. I know two individuals who are sucked into their "shows" and use what they are saying as gospel. It drives me nuts because they spout off numbers like "BTC @ 100k" and theres no date given.. I just respond by saving an even more ridiculous number like "BTC @ 100bn"
Still waiting for someone to name one singular measurable impact of a crypto project.
It's a solution that's been searching for a problem for over 10 years.
Decentralized, distributed, blah blah, stop drinking the koolaid.
Is a network controlled primarily by 4 mining companies decentralized?
Do you need a distributed network to sell NFTS that are only useable within the world of a specific video game company? (game nfts)
Name a project that can't be accomplished traditionally with the cloud and some code?
Name a reason why you should leave your FDIC insured government backed bank for a 3rd party wallet and incur transaction fees, gas fees, fraud, hacks ect that are equivalent to wire transfer fees cbx fees ect.
The crypto community has been spewing advantages that don't exist and solutions for problems that do. not. exist.
I was looking at a project called Helium or HNT. The basic idea is that "miners" are running something like a mix between a WiFi endpoint and a personal cell tower. People can use HNT tokens to get network access and the miners earn the tokens by providing the access.
I thought it seemed like a pretty neat idea and was encouraged by the fact that this crypto project actually did something useful. As I looked into it though I could only find people talking about how to mine the token, or details about the price, and nobody was talking about using the network. I wanted to try the network myself, or see if I could get a device on the network and what the service was like.
It's a little naive of me, but at first I was imagining something like cell service being provided by this system. I was wondering what it would take to get my laptop on it and imagining having a network connection wherever for a low price.
When I looked into it though I didn't find anyone using the network. The limitations on the network were severe, if I recall correctly their pricing calculator shows you the price of network usage in terms of cost per packet, where a packet can send something like 16 bits of information. Their envisioned use case was a collar for pets to wear that could ping the network once a day, but to my knowledge no such collars had actually been created or sold...
Disappointed to find something that looked kind of useful at first glance actually resolve to something that looks kind of useless.
FDIC covers all 6 billion people on earth now? You can store an unlimited amount of money in your head by memorizing 12 words. Like it or not, that has value to a lot of people around the world for a lot of different reasons.
> Still waiting for someone to name one singular measurable impact of a crypto project.
It's a solution that's been searching for a problem for over 10 years.
Protection against a devaluing currency, privacy and access.
> Name a reason why you should leave your FDIC insured government backed bank for a 3rd party wallet and incur transaction fees, gas fees, fraud, hacks ect that are equivalent to wire transfer fees cbx fees ect.
For so many people the answer is simply: higher interest rates.
DeFi: Removing middlemen (and their fees) as well as discrimination based on arbitrary criteria from all kinds of financial services. Also, these services can easily run 24/7.
This is a brilliant thread and sums up neatly what's wrong with crypto space in general.
> 90% of your telegram/discord are scammers and people asking why price is going down/accusations that you and your entire team should go to jail.
So much this. The greed of get-rich-quick crowd is the biggest hurdle in the success of crypto. Remove the incentives from crypto projects and you'll see how the interest from general public decreases. After all no one cared about BTC until people figured out how to build a ponzi scheme out of it.
It's also one of its biggest strengths. People with real value at stake in an ecosystem will do anything possible to increase the value of their holdings, which means making the overall ecosystem more valuable through individual and team contributions, all open source contributions I might add.
Here is a free tip if you want to do it anyway.
DON'T CREATE ANOTHER F**ING TOKEN!
Build you product on an existing reliable fast and cheap blockchain that fits your needs.
Focus on the product not the price of tokens on said DLT.
You dont need a token. No, really you dont. Your tokens only use case is likely to transfer value and guess which token can do this better than yours? All of them! Simply because they already have adoption/liquidity/fiat on-ramps etc. etc.
You also instantly gain a community simply by using a token that has a community already.
And you avoid lots of legal problems.
Here are some companies that did/do this:
coil.com
sologenic.org
gatehub.net
forte.io
raisedinspace.com
(Very biased (they all use XRPL.org) because I simply dont know other projects. But you get the point, every DLT that actually works in a useful way should have people building on top - if not its probably garbage tech)
I personally have experienced NFT cartels first hand and would love to expose it. From pay to play propositions by a “NFT artist” that’s sold millions in NFTs for an invite to an invite only NFT marketplace, promises of $x/month in sales, to a prolific “NFT collector” on Twitter confirming being part of the whole scam by retweeting me upon request of the artist to verify the authenticity of it all.
From what I gather no one gives a shit, and their attitude seems to be we can buy off anyone who challenges us. The irony is the same people shaking me down for Bitcoin in exchange for an invitation to the marketplace/inner circle successfully have collectively called for for banning/suspending of accounts from various NFT marketplaces openly on Twitter.
I've been thinking about this, there are so many crazy/interesting stories in the crypto sphere that you could fill volumes upon volumes. I wish they were reported more, hope someone picks you up on your offer.
To be honest I really hope this cryptocurrency and blockchain bullshit fad is dying really, really soon. Lots of promises and bold "ideas". We waste our precious resources on something that just benefits what feels like a few people but claims to bring decentralization. I think you can have all the cool projects without any blockchain/crypto bullshit. Nobody wants to do their due diligence with the regulations though and that's dangerous. We're polluting our atmosphere with something that is broken af.
Sounds like he's talking about tokens, rather than an honest blockchain built from scratch with no rewards for the developers other than creating innovative technology. Without a premine/instamine/devtax, there's no need to shill the coins, or care much about the price.
Reading that twitter thread, and HN discussion here, I am again reminded how the whole startup scene looked before dotcom crash: insane valuations, lots of scammers, and what little utility there is, it's mostly for illegal means. (If you're saying that there's no real utility in Bitcoin, you really should google Hydra).
But don't you wish you bought Amazon stock right after IPO?
He forgot a point: exchanges are the house, and the house always wins.
Want your token to be traded on an exchange? You'll pay a fee, you'll do all the integration legwork for them pro bono, and then they'll skim money off of all the trades on your token in perpetuity.
Add to that: 16.5 You will be demonized by everyone except those that participate in what you build. 17. Every dollar spent on dev didn't 40x in ETH over the last year, or 400x in some other things. 18. Centralized gatekeeping of the "decentralized" projects both in coin ranking sites and exchanges. 19. Constant and never ending copycats and straight scams impersonating your brand. 20. People duct-taping coins onto what you build and stealing your users (ala sushi vampire attack on uniswap.) 21. Advertising is banned everywhere for you (reddit, facebook, youtube, google, etc) Caveat: Founder of #14 on nomics.)
I see lots of people in the thread, including the author, that have avatars with glowing eyes. Can someone explain what this is about? Is this some sub cultural thing?
From user experience, I personally don't see a strong benefit of crypto. It always looks like a Ponzi Scheme to me. When early users are people driven by greed than productivity, it is a HUGE problem.
I do. I can take out a 6 figure loan in 15 seconds and send it to anywhere in the world (https://aave.com/). I can deploy capital, I can participate in liquidity pooling on decentralized exchanges in a completely permissionless manner (https://uniswap.org/) (impossible unless you're a Wall Street insider in the current system), I can lend out currency at higher market rates to day traders participating in leverage trading (https://dydx.exchange/) (impossible unless I'm a Wall Street insider today), I can mint a derivative of a Tesla stock that follows the price action of Tesla from anywhere in the world (https://www.synthetix.io/). I can trade 24/7. I can play a game, earn in-game swag and trade that on an open marketplace (https://opensea.io/). I can take out crop insurance backed by a smart contract in an African country that lacks a stable legal system or currency (https://www.arbolmarket.com/). I can go on and on...
Having been part of launching Helium HNT token (which is honestly a real-world utility use case), here is my personal experience related to his points...
Helium started as a traditional centralized IoT project, realized that centralization was a limiting factor, then joked about turning it into a blockchain application. Now it is over $1.5bn market cap and provides a real-world utility.
Exchanges are pay-to-play. It feels bad to interact with them to get listed.
Lots and lots of scammers.
There is still so much untapped value in some possible use-cases, but honestly too many get-rich schemes.
Launching a new layer 1 protocol is a tremendous amount of development effort and I think underestimated by most.
Security is hard.
Scammers/hackers go after all project members personally. You probably aren't prepared for any kind of success.
5 years ago crypto wasn't mainstream. Fast forward to today, and when you say you're in crypto, everyone thinks you're a billionaire.
1.) Decentralization will come for sure (DAO LLC), but no matter what, there is still a Foundation of some kind.
2.) Community depends on utility. There are some amazing strong communities, but is in direct proportoin to the utility the token really brings. Otherwise, just pump and dumpers.
3.) I don't think it is 100% possible to truly decentralize governance. But people are trying.
4.) I don't believe this is true for everything. There are pump and dumpers, but many of the decent tokens today need to focus on utility, the tokens for speculation only will always be manipulated.
5.) I think the VC landscape has changed and maybe a more piling on, but couple of years ago, VCs wouldn't touch crypto and the VCs focusing on crypto (Multicoin, Polychain, etc) are very good and extremely smart.
6.) Time makes no difference. Since it is decentralized it isn't like you have a support team fielding issues. You can't fix anything in a moment's notice. Releases take careful planning and careful testing.
7.) Again this assumes there is no utility in the token. But he is right you can't talk about token price or speculation. But underneath it all you hope the token price goes up.
8.) 100% true. You can't build it and they will just come. It requires real marketing and PR. Most importantly branding. People are looking for value and community around your token. But the early adopters are FOMO speculators.
9.) Yes, legal fees are very high. Could be 7 figures.
10.) Taxes are becoming more clear. Cost basis and capital gains. But a lot depends on how you acquired your token.
11.) Basically, people will constantly claim your are scammers. Literally day and night. And people will spam free bitcoin offers to all your telegram and discord users. Every day and every night.
12.) I think insider trading is unbounded in crypto currency, but that being said a.) its still illegal and not sure founders would be participating in this, b.) its still unclear what really motivates the market. Crypto is heavily retail and the chatter as always be trolls, scammers and naysayers. But also fomo'ers. So hard to say how much insider trading will capitalize on information versus exchanges that can manipulate the volume data. I think whales can manipulate far better than insider trading.
13.) hard to say are we talking a stock market bear market or a crypto bear market?
14.) There are several tokens that have real utility and likely you aren't questioning your lifes' decisions. But lots of sh*tcoin maybe you are. But blockchain (layer 1) developers are still incredibly hard to find--so think they can pick whatever they want to work on.
15.) Again, utility (real use case) or pure speculation play. There are tons of garbage uses of blockchain that are a super poor fit. Hopefully, you don't work for one of those (does supplychain really need to be on a blockchain?)
16.) Unsure if that is true. I think most projects get a halo effect from the success of bitcoin. Most new tokens should be real utility instead of trying to replace bitcoin.
Most of the comments here seem to revolve around "traditional" crytocurrencies that are more or less copycats of Bitcoin with no real value-add.
I think what most people don't realize is how much crypto has changed since 2017, mainly through Ethereum and the concept of smart contracts. The idea of running (immutable) functions on a decentralized network combined with transaction of value has so many interesting applications, that I believe we haven't even scratched the surface of what's possible.
Shameless plug: We're in the middle of validating/refining an idea for a tokenized e-commerce platform. The main idea is that a tokenized platform can shift the incentives for all actors to produce drastically different outcomes. So we're more about embracing the game-theoretical side of crypto than the technical side.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
As much as they’re excited about the technology itself, very few people are actually interested in using it. Instead, their business seems to revolve around the value of the utility tokens for their project.
Few people are buying the utility tokens to pay for the service. They’re buying them to horde so they can resell to other speculators when the price goes up. They have a lot of tokens in circulation, but only a small number of them get used to pay for the service. Many of them are sitting in the wallets of exchanges where they get traded back and forth but never come near the blockchain.
Investors only care about getting more press releases out so they can pump up the price of their discounted tokens, which have a shortened lockup period relative to something like stocks. It’s almost like a pump-and-dump scheme for investors.
Maybe their underlying project will become popular in the future, but the volatility of the token price makes it increasingly unattractive for companies that want to actually use it.
[+] [-] fumblebee|4 years ago|reply
I'm consistently repulsed by the lack of thoughtful discussion in crypto communities. For a space littered with intriguing technology it's endlessly frustrating that there's no HN-like forum. Instead, any community that started off that way is now filled with speculators and shillers.
Take your pick for where to source your news: 1. crypto influencers on YouTube who are paid to shill, 2. forums likw Reddit filled with speculators and conmen, 3. pump and dump groups on Telegram.
The greed and FOMO on display in the crypto gold-rush is deeply depressing, and for the majority who join the craze at the peak of the bull run, it'll surely end in tears.
[+] [-] hanniabu|4 years ago|reply
There are communities like this, such as the crypto dev discord, the daily gwei discord, ethereum cat herders discord, etc. You're just in the wrong communities. That's like spending time on 4chan and saying "the internet sucks, it's filled with horrible people and no thoughtful discussions."
[+] [-] Legogris|4 years ago|reply
1. Newsletters. One basic example is Bitcoin Optech. I've always been the kind of person who looks at any newsletter just about long enough to put it in Trash. But I've come to understand there are plenty of greatly curated and/or written ones out there.
2. Podcasts. I can recommend Unconfirmed and Zero Knowledge, for example.
3. Discord (I know I miss out by not going here but the noise-to-signal ration and complete lack of privacy/anonymity/anything like that are both too much. It makes me a bit sad that this is where the action is even for infrastructure and supposedly open/freedom-asserting projects.)
Can be non-trivial to find the good ones for whatever angle/topic you are interested in, of course.
> The greed and FOMO on display in the crypto gold-rush is deeply depressing
Absolutely agree and I couldn't agree more with the comment you're replying to.
[+] [-] baby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] queuep|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Luker88|4 years ago|reply
Sure, there's cryptography in it. But you don't call a mail or http server "crypto". There's similar tech in git, we don't call it "crypto", we call it VCS.
Calling this "crypto" is just trying to add a mystic aura for stuff people don't understand, to further muddy the waters.
We have a word for this technology. It's not "crypto". It's blockchain.
Sure, it's your shorthand for "cryptocoin" or "cryptovalue". Which are again newspeak for blockchain, and we could argue that given its limits and usage of the last years they should be called crypto-investment, at best.
Which is still like ordering a pizza and forcefully referring to it only as "food". I want a pepperoni-food please.
Sorry for the rant, but it really feels like it's just a way to further embellish something with dubious values like the post points out
[+] [-] ccamrobertson|4 years ago|reply
The "crypto" shorthand emerged from the cryptocurrency side, which by and large, uses cryptographic primitives in order to spend and receive value. One further bit worth adding is that the market demand for cryptocurrencies broadly has directed massive amounts of resources towards the development of novel cryptographic primitives.
[+] [-] munchbunny|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jyriand|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] B-Con|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avindroth|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
A new one was created to convey a shared concept (aka the purpose of language) and will always be more popular than the thing you invested way too much time into to change.
It’ll sting at first but time to accept that and update your lexicon.
[+] [-] baby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sadfasf122|4 years ago|reply
/thread.
[+] [-] sneak|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] garmaine|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steveEnix|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pattusk|4 years ago|reply
This is the most frustrating thing about crypto and has been since at least 2016. Most of the projects with the highest market cap in the space either don't do anything, don't plan on doing anything and don't have any purpose.
And then you have a myriad of projects that are rewriting the traditional finance playbooks. Or blockchain infrastructure projects that are laying the foundations of what could be a fully decentralized and anonymous web. And they're worth a 100th of DOGE's market cap. Granted, they might still very well be grossly overvalued. Especially at this stage of the bull market. But the fact that there's such assymetry with projects that are at best vaporware and at worse outright scams is by far the most frustrating part of crypto.
[+] [-] ignoramous|4 years ago|reply
The second most valued crypto-currency is Ethereum. And the entire ecosystem around it does plan on doing a lot of things, starting with decentralised finance.
There are also efforts to layer a network on top of Bitcoin in a bid to counter-act Ethereum. And competing networks like Diem (Facebook, Spotify, Uber...), CENTRE (Coinbase / Circle...), Stellar (Stripe...) that aim to replace the current payments infrastructure.
Then there are cross-chains like Polkadot, Cosmos, Polygon et al that try to make all of these disparate blockchains inter-programmable.
Agree that pump and dump schemes seem like the norm, but that's like saying Internet has no utility and is crap because there's porn, spam, and malware all around.
[+] [-] bearjaws|4 years ago|reply
This is the sad truth about all these people on Youtube / Twitch. I know two individuals who are sucked into their "shows" and use what they are saying as gospel. It drives me nuts because they spout off numbers like "BTC @ 100k" and theres no date given.. I just respond by saving an even more ridiculous number like "BTC @ 100bn"
[+] [-] aero-|4 years ago|reply
It's a solution that's been searching for a problem for over 10 years.
Decentralized, distributed, blah blah, stop drinking the koolaid.
Is a network controlled primarily by 4 mining companies decentralized?
Do you need a distributed network to sell NFTS that are only useable within the world of a specific video game company? (game nfts)
Name a project that can't be accomplished traditionally with the cloud and some code?
Name a reason why you should leave your FDIC insured government backed bank for a 3rd party wallet and incur transaction fees, gas fees, fraud, hacks ect that are equivalent to wire transfer fees cbx fees ect.
The crypto community has been spewing advantages that don't exist and solutions for problems that do. not. exist.
[+] [-] inteoryx|4 years ago|reply
I thought it seemed like a pretty neat idea and was encouraged by the fact that this crypto project actually did something useful. As I looked into it though I could only find people talking about how to mine the token, or details about the price, and nobody was talking about using the network. I wanted to try the network myself, or see if I could get a device on the network and what the service was like.
It's a little naive of me, but at first I was imagining something like cell service being provided by this system. I was wondering what it would take to get my laptop on it and imagining having a network connection wherever for a low price.
When I looked into it though I didn't find anyone using the network. The limitations on the network were severe, if I recall correctly their pricing calculator shows you the price of network usage in terms of cost per packet, where a packet can send something like 16 bits of information. Their envisioned use case was a collar for pets to wear that could ping the network once a day, but to my knowledge no such collars had actually been created or sold...
Disappointed to find something that looked kind of useful at first glance actually resolve to something that looks kind of useless.
[+] [-] gwicks56|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conanbatt|4 years ago|reply
Protection against a devaluing currency, privacy and access.
[+] [-] bitxbitxbitcoin|4 years ago|reply
For so many people the answer is simply: higher interest rates.
[+] [-] epinephrinios|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FlyingSnake|4 years ago|reply
> 90% of your telegram/discord are scammers and people asking why price is going down/accusations that you and your entire team should go to jail.
So much this. The greed of get-rich-quick crowd is the biggest hurdle in the success of crypto. Remove the incentives from crypto projects and you'll see how the interest from general public decreases. After all no one cared about BTC until people figured out how to build a ponzi scheme out of it.
[+] [-] intotheabyss|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noxer|4 years ago|reply
Build you product on an existing reliable fast and cheap blockchain that fits your needs. Focus on the product not the price of tokens on said DLT.
You dont need a token. No, really you dont. Your tokens only use case is likely to transfer value and guess which token can do this better than yours? All of them! Simply because they already have adoption/liquidity/fiat on-ramps etc. etc. You also instantly gain a community simply by using a token that has a community already.
And you avoid lots of legal problems.
Here are some companies that did/do this:
coil.com
sologenic.org
gatehub.net
forte.io
raisedinspace.com
(Very biased (they all use XRPL.org) because I simply dont know other projects. But you get the point, every DLT that actually works in a useful way should have people building on top - if not its probably garbage tech)
[+] [-] throwaway_kufu|4 years ago|reply
From what I gather no one gives a shit, and their attitude seems to be we can buy off anyone who challenges us. The irony is the same people shaking me down for Bitcoin in exchange for an invitation to the marketplace/inner circle successfully have collectively called for for banning/suspending of accounts from various NFT marketplaces openly on Twitter.
Anyone here in media want to do a story?
[+] [-] yunusabd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emosenkis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knorker|4 years ago|reply
> 10. There's actually a good chance that there's not a single person in your entire state or country that knows how to do your taxes.
And this is because your entire business model is to get around laws that were put in place ON PURPOSE.
[+] [-] RamblingCTO|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 55555|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tromp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golergka|4 years ago|reply
But don't you wish you bought Amazon stock right after IPO?
[+] [-] jude-|4 years ago|reply
Want your token to be traded on an exchange? You'll pay a fee, you'll do all the integration legwork for them pro bono, and then they'll skim money off of all the trades on your token in perpetuity.
[+] [-] RichardHeart|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mosselman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emmap21|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisco255|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aabhay|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hanniabu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onebot|4 years ago|reply
Helium started as a traditional centralized IoT project, realized that centralization was a limiting factor, then joked about turning it into a blockchain application. Now it is over $1.5bn market cap and provides a real-world utility.
Exchanges are pay-to-play. It feels bad to interact with them to get listed.
Lots and lots of scammers.
There is still so much untapped value in some possible use-cases, but honestly too many get-rich schemes.
Launching a new layer 1 protocol is a tremendous amount of development effort and I think underestimated by most.
Security is hard.
Scammers/hackers go after all project members personally. You probably aren't prepared for any kind of success.
5 years ago crypto wasn't mainstream. Fast forward to today, and when you say you're in crypto, everyone thinks you're a billionaire.
1.) Decentralization will come for sure (DAO LLC), but no matter what, there is still a Foundation of some kind.
2.) Community depends on utility. There are some amazing strong communities, but is in direct proportoin to the utility the token really brings. Otherwise, just pump and dumpers.
3.) I don't think it is 100% possible to truly decentralize governance. But people are trying.
4.) I don't believe this is true for everything. There are pump and dumpers, but many of the decent tokens today need to focus on utility, the tokens for speculation only will always be manipulated.
5.) I think the VC landscape has changed and maybe a more piling on, but couple of years ago, VCs wouldn't touch crypto and the VCs focusing on crypto (Multicoin, Polychain, etc) are very good and extremely smart.
6.) Time makes no difference. Since it is decentralized it isn't like you have a support team fielding issues. You can't fix anything in a moment's notice. Releases take careful planning and careful testing.
7.) Again this assumes there is no utility in the token. But he is right you can't talk about token price or speculation. But underneath it all you hope the token price goes up.
8.) 100% true. You can't build it and they will just come. It requires real marketing and PR. Most importantly branding. People are looking for value and community around your token. But the early adopters are FOMO speculators.
9.) Yes, legal fees are very high. Could be 7 figures.
10.) Taxes are becoming more clear. Cost basis and capital gains. But a lot depends on how you acquired your token.
11.) Basically, people will constantly claim your are scammers. Literally day and night. And people will spam free bitcoin offers to all your telegram and discord users. Every day and every night.
12.) I think insider trading is unbounded in crypto currency, but that being said a.) its still illegal and not sure founders would be participating in this, b.) its still unclear what really motivates the market. Crypto is heavily retail and the chatter as always be trolls, scammers and naysayers. But also fomo'ers. So hard to say how much insider trading will capitalize on information versus exchanges that can manipulate the volume data. I think whales can manipulate far better than insider trading.
13.) hard to say are we talking a stock market bear market or a crypto bear market?
14.) There are several tokens that have real utility and likely you aren't questioning your lifes' decisions. But lots of sh*tcoin maybe you are. But blockchain (layer 1) developers are still incredibly hard to find--so think they can pick whatever they want to work on.
15.) Again, utility (real use case) or pure speculation play. There are tons of garbage uses of blockchain that are a super poor fit. Hopefully, you don't work for one of those (does supplychain really need to be on a blockchain?)
16.) Unsure if that is true. I think most projects get a halo effect from the success of bitcoin. Most new tokens should be real utility instead of trying to replace bitcoin.
[+] [-] yunusabd|4 years ago|reply
I think what most people don't realize is how much crypto has changed since 2017, mainly through Ethereum and the concept of smart contracts. The idea of running (immutable) functions on a decentralized network combined with transaction of value has so many interesting applications, that I believe we haven't even scratched the surface of what's possible.
Shameless plug: We're in the middle of validating/refining an idea for a tokenized e-commerce platform. The main idea is that a tokenized platform can shift the incentives for all actors to produce drastically different outcomes. So we're more about embracing the game-theoretical side of crypto than the technical side.
https://shopla.shop
Curious what you guys think, any feedback is welcome.
[+] [-] asdev|4 years ago|reply