Part of my series on ICO Mania. One of the nice things about stepping away from blockchain for a bit to get my U. With a few notable exceptions including a very helpful TexanI was never a huge fan of those meetings, which felt like bad Tinder dates without any alcohol, where you talk about work the entire time, and go home alone at Not that Bitcoin zero hedge datasheet do that. These appointments became especially painful at the beginning ofwhen every single one went something like this:.
Great, bitcoin zero hedge datasheet, are you doing a token? It was moments such as those that forced me to quietly muster whatever inner steel I had and ask the one true Roman Catholic God to lend me strength to suppress the words. Had I given forth on a VC in this way, while in my previous employment, there is a non-zero bitcoin zero hedge datasheet that my co-founder or investors would have had me swiftly taken out back and shot.
And I just did, so there. But at the time, I smiled and nodded, thanked the VCs for their time, and either left or hung up. I have been firmly against ICOs since before the day I started a venture of my own in the space, back in when my company was walking door-to-door visiting every bank in London and competing with a certain ICO-funded project named Ethereum for attention and budget.
I remain opposed to most ICOs today. And I am bearish on their future. These other people buy the Neo-Bitcoins in the bitcoin zero hedge datasheet these new coins will go up in value just like the original Bitcoin did, so that they can retire to Tahiti without having done any work.
ICOs, or Initial Coin Offerings, are an alternative, unregulated way of fundraising enabled by blockchain technology. The bull case says that Bitcoin and its ilk are the future of money and commerce itself. Getting on the ride now promises countless riches, failing to do so means missing the future. Proponents point to Bitcoin and Ethereum as prototypical examples of this new paradigm of making and selling software.
If the rumours are true, hundreds bitcoin zero hedge datasheet millions if not billions more in institutional money is sitting on the sidelines, waiting to be deployed. I think the bull bitcoin zero hedge datasheet is wrong, transparently short-termist, bitcoin zero hedge datasheet bankrupt, and will deal tremendous bitcoin zero hedge datasheet to the reputations of the technology and its promoters before the end of the day.
Below, I set out why. The paucity of effective regulation to date means that, as an investment, it has enjoyed an advantage vis-a-vis other investments, like shares or bonds. To be fair to Bitcoin, there are infrastructural developments i. Lightning which propose to ameliorate some of its capacity limitations. They won't sit still and take it. How soon will Bitcoin replace the dollar entirely and render government obsolete?
The first two tweets above are a small taste of the untestable propositions we see in Bitcoinlandia all the time. Although BTC has its issues, at the bitcoin zero hedge datasheet least it has focus. Meaning its problems pale in comparison to what we see with the ICO ecosystem that apes Bitcoin. Ether has an even more bitcoin zero hedge datasheet set of goals than Bitcoin does. At this point, for that group, literally anything is fair game:. See, for example, the following from ZeroHedgeposted three weeks ago.
The announcement of the co-venture between several of the largest US tech companies coincided with the beginning of a massive runup in the value of Ethereum. Second, bear with me for a minute while I unpack that throughput claim. If you want to run a database at 1 million TPS transactions per secondyou can do it, but you need the right tools.
Ethereum works rather differently. All of these conspire to ensure that its blocks propagate around the globe at a leisurely pace, between 0. In other words, Ethereum is slower than molasses. Public, proof-of-work blockchains will always have this limitation, so Ethereum will continue to be this slow for as long as it is a public blockchain.
If it wants, it can try some tweaks, but those tweaks will have consequences. TPS could be increased, for example by increasing block size, but this would result in a more bloat, resulting in increased centralisation risk and b slower propagation and other network problems. Just like they have failed to rebut other similarly overwrought claims over the years. Not that anyone is surprised. My technically-minded friends and I have had, privately, a good chuckle more than once at the expense of other claims nearly as outlandish as this one, and the folks making them, for as long as I can remember.
In the real bitcoin zero hedge datasheet, questions around accuracy lead to trading suspensions. In Cryptoland, fake news almost always goes unchallenged. The above is by no means the only instance in relation to which a reasonable observer might think it prudent ask some follow-up questions; apart from the ZeroHedge piece dealt with here, the Eth universe produces some excellent creative writing on similar themes see, e. Ethereum is adding 5GB of state per day.
One wonders for how much longer this can be sustained. Help me with a disconnect: Which brings me to what irks me most as a legal professional, and also underlies the bear argument that the asset class as a whole is mispriced: We must therefore respond to this truly enormous quantity of woo-woo with a commensurate degree of skepticism. Developers-as-regulatory-neophytes wading in the grown-up pool will eventually learn, the hard way, that there is a fairly substantial difference between hopes and aspirations on the one bitcoin zero hedge datasheet, and actionable representations on the other.
I deliberately refrain from naming those projects here. As a result, in-depth criticism of the two primary platforms is fairly rare, with debates revolving around whether this improvement or that one should be added rather than questioning whether the GB database we are all running is really worth more than everything produced by Kenya and her 50 million citizens for an entire year.
This is why we regulate the marketing and sale of investments, and why cryptotokens that people purchase with the expectation of profits from resale at a later date — no matter what function they perform — should be regulated as such. Otherwise, we will continue to see cases of.
The differences between the time Rick Falkvinge got in and today, of course, are a the number of victims bitcoin zero hedge datasheet b how much closer the clock is to striking midnight. ICO capital gains have funded dozens of companies, with hundreds if not bitcoin zero hedge datasheet of bitcoin zero hedge datasheet, which collectively have thrown many tens of millions of dollars — and are poised to throw tens to hundreds of millions moreif current trends are any indication — towards sponsorships, consortia, feel-good events and bitcoin zero hedge datasheet, promoting their own financial interests while as far as I can tell almost never disclosing them.
Bitcoin zero hedge datasheet is similar for the VCs, who bitcoin zero hedge datasheet that providing a favoured project with even the slightest whiff of institutional involvement will cause an ICO fundraising to blast into the ionosphere. And it is thus that a technology meant to undo entrenched corporate interests is pressed into their service for the sake of short-term liquidity.
The coins may undo them yet. Despite the fact that neither Bitcoin nor any of these cryptocurrencies are especially useful on and offramping fees are insane and writing a check is more efficient in terms of transaction feesthe price continues to spiral wildly out of control bitcoin zero hedge datasheet, seemingly, no end in sight. Distressingly, my home jurisdiction — England and Wales — seems to be very slow off the line if indeed they have begun seriously considering enforcement activity at all.
By contrast, news out of the United States — where, it seems, the only serious enforcement has occurred — teaches us a great deal about where we might expect other aggressive jurisdictions to set down the acceptable boundaries for conducting cryptocurrency business.
We know, for example, selling Bitcoins in-person has seen folks get slapped with charges for running an unlicensed money transmitting business. Bitcoin zero hedge datasheet is a criminal liability minefield. Which brings me to the bear case for crypto. Bear Case 1 assumes that the list of enforcement actions in the various categories mentioned above is a prelude to simultaneous dawn raids at the major exchanges and the homes and offices of the major ICO promoters, with a variety of bitcoin zero hedge datasheet in a variety of countries co-ordinating their bitcoin zero hedge datasheet.
Most liquidity dries up; the few remaining legal on-ramps for liquidity have nothing bitcoin zero hedge datasheet which to put it. Billions in paper gains are lost. We have set our coordinates to the city of Denver at the end of For two years, a powerful belief in a type of alchemy had a grip on the Denver area.
It promised to transform pennies into millions of dollars overnight and produced its own industry. Its focus bitcoin zero hedge datasheet Denver, where small companies, primarily energy firms, sought to raise money through stock offerings.
Hundreds of new issues floated onto the over-the-counter market on the crest of the oil and gas bitcoin zero hedge datasheet. Most of them were low-cost. From January to the end of Decembersome new offerings went to market through Denver underwritings. More than of them were oil or mineral extraction firms. Gee, this sounds awfully familiar.
Back to the matter at hand: In earlythe market really softened. Jim and John sent about 35 securities compliance examiners to Denver. These 35 examiners flew into Denver one Sunday night.
Everyone met at the office of the SEC the next morning, bright and early. Anyone familiar with dawn raids will know that these exercises can be highly disruptive for clients and highly lucrative for their lawyers. They are best avoided. Consensus among my colleagues seems to be that any governmental enforcement action particularly a criminal action would be followed swiftly by a series of private lawsuits to mop up what remains.
It is, of course, impossible to read the tea leaves from outside of a governmental agency to understand what their plans or intentions are. But these things are possible. This lends itself to the proposition that we are in the early stages of the Zombie Marmot Apocalypse scenario. Note the zombie apocalypse in World War Z: Bear case 2 is not as extreme but looks to government agencies to cause significant disruption over an extended length of time.
Delaying enforcement gives time for these schemes to turn more speculators into victims. The longer enforcement waits, the bitcoin zero hedge datasheet damage will be done. Here, only the most outrageous frauds are prosecuted and the regulators leave everyone else alone. I think this is unlikely, or rather, that this was the correct answer in This is effectively the bull case, but it is temporary at best; bitcoin zero hedge datasheet it means is that the ICO space will continue to grow until it becomes too large for the regulators to ignore.
First, that there is, in a NIRP world, enormous demand for higher-risk, higher-yield investment.
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