
Google will ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising - lnguyen
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/13/google-bans-crypto-ads.html
======
jsonne
As outraged as many folks might be this is just good business for Google and
Facebook. Internet advertising, nay advertising at large, is dangerously close
to becoming a regulated, or more regulated, industry in the wake of fake news
and Russian troll farms etc. If they aren't proactive and people lose money
they inch ever closer to requirements that can and will eat large chunks of
their profit margins. This isn't even to mention that they're also getting
pressure from the private side where a couple hundred companies control over
half the world's advertising spend and are getting actively called out by
consumer advocacy for where they advertise. The handful of dollars they will
get from crypto ads (in comparison to their overall spend) pales in comparison
to even one Coca Cola, Unilever, etc. pulling their ad spend. Advertising, and
media for that matter, is not free and fair market. It is tightly controlled
by a handful of players that will fight tooth and nail to keep it that way.

~~~
220V_USKettle
Acai berry is ok, but Bitcoin is bad?

~~~
cesarb
Sorry if I'm out of the loop, but why would açaí be bad? I can walk a couple
of minutes and buy a drink of açaí with guaraná, and I've never heard anything
negative about these drinks.

~~~
candu
Well: "very little research has been done in people on the health effects of
acai products." [1]

In general, health supplements, miracle berries, etc. sit on dubious
scientific ground: many have either not been extensively studied, or have been
studied and shown to have no discernible effect (good or bad). The assertion
here is not that açaí itself is bad per se, but that it is marketed as being
healthy with little or no scientific evidence to back that up - and therefore
that people are being convinced to waste their money through deceptive
marketing, in that they imagine themselves to be getting a health benefit that
likely does not exist.

[1]
[https://nccih.nih.gov/health/acai/ataglance.htm](https://nccih.nih.gov/health/acai/ataglance.htm)

~~~
sli
> miracle berries

Is this commonly used to refer to acai berries? The only "miracle berry" I
know of[1] is named for the effect on perception of flavor caused by the
chemical miraculin, which is produced by the berry.

They're also extremely fun to introduce to people who have never tried them
before, and I highly recommend them for your next party.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synsepalum_dulcificum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synsepalum_dulcificum)

~~~
candu
Ah, fair. I was using it here as more of a general term for all berries caught
under the umbrella of various health crazes (antioxidants, etc.), but forgot
about this berry (which, as you say, is a lot of fun to play around with).

------
anonytrary
Well, it's their platform so it's their rules. It would be dystopian if they
tried to censor cryptocurrency-related Google Trends insights, news and other
media. The pressure on the rest of humans to find suitable substitutes to
Google and Facebook will only grow with time.

Speaking of substitutes, Google and Facebook have a strong incentive to
squander cryptocurrency. The long vision is a direct threat to the way they
operate, and to the very question of whether or not they should exist.

If there was some hypothetical way to decentralize search, email or even
social interactions, DLT research is likely the path forward. The whole point
is that the nodes cannot trust each other, creating a sort of differential
company, where search is provided entirely by those who are searching.

This is vastly different to Google's model which had the ease of assuming that
they owned all of the nodes. Perhaps this is why Google and Facebook happened
first in human history; they were simpler inventions. I truly believe the
decentralized option is better for society, and so it will inevitably exist.
Emergent protocols are changing the way I think about how computers talk to
each other.

~~~
lawlessone
> The long vision is a direct threat to the way they operate, and to the very
> question of whether or not they should exist.

I don't see how that's true?

~~~
binocarlos
Take Basic Attention Token
([https://basicattentiontoken.org/](https://basicattentiontoken.org/)) as an
example - it is attempting to remove YouTube as an advertising middle-man that
controls and takes a cut of ad revenue. By creating a marketplace where
advertisers pay content creators directly, it in my mind represents a direct
threat to how YouTube operates today.

~~~
pgeorgi
> how YouTube operates today

You mean, paying for the infrastructure with ads? As soon as most of that
money is routed elsewhere, YouTube has little other option than to invoice
operation costs with creators (or shut down the service). The BAT doesn't
provide a solution for hosting.

~~~
d3ckard
That's the point. Now they take most of the profits from the content because
they provide monetization and infrastructure. Once they are providing only
infrastructure, they can only charge for infrastructure. They will still make
money, but much less of it.

~~~
pgeorgi
I'm less concerned with the amount of money flowing to YT, but the logistics.
The hassle free "upload stuff, and if you're popular there's a button to add
ads" model wouldn't work. The first interaction with YouTube as a publisher
would be a form to enter credit card data.

------
freedomben
Google is a private business and they can do what they want, but this
disappoints me. More and more Google seems to be thinking of themselves as
content police (consider YouTube is owned by Google also), and I think that's
a shame. Perhaps it will open up a market for dethroning them. A serious
YouTube competitor that doesn't demonetize content they find disagreeable
would be very healthy, IMHO.

~~~
provost
With the ICO/coin ads promising 49,000% returns that I see here in the UK, I’m
glad that they’re putting the brakes on it.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
It would be one thing if they followed a strict rule such as "we will block
ads that present unrealistic claims" and then applied that rule equally across
all advertisers. But the concern is they are singleing out one particular
technology. That will harm those cryptocurrency business which aren't making
claims about certain percentage of returns, thereby making it hard for a
potential new novel use of cryptocurrency from being heard.

~~~
che_shirecat
novel uses of cryptocurrency will almost inevitably gain traction because of
their worth, especially considering how hot the market is right now with
whales willing to throw ETH/BTC at anything that has a tiny chance to moon.
how would Google enforce a rule like "we will block ads that present
unrealistic claims?" who defines unrealistic? if you left that definition up
to me 99% of the ERC-20 token based startups out there are unrealistic.
there's no way that Google could "apply that rule equally across all
advertiser" without being accused of being impartial/having vested interests.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
How about instead of "unrealistic claims" simply prohibit claims about
unproven future monetary performance of an asset?

------
garganzol
I'm collecting those ICO banners as signs of the era. Sure, I know it is the
bubble, hence the driving force for me to collect them.

"Kids look, those are the pics of ICO craze 2018! Now get off my lawn"

------
SoggyMike
I'd be quite stoked were Facebook to ban most but not all cryptocurrency ads.

What I find most disturbing are all the self-appointed "experts" who offer
classes in which they will teach their "system" that they claim will guarantee
the students collossal returns on very small investments.

However there are lots of ads that I'd like Facebook to keep. Many of the ICO
(Initial Coin Offering) ads are from legitimate startup companies who hope to
finance their new businesses by selling tokens at a fixed price for a limited
period of time.

But I only want just the _legitimate_ ICO ads to remain. Unfortunately there
are plenty of ICO scams. It can be quite difficult for a newbie to determine
the difference.

I had a good experience with my first ICO - I bought NAGA at $1.00 then after
it was listed with an exchange, I sold it at $3.00.

I have three other ICOs that I plan to hold until the companies behind them
become profitable.

Note: "sold". I have a special hatred for the word "HODL".

There are other kinds of crypto advertising that I feel should remain. I'm
very happy with my Bitmain Antminer L3+ LiteCoin mining rig.

Even with mining rigs there are scams: Etherium and Monero are both "ASIC
resistant" because mining them requires quite a lot of memory. They both
require GPUs.

In principle ASIC ETH or Monero ASIC mining is _possible_. I expect someone
will eventually make ASICs with the required memory integrated into the chip.

But there are _no_ ETH or Monero ASIC rigs _yet_. Despite this, scammers are
endlessly posting on message boards that their "company" \- perhaps "shell
company" is a better term - has ASIC Etherium rigs for sale.

~~~
dunkelsten
> But I only want just the _legitimate_ ICO ads to remain.

I‘m sorry to bring you the news, but there aren‘t any.

Oh, and just in case there are, the crypto ecosystem implosion happening this
year will drag them along to the bottom of the pool together with all the
scams.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
Reminds me of the dot com boom with tons of $noun.com companies of which the
vast majority were worthless. But there were some true innovations, and those
gems survived the crash. Had we lumped them all together and prohibited any of
their advertisement, they may have never succeeded.

~~~
tim333
Often the significant innovations don't need to advertise. I didn't use the
early Google because I saw an ad for it and I don't think Etherium did paid
ads for their launch.

~~~
herbst
Ethereum is a good example. Look at all these poor Ethereum clones that ICO
the shit out of their eth chain copy cat. Same shit we saw with the Altcoins
craze some years ago.

The names that stay are those that speak for them self through revolutionizing
Technologie.

------
newnewpdro
At first I expected this to be about JS-mining ads.

How the hell can these companies turn blind eyes to bogus advertising like [1]
to the point that the FTC steps in - but suddenly have a conscience about
cryptocurrency.

It would please me to no end for advertising to magically become 100% truthful
and fact-based. But this is selective censorship for reasons I don't care to
understand, the ads these companies serve will continue to be rife with lies
and propaganda with or without cryptocurrency.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_weird_trick_advertisements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_weird_trick_advertisements)

~~~
Buge
Is/was Google serving "one weird trick" advertisements? Or is that other ad
networks?

~~~
newnewpdro
"In all of the cases, news sites such as MSNBC and washingtonpost.com appear
to be passive hosts of the “flat belly” ads. The ads are “served” to the news
sites and thousands of others by ad networks, including those operated by
Google and Pulse360, based in New York." taken from [1].

There's probably a comprehensive list in the FTC documents, but the other
articles cited by the wikipdia article make it sound like the ads were
ubiquitous at the time, run on every major ad network.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/ubiquitous-
ti...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/ubiquitous-tiny-belly-
online-ad-part-of-scheme-government-says/2011/06/27/gIQAbI6Q1H_story.html)

------
nkkollaw
It might look like censorship, but they probably realized that most ads where
getting similar to penis enlargment ads and thought they didn't want to be
associated with that.

~~~
convery
Indeed, the crypto/ICO advertising along with multi-level-marketing schemes
are a plague on social media. Guessing it's only getting attention because
it's 'crypto' in the title rather than 'likely scams'.

~~~
nkkollaw
Exactly :-)

------
mrarjen
The whole cryptocurrency is quite tainted atm, I'm pleased they do this, if
only to root out the bad players. Perhaps at a later time when things are more
stable they will go back to offering these ads.

------
thisisit
I wonder what kind of effect, if any, do advertising platforms have on success
of an ICO? My understanding is that most of the demand is driven through
Discord and Youtube channels, Reddit and maybe BitcoinTalk. Happy to be
corrected on this.

~~~
tgtweak
Envion ran a very large Facebook campaign and they finished with a 100M
funding round. I'd say it has a substantial effect.

------
sjbase
I don't think they really have a choice here. If you think the SEC rules on
"is X a security" are broad, take a look at FINRA's rules on advertising and
recommending securities.

The crypto litigation mass is approaching its Schwarzschild radius... By
acting as a conduit for these ICO ads, Google etc. are making themselves part
of the accretion disk arond the black hole, teeing up a decade of subpoenas,
complaints, etc.

------
v4ult
If this is in response to the BitConnect drama. I think it is unfortunate but
it will be a good idea in the long run.

On one hand there are tokens and coins created with good intentions who will
have to find other ways of marketing their values. On the other hand it
prevents scam-coins like Bitconnect and DavorCoin from taking advantage of the
less informed on a grand scale.

------
_aeneas
I welcome this decision. Investment should not be driven by advertisement but
by facts. In my experience, any investment advertisement trying to appeal to
mass audiences is fraud. This is no different for cryptocurrencies and reminds
me of the penny stock scams.

------
tnolet
I was on an Easyjet flight yesterday and their in flight magazine had a
15-page section with paid advertorials from all kinds of bitcoin, ico etc.
companies. The rest were ads about VPN software. Pretty weird.

~~~
lewisj489
I saw this too, I was genuinely weirded out to see print advertising for
cryptocurrency

Did you see the "World's first blockchain currency for football"?

~~~
tnolet
Yes! and we also have a DJ Don Diablo ICO
[https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/dance/8241155/don-
di...](https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/dance/8241155/don-diablo-
cryptocurrency-hexcoin)

~~~
purple-again
This actually doesn't look like an example of a bad ICO from the 3 minutes I
spent looking at it. You pay an upfront fee (buying HEXCOINS) for access to a
virtual environment filled with like minded people, Hexagonia ($15 a month to
play World of Warcraft) AND you earn coins just for spending time there, AND
you can spend those coins right now on real life things you probably care
about (this guys music, shirts, hats and shit kids eat up).

I see no issues here.

------
TekMol
I wonder if all these crypto projects still attract fresh money. Or if it's
largely winners of the Bitcoin boom shifting their assets around.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
I suspect that a good chunk of the crypto projects are simply money laundering
fronts. Buy crypto with undocumented cash, create ICO, buy into it with your
own undocumented crypto, and take the cash from the ICO as something the IRS
believes you have the legitimate right to spend.

I have no proof of this, of course, but it's an _obvious_ money laundering
route. Costs are fairly minimal to generate a legitimate-sounding reason to
have a bunch of crypto.

------
fuscy
I completely understand this decision but that doesn’t make me any less
disappointed. Not in Google but the users. Nothing has changed if after all
these years, people still fall for scams: Nigerian princes, Ponzi schemes,
single house wives and now ICOs.

~~~
noobermin
You can always find a sucker, but the hope is that education will greatly
reduce many of those suckers.

The thing is there still are many scams that are in plain sight, things like
fad diets, weight loss products, and on and on.

~~~
afarrell
The medium makes a difference. Lots of people wake up and the first thing they
do is turn on their smartphone, consuming advertising at the time when they
are least capable of critical thought.

------
technics256
Now if only Twitter would do the same, it's about 90% of their promoted tweets
now. To me, it says something about the platform overall since they don't seem
to mind these obvious scams marketing to their userbase.

------
neals
So where do I advertise my blockchain consultancy business?

~~~
wepple
Blockchain != Cryptocurrency

~~~
neals
No, I know, just questioning where the line is.

~~~
wepple
Yeah that’s a good question. Reading between the lines of that article, I’d
guess they’re worried about the damage caused by people taking regular folks
money, which would surely exclude blockchain consultancies. That’s based on a
giant assumption that their filtering can spot the difference effectively.

------
machinesmachine
forgive me, but all i can say is: lol years too late

~~~
tudorw
indeed, they seem to have been fairly happy pushing some fairly dodgy looking
schemes via youtube ads, now there is some heat on them to take responsibility
over content it's easier to ban them all, any attempt to corner these giants
into human moderated content is their worst case scenario, if they are held
responsible as publishers for the content they provide, their margins are too
small for them to survive.

------
wruza
Now there will be an order of magintude less scam per popula, and without ads
crypto bubble will fade and go away in few months.

------
tudorconstantin
I think a time will come when these decisions will brigng lots of shame and
bad PR for companies like google and facebook.

I find it totally unacceptable for a third party to assume the role of
babysitter for consenting adults.

~~~
danmaz74
It's not consenting adults if it's a scam, and Google can't analyze every ad
to check for that. In a space where most ads are scams, this looks legit to
me.

~~~
jMyles
> It's not consenting adults if it's a scam

Are you serious? Or is this sarcasm?

If you're serious: you're welcome of course to an opinion that google is right
to block scams, and / or that most cryptocurrency ads are scams.

But you can't really believe that adults stop being adults, or that consent to
judge the merits of, for example an ad, suddenly evaporates in the presence of
a scam?

Is the presence of a scam sufficient to warrant treatment of the involved
individuals like children?

That sounds like an awful world.

~~~
danmaz74
Scam = based on lies. EG I tell you that your money will be used to do X,
while instead I use it to buy a new home for myself. If one is lying, the
others aren't "consenting".

~~~
jMyles
I think I'm reasonably capable of giving consent to a situation wherein I know
I'll need to discern truth from lies. I mean, I understand there's a limit to
human agency, but the mere presence of a scam in a google add isn't close to
it, at least for my worldview.

------
kgdinesh
So Google is joining the #CRAEFULGANG?

------
aqsheehy
Good

------
aviv
This is good for bitcoin.

------
jimjimjim
Yay. Good news.

Go peddle your ponzi schemes somewhere else!

------
carlossilva33
"First they came for the crypto-currencies and I said nothing..."

For those with their eyes open, this is just another example of the current
authoritarian trend sweeping the globe.

Yes, google is a private company but so are bakers. Unless you subscribe to
"All animals are equal but some are more equal than others".

By the way, there is no distinction here between public and private powers.
The State needs these big corporations to extend itself and they in turn need
the State to regulate competition out of the markets.

~~~
pjc50
First they came for the crypto-currencies and I said "finally, it's about
time, now how about the white supremacists?"

~~~
carlossilva33
The only direction for a repressive, authoritarian regime is a completely
homogenous society. Such a society, in turn, will be filled with its own brand
of supremacists.

Case in point: Germany, 1933.

~~~
pjc50
Banning scams is not "repressive" and the slippery slope is ridiculous.

~~~
carlossilva33
The slipery slope starts with starving websites of ad income[1], goes through
arresting people for trolling[2] and God knows where it ends. Now in US they
are trying to make companies like Facebook responsible for the content of the
users[3], nevermind the new crazy EU law[4].

[1][https://www.recode.net/2017/1/25/14375750/google-adsense-
adv...](https://www.recode.net/2017/1/25/14375750/google-adsense-advertisers-
publishers-fake-news)

[2][https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-
order/116271...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-
order/11627180/Five-internet-trolls-a-day-convicted-in-UK-as-figures-show-ten-
fold-increase.html)

[3][https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180226/07321339304/secti...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180226/07321339304/section-230-isnt-
about-facebook-about-you.shtml)

[4][http://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/remove-terror-
conte...](http://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/remove-terror-content-
in-1-hour-or-else-eu-warns-tech-giants)

------
JohnJamesRambo
This is complete nonsense on the part of Google. I'm not sure when they
thought they became God. Banning all ads for something that isn't even illegal
and is a fresh new wave of tech and financial innovation is a sad day. Do no
evil, sure sure.

This reminds me of when newspapers wouldn't run my ads for internet sites back
in the day.

~~~
InclinedPlane
You have a very inflated concept of the importance of cryptocurrency
advertisements.

