
Hollywood Hitmaker Plans to Fund Next Blockbuster with Crypto - petethomas
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-17/hollywood-hitmaker-plans-to-fund-next-blockbuster-with-crypto
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datamoshr
Seriously Bloomberg, automatically playing a video? I just woke up my wife by
accident thanks to your poor UX.

I like the idea of more democratic film-making but am apprehensive about this
as it seems just like crypto is hitting fever pitch and people are trying to
make it fit in every paradigm they can think of

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jaryd
Anyone know of any extensions that automatically (and reliably) quash auto-
play videos or automatically mute them?

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mintplant
This one automatically mutes new tabs until you explicitly unmute them:
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-
mute/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-mute/)

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teddyh
I prefer Advanced MuteList:

 _Advanced Mute Links (MuteLinks fork) makes use of the Firefox 's built-in
mute tab functionality and automatically mutes a tab based on its URL._

 _Every time a new tab loads or a tab URL changes, Advanced MuteLinks will
check the URL and if it matches a link or criteria of the Blacklist, Whitelist
the tab will be muted, in case a tab is muted and its URL changes to one not
on the Blacklist the tab will be un-muted._

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/advanced-
mute...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/advanced-mutelist/)

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jedberg
Every ICO I hear about just sounds like a scam. Maybe I don't understand it,
but I have yet to see a case where as an investor I thought "that sounds like
a good investment!".

Can someone describe a scenario where an ICO is a win for the investor?

For example, at least with stocks, I get a share of ownership in return for my
money. So as the value of the company goes up, the value of my share goes it.
It's based on tangible ownership of a real thing. But with a crypto coin, what
is the value tied to? Is it really just the perceived value of the underlying
asset? And what happens when the company shuts down? They sell all the assets,
the real shareholders take all the money, but what happens to all the coin
holders?

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hackinthebochs
The best use-case for a crypto coin is as a share of an underlying economy.
Take ethereum for example, their underlying asset ETH is used to power
computation on the network. So when the network first launches you get to
purchase a share of the ethereum economy for relatively cheap since the risk
of failure is high. Your expectation is that once the network of apps and
users is built up, that economy will grow and so will the value of your share
of it. The value proposition in an ICO is that the potential upside of your
investment can reasonably be 100x.

I don't recall exactly but I think ether tokens sold for around 30 cents per
coin which is about a 1000x return at current prices. So for the extra risk of
having zero leverage in determining how the company operates, and no ability
to recover assets if things fail, you hope for a much greater return than you
get through traditional investments.

The problem with the recent ICO wave is that the value proposition has gone
completely out of whack. Instead of the underlying economy starting off at a
$2M market cap and thus having huge room to grow, they're starting off at $20M
or even $200+M with very little room to grow outside of the increase due to
massive bubble valuations.

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jedberg
> So for the extra risk of having zero leverage in determining how the company
> operates, and no ability to recover assets if things fail, you hope for a
> much greater return than you get through traditional investments.

This was the best explanation yet, thank you!

It almost sounds like gambling, in that I have no control in the outcome nor
any way to recoup assets, expect that I can't even calculate the odds of my
return on an ICO. :)

I guess my question is, what is the end game? Doesn't someone end up at the
bottom of the pyramid so to speak, stuck holding the bag with the whole thing
goes spiraling down?

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hackinthebochs
>I guess my question is, what is the end game? Doesn't someone end up at the
bottom of the pyramid so to speak

I think there's a chance a handful of blockchain projects will have enough
utility to be sustainable long term, but almost certainly not at the
valuations that are common currently. But the vast majority of them have zero
long term value. The way I see it crypto is winner-take-most. There's room for
one "currency" that can potentially have a Trillion+ market cap, followed by a
couple of niche utility projects with maybe around 100M market cap at best,
and the rest are utterly worthless.

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klipt
And then thanks to "Hollywood Accounting", the film makes no profit and the
investors get nothing:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting)

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dreamdu5t
It is _fraud_ and a blatant lie for Christopher Woodrow to claim “Investors
will benefit as the tokens, which can be traded in the secondary market, would
appreciate based on the success of the films”

That is a straight up lie. Token value is not a share of the film’s revenue or
profits.

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loup-vaillant
Dammit, they say "cryptocurrencies" in the first sentence of the article, why
don't they use that term in the title as well?

For a second it looked like the blockbuster itself was about AES something.

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dillondoyle
Sounds like just buying a tiny piece of equity in a seed round. I don't get
what a blockchain value adds here except probably easier SEC regs - maybe I'm
missing something.

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jondubois
It would only work if they advertise the coin inside the movies that are
produced. They have to keep driving attention towards the coin with every
movie released.

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junk_f00d
I think something similar but for musical artist could be very fun. Betting on
the next 'big band' sounds like a good time.

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clarkmoody
It would probably be more profitable to make a good film about the crypto
space and fund it with dollars.

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valsoltow
It's already happening in music with several different cryptos
[http://vectorspace.ai/recommend/app/crypto_discover?query=mu...](http://vectorspace.ai/recommend/app/crypto_discover?query=music)

