
Worked at an ICO crypto company. Crazy how people still believe/invest in them - tim333
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/b24e4s/i_worked_at_an_ico_crypto_company_its_crazy_how/
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ZhuanXia
Just before the ICO bubble went completely nuts, I read the white papers of
the 10 highest market cap ERC20 tokens. None of them made any sense from an
investor's perspective, from a consumer perspective, from a mechanism design
perspective. With the exception of Augur (and I have other problems with
Augur), they all relied on the Chuck E-Cheese model: requiring the customer to
use of a novel internal currency for purchasing the services of the smart
contract. This model is an absurd rent-seeking hack that basically assures
your service will not grow at all.

As someone interested in mechanism design, cryptocurrency strikes me as a low-
stakes method of testing out various mechanisms, such as Futarchy and
quadratic voting. But pyramid schemes (both intentional and unintentional)
seem to be the order of the day.

At this point for me to take a cryptocurrency seriously I would require it to
have an inflationary monetary policy. And not "inflationary" in the sense
Ethereum is. I mean, inflationary in the sense that the price does not go up
over time. It doesn't have to be pegged to an existing currency, but it needs
to manage its supply in such a fashion as to make a speculative bubble
impossible.

There would be little financial incentive to work on such a project, but Linux
had that problem too. The upside is I am pretty certain it would screen out
most of the toxicity of Bitcoin and its ilk. And it would actually have a
chance of being useful for someone.

In terms of prediction markets, the big problem with prediction markets is
liquidity. There is no liquidity because it is provably irrational to
participate in a non-subsidized prediction market. Subsidizing a prediction
market with demurrage seems like a very good idea to me and isn't something a
traditional prediction market can do.

Something like this seems like a worthy experiment.

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tim333
Another problem with prediction markets is issues with US law. There used to
be a 'futures market' in Dublin where you could buy and sell futures on
whether Osama Bin Laden would be caught by some date and all sorts of stuff
but I think they ran into problems with US residents betting on politics I
think which is illegal there. This was a decade or so ago using fiat.

I punted a bit in the bubble and have a friend still working for an ICO
company so am curious to see if any of it pans out.

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waste_monk
The OP is [deleted], but a copy remains here:
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jameshilliard
Archive: [http://archive.is/MK23e](http://archive.is/MK23e)

