
Coinlist - ttam
http://avc.com/2017/05/funding-friday-coinlist/
======
tudorconstantin
I think the blockchains now are like the internet was in '95\. Besides BTC's
proof of work consensus algorithm the majority of the rest of technologies are
in alpha/beta stages, ready to launch sometimes next year: proof of stake
algos, smart contracts, blockchain based computing, the lightning network,
most of the governments not knowing how to treat the crypto economy, etc.

While the market capitalization grew from 20 billion usd, close to 70 billion
this year alone, I think the big growth will start next year, when some of
these technologies will reach the production ready phase.

As a technologist, I wouldn't forgive it to me, in say 10 years, that I didn't
tried to ride the blockchain train if it becomes mainstream.

~~~
mifeng
I used the internet in '95\. It was awesome: I played Trade Wars with my
friends. I received and sent email with Juno. I chatted with random strangers
on BBSes (a few were super weird, but whatevs).

Despite the limited options and the slowness of my 28k baud modem, the
internet in '95 still fulfilled my needs for entertainment, communication and
socialization. Blockchain today doesn't fulfill any human needs.

~~~
wpietri
Exactly. One of my eternal questions about shiny new technologies is, "Great,
but who's getting value from it on a daily basis?"

I keep asking this about Bitcoin, et al. For 6 years I've been getting, "Oh,
it's just about to take off! You'll see soon!"

The Internet was definitely delivering value daily by 1990. It wasn't just a
technological curiosity. Email, Usenet, mailing lists, file transfer, remote
computing: all providing the sort of benefits that let researchers and
academics justify paying to connect up.

I think cryptocurrencies and blockchains are technologically neat, and I
appreciate them on that level. But neat technology doesn't always end up being
useful.

~~~
jcfrei
The raison d'être of Bitcoin is that it makes the entire banking
infrastructure (ie. the equivalent of the huge settlement industry currently
in place to keep global finance running) accessible to everyone with a
smartphone and internet access. Or think of it like this: Before the internet
the knowledge you had access to depended mainly on the people and libraries
around you. With the internet you gained access to all the knowledge in the
world. Blockchains are doing the same with regards to the accessibility of
financial resources and services.

~~~
wpietri
Again, I understand the _theory_ of Bitcoin. What I'm pointing out is that the
_actual use_ of Bitcoin does not yet appear to support the theory.

Here you are basically reiterating the metaphor "the blockchain is like the
Internet was back in the day". Since that's what I was responding to, I
already am familiar with the metaphor. Repeating it doesn't help me.

What I'm saying is that for the metaphor to be useful in terms of evaluating
the commercial/societal impact of a technology, I want to see evidence of
utility that is similar to what we could see for the early Internet.

So who do you believe the early vanguard is? Who is actually getting value?
Who are the people previously isolated from global finance that are now making
daily or at least weekly transactions?

I see you're already aware of M-Pesa, which is only a couple of years older
than Bitcoin. But M-Pesa has, per CNN, "30 million users in 10 countries and a
range of services including international transfers, loans, and health
provision. The system processed around 6 billion transactions in 2016 at a
peak rate of 529 per second." Bitcoin's numbers are orders of magnitude
smaller, and it's my impression that it would be much smaller still if we
subtracted the speculative transactions to match what people use M-Pesa for.

~~~
jcfrei
The most important (legal) use case is probably as an alternative to
international wire transfers or services like Western Union. There are a few
startups in this space, like luno or localbitcoins.

~~~
wpietri
Apparently I'm not being clear here. I understand the _theory_. I am looking
for proof of _actual daily use_ among specific groups of real-world users. And
by real-world, I mean people who are not in it for the tech, but just regular
people who are doing it because it's the best solution for their needs.

That startups exist doesn't prove anything about use. What I'm looking for is
traction.

~~~
jcfrei
I found a good article that you might be interested in:
[https://www.saveonsend.com/blog/bitcoin-money-
transfer/](https://www.saveonsend.com/blog/bitcoin-money-transfer/) (make sure
to read the comments as well for some actual use cases!) Growth in usage for
international remittances indeed seems to be minimal. An important takeway
from the article is that changes to people's behaviours take much much longer
than we usually expect. In the countries mentioned, people still rely on cash
agents rather than using the available (and cheaper) online banking tools. A
similar story can be observed in e-commerce. 25 years after the invention of
the WWW e-commerce has only reached 10% of all sales. A similar development
can be expected when consumers are changing their banking behaviours. These
things take a lot of time.

Now, regarding actual demand for blockchain assets (outside of speculation):
Previous price rallies in 2016 were most likely caused by the Chinese as a
method for capital flight ( [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-02/bitcoin-
surges-abov...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-02/bitcoin-surges-
above-1000-china-unveils-new-capital-controls) ). Another recent surge in
ethereum prices was caused by more and more ICOs, which use ethereum as way to
crowdfund their project. So those two I believe are currently the most
important sources of demand: Tax evasion / capital flight and funds raising.

------
RichardHeart
Please stop pumping little mini Ponzi ICO's. Please stop shoving new tokens to
get rich under the guise of "anti-spam." Please stop trying to get rich on
tokens. Storj and it's stupid token preceded this stupid token.

Blockchains are useful for an extremely limited set of circumstances. They
enhance trust at extreme throughput and expense. If you can solve trust almost
any other way, its better. disclaimer, I'm long as fuck bitcoin, however I
know that it's still risky, and has a rather unaddressed lists of
vulnerabilities in it's wiki, and has very limited use cases beyond emergent
ponzi value.

That being said, creating a digital scarcity to act as functional proxy for
human productivity, thus money, is hampered by every new shitcoin. Digital
scarcity can be ruined for a couple decades, and every new shitcoin enhances
that negative outcome. Utility before pump and dump please.

~~~
aqsheehy
HN really needs to start cracking down on the coin pumping, out right ponzis
have no place here.

~~~
grzm
If you think particular submissions are inappropriate for HN, flag them. If
you think particular comments are inappropriate for HN, downvote them.
Similarly, up-vote submissions and comments you believe are substantive and
contribute meaningfully. Each of us plays a role in curating HN.

------
aaron-lebo
_Investing in token sales shouldn’t just have the potential for profit, it
should also be simple, understandable, and enjoyable. It’s time to take token
sales mainstream._

\- coinlist homepage

Because there isn't enough speculation in the space already. Wonder when this
bubble pops?

The pitch must have been something like "did you know that there are over 800
coins listed on Coin Market Cap and that 795 of them are nothing more than
vehicles for speculation. What if...what if we created a platform which
allowed us to launch the next line of speculation?"

The person in the meeting who asked about practical use and societal benefit
got overruled pretty quickly because all the VCs saw was $$$.

~~~
mrharrison
Also, this isn't taking token sales mainstream, token sales are already
mainstream. This is making token sales available to the privileged (accredited
investors) before they are available to the public.

~~~
sbisker
On the plus side, token sales are actually mainstream - so companies will
actually be able to choose this hacked together version of the old public
securities model and controlling their own destiny via DAOs and, well, simply
setting up shop outside of the US. Choice is a good thing for companies, and
it's a clever compromise - but if the only way VCs can invest is with hacks
like this, I'm not feeling bullish on America's chance of participating in
this new economy.

~~~
aml183
I don't know how you consider token sales mainstream. I wrote a post
explaining how difficult it is to participate in a token sale.
www.arilewis.com/blog/2017/5/15/my-mom-cant-buy-an-ico

It's very plausible that there could be a bubble, but just to give some
context, the cryptocurrency market is valued at $68 billion dollars. The
Bloomberg US Internet Index went from $2.948 trillion at its peak to $1.193
trillion. We are nowhere those types of valuations.

~~~
andruby
Sure, but the internet at its peak was providing _real_ goods and services,
not just a _financial_ service.

------
xor1
Is there some sort of aggregator for these early crypto offerings? Still
kicking myself for not participating in the Ethereum pre-sale after a friend
linked it to me and I just wrote it off completely. Love me some gambling.

~~~
buzzybee
Check the bitcointalk forums. There are lots of altcoin announcement threads.
Most are absolute drek and not worth your time, and most of the comments are
people deceiving others or themselves by engaging in pumping/bashing. I
scanned those a little more when I started, but they're awfully crowded now.

~~~
OJFord
I think GP means an aggregating _fund_ , not a news aggregator.

~~~
MichaelGG
Is there a mining aggregator? I've got a few decent GPUs around, enough to
mine a couple hundred bucks worth of, eg Monero a month. I'd love to run a
script to automatically jump in on new coins where GPU mining is feasible. Not
the most profitable at the moment, but more like speculation. Am I stuck with
dredging through news and manually mining each one?

------
placeybordeaux
Looks like there are at least three semi serious storage related blockchains:
sia, filecoin and storj.

Are any of these reasonable to actually use at this point? It looks like
siacoin doesn't actually allow for true backups yet. Filecoin hasn't launched.
Haven't looked into storj much yet.

~~~
nemo1618
None of them are ready to use in a serious capacity yet. However, Sia's
network has been live for 2 years now, and people are forming smart contracts,
getting paid to host data, and backing up real files on the network. The
fundamentals are solid -- it's just Bitcoin with one extra transaction type --
but there's a lot of potential left to be explored.

Based on the Filecoin announcement, they are building something very similar
to Sia. It appears to depart from traditional Bitcoin proof-of-work consensus
though. I'm looking forward to reading their whitepaper.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders of Sia.

~~~
placeybordeaux
I was under the impression that you can't currently recover your files from a
seed on sia. Is that correct?

I was also wondering if siacoin is LN compatible. Can you speak to that? It
looks like there is something similar up, but will I be able to pay for
storage with any other LN compatible coin?

I'd have loved to see the value of coins like these that are supposed to
provide a specific economic utility have their value essentially determined by
it. For instance you could simply mint new bitseconds * mining efficiency each
time that someone issues a proof of storage over a given time period. This way
the value of bitseconds shouldn't never go above the real price for storage
over time.

Obviously you'd need to set the mining efficiency below 1 to encourage people
to actually store user files, or else it'd always be more profitable to just
store for the mining rewards.

------
woodandsteel
This article is about how Juan Benet's Protocol Labs is getting into
cryptocurrencies to fund protocol development. The basic idea seems be that a
new protocol will have a cryptocurrency attached to it that will capture some
of the value the protocol provides, and this will provide funds for developing
additional new protocols.

In addition, if I understand it correctly, they are developing a way of making
investing in the development of new protocols into securities that ordinary
people can buy, instead of raising funds from VC's.

[https://protocol.ai/blog/protocol-labs-creating-new-
networks...](https://protocol.ai/blog/protocol-labs-creating-new-networks/)

------
wslh
If you like to follow good blockchain progress to move beyond proof of work
take a look at [https://dfinity.network](https://dfinity.network) using
threshold relay chains.

------
powera
It's too weird and obscure to become a tech bubble, but making "pre-purchasing
new digital coins" easier is not something I would support or encourage in any
way.

~~~
htsh
I get (and agree) with your point but aren't they making it harder than other
coins here by limiting the pre-sale to accredited investors?

------
SippinLean
How is this meaningfully different than Siacoin et al?

------
sandGorgon
coinlist announces SAFT - Simple Agreement for Future Tokens, inspired by YC
Safe!
[https://coinlist.co/about/help/saft/](https://coinlist.co/about/help/saft/)

anybody know why this is generally relevant w.r.t the regulatory landscape
around bitcoins ?

------
andrewfromx
there is something odd about a new modern company like this not using SSD
drives
[https://coinlist.co/static/media/landing.6efaa9c2.png](https://coinlist.co/static/media/landing.6efaa9c2.png)

~~~
nivertech
CoinList uses this background photo b/c those HDDs are shiny like silver
coins.

The actual representation of tokens as a uint256 variable in Solidity contract
is not as sexy ;)

------
aqsheehy
Can't wait for the SEC to come in and crack down on the crypto space.

~~~
wakkaflokka
Why?

------
hal9000xp
Calm down folks, Coinlist is not for you (and not for me):

[https://coinlist.co/about/help/investors/2](https://coinlist.co/about/help/investors/2)

They require you to be an accredited investor. For those who don't know what
it is:

It's the single biggest reason why rich become richer and the rest stay the
same. In short, you have to have at least $200k yearly income (per individual)
or $1M liquid net worth in order to be an accredited investor according to
SEC.

I hate so much this regulation! Just because of some retarded voters can't
realize risks they taking, the rest must be out of all sweet deals angels and
VCs are making.

What the government tells you: stay where you are or invest in crappy index
fund and it takes you about 23 years to get $1M if you invest $1000 each
single month and every single year index grow 10% which never happens by the
way.

I'm so so glad that first time in history the government forgot to put their
heavy hand and I had a chance to invest in Ripple before Google Ventures did.
So now, for the first time in my entire life, I'm enjoying the same rate of
grow as Google Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

So folks enjoy the crypto-party, dance till music stops!

It won't last long before the government with support from leftists impose new
regulations when a few retards lose their money in obviously scammy ICOs.

~~~
pmorici
Google ventures bought a share of ripple labs. Sounds like you sunk money into
useless and worthless ripple coins which are currently in a pump and dump due
to there low float and majority control by a few insiders. You are invested in
the penny stock of cryptocurrencies. I hope it ends well for you but I doubt
it will.

~~~
hal9000xp
> useless and worthless ripple coins

[https://ripple.com/files/xrp_cost_model_paper.pdf](https://ripple.com/files/xrp_cost_model_paper.pdf)

~~~
pmorici
Can you find anyplace in that doc where it shows an individual being able to
send ripple. It's a banking platform unless you are a bank xrp has no value.

