
Cryptocurrencies Come to Campus - montrose
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/technology/cryptocurrencies-come-to-campus.html
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Animats
Name three ICOs that actually got their claimed product out the door and in
use. Filecoin [1] raised $200 million last summer. But the actual storage of
files hasn't been implemented.

This is not going to end well.

[1] [https://filecoin.io/blog/](https://filecoin.io/blog/)

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charlesdm
Ethereum. Funfair is also looking good.

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nwah1
Ethereum is not an ICO, it is a cryptocurrency and a platform, and it hosts
approximately zero useful software services.

Nobody is eagerly awaiting new features of some blockchain app they use, which
makes their life better in any way. They are looking at the price charts.

~~~
charlesdm
Not an ICO in the traditional sense perhaps.

There's plenty of useful stuff being built upon Ethereum. The platform itself
is also still in development and improving with every update.

People need to give projects more than 5 minutes to succeed.

Not that I disagree however plenty of money will be lost on useless projects.
But that's just the nature of the game (excluding any obvious scams). Plenty
(nearly all) of venture capital money is wasted as well.

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root_axis
> _There 's plenty of useful stuff being built upon Ethereum._

Can you give an example please? So far, the only useful function I've seen for
_any_ blockchain token is its use as a stand-in for fiat money (e.g.
blackmarket commerce), and bitcoin already has that covered. The usual go-to
for Ethereum are smart-contracts, but I've never heard of a useful one, or
even an idea for a useful one (that doesn't ignore realities that make it
useless in practice).

~~~
charlesdm
Land registry systems, voting systems, asset transfer and settlement systems,
tokenisation of (certain) assets (e.g. music IP, royalty flows), etc etc

Essentially anything where trust and/or potential corruption might be an
issue.

~~~
root_axis
I've heard all these suggestions before and _never_ had a practical example
detailed to me.

> _Land registry systems_

This won't work. In most places a centralized system works fine, but in places
where corruption is an issue the blockchain system is still useless because
corrupt officials will just disregard whatever the blockchain says or use
coercion to force you to give up the private keys. There are also many other
impracticalities that preclude its use such as situation where keys are lost
or stolen. What happens when the owner of the keys dies and the keys cannot be
found? What happens when the state needs to force transfer of ownership from
an unwilling party to another based on a judgement of the courts? Ultimately,
the government is the final arbiter on any question of land ownership rights
and any system that does not give the government overriding control of land
ownership registrations is untenable. Of course, if the government has
overriding control of the system, a blockchain is pointless.

> _voting systems_

This does not solve any problems that aren't already solved using a
centralized system that employs cryptographic signatures. If we can trust a
message signed by a citizen's private key, then all we need is a signed
message with their vote; adding in a blockchain serves only to introduce
needless complexity and resource waste.

> _asset transfer and settlement systems_

This is a solved problem. Asset transfer works fine today and actually
functions _better_ in a centralized system where the institutions can
safeguard assets from unacceptable failure scenarios such as having hundreds
of millions of dollars irrevocably wiped out or stolen.

> _tokenisation of (certain) assets (e.g. music IP, royalty flows),_

Pointless. Copyright violators will just ignore the blockchain and if you have
to petition the government to enforce a copyright claim that lives on the
blockchain then there's no benefit to using one since this already happens now
with a centralized database of copyright claims. "Tokenization" of things like
music IP is especially absurd considering the intractable layers of ambiguity
in determining which aspects of a complex artistic work fall under the
copyright. There isn't even a meaningful way to map ownership of a specific
piece of art to a copyright holder's private key since artistic expression is
not measured in discrete streams of bytes which can appear digitally distinct
while looking or sounding practically identical.

Blockchains just don't solve any of these problems.

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devereaux
I would like to know more about these students interest for crypto.

Previously, most teens and young adults didn't care about the stock market and
trading. It wasn't considered cool.

Now we have a generation that is hooked. They follow their investment on their
cellphone, they take positions on a whim, and yet still to be reacting more
logically than older investors [1].

I want to know what they are interested in, to sell them products they will
like.

1: [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/08/younger-investors-are-
remain...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/08/younger-investors-are-remain..).

~~~
rayj
They are interested in it due to the pretty charts and slick interface of
coinbase and robinhood. Many of the young adults and teens do not understand
the concept of compound interest at all. They think stock picking and market
timing can actually work for them. All they see is $300 -> $10000 or
something. Making 8%/yr is not nearly as interesting.

IMO Fidelity/Vanguard need to figure out a better marketing campaign. Right
now it is targeted to east-coast retiring boomers.

~~~
sidko
>They are interested in it due to the pretty charts and slick interface of
coinbase and robinhood You got to be kidding if you think Coinbase has a slick
interface/user experience. You would need to explain why in-spite of such a
terrible interface, people are flocking to Coinbase to buy Bitcoin/Ethereum.
In fact, so much so that Coinbase was the top app on the App Store for a day
[1].

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/08/coinbase-was-top-of-us-
apple...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/08/coinbase-was-top-of-us-apple-app-
store-after-bitcoin-price-surge.html)

>Many of the young adults and teens do not understand the concept of compound
interest at all

I'll need a source for that. It doesn't seem like humans in general are wired
to really grasp the power of compound interest (or exponential functions for
that matter), so if you're claiming that young adults today are less likely
than average to grasp that concept, I'd need a source for that. I do not
believe it to be true, but I am happy to be proven wrong.

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IntronExon
Sorry!

~~~
dang
On HN, it doesn't count as a dupe until the story has had significant
attention. Please see the bit about reposts in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

We have this policy to allow good stories multiple cracks at the bat. What
gets noticed on /newest is too random otherwise, and the goal is to help the
best stories get noticed.

Also, the convention on HN is to link to previous submissions of an article
only when they had an interesting discussion. Otherwise users click on the
link, find no there there, and get ornery.

~~~
IntronExon
Sorry about that, I’ll reread that link and avoid this in future.

