It's really exciting to see the different components for decentralized apps come together. Bitcoin promised programmable money, and it sort of is, but Ethereum is so much more accessible (for better or for worse).
With Ethereum we have decentralized compute. With IPFS we get decentralized storage. Cryptographic keys give us self-sovereign identity. Build tools like Truffle make it easy to get started (think create-react-app for Ethereum). And libraries like Zepplin are helping standardize secure patterns.
And, to top it off, using web3.js we can write UIs _in the browser_ using JavaScript and the libraries we're already familiar with (Angular, React, Vue).
By the way, [shameless plug], if you're a web developer and you're looking to get started programming cryptocurrency and distributed apps, I have some introductory tutorials here => https://newline.co/
Could we agree that everyone who writes anything about crypto puts at the end of his/her post a disclaimer telling us if he/she is invested in tokens discussed in that post and if yes what is the share in their portfolio.
You know, if I was invested in eg IPFS I would post night and day in all forums subtle not too obvious hints how great IPFS is (pump) and then I would dump them.
Or to be clear, any discussion about crypto might be motivated by financial incentives which makes a meaningful technical discussion quite hard.
Let's start with @jashmenn, are you invested in Ethereum and IPFS?
I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that you would suggest any ICO investor might let their financial position influence the way they talk about cryptocurrencies. These people are visionary investors who selflessly pour their resources into ICOs, not mere speculators looking to make a quick buck on a greater fool. /s
You make a really good point. I'm genuinely excited about blockchains and cryptocurrencies, but it's so hard to find writing about it that isn't thinly veiled asset pumping.
> Could we agree that everyone who writes anything about crypto puts at the end of his/her post a disclaimer telling us if he/she is invested in tokens discussed in that post and if yes what is the share in their portfolio.
No? That seems like a silly question. If I'm the kind of person to hype something so that I benefit at your expense, then I'm unlikely to be the kind of person to tell you about the trap I set.
> Or to be clear, any discussion about crypto might be motivated by financial incentives which makes a meaningful technical discussion quite hard.
In general, anything dealing with other humans introduces ambiguity of motive. A good technical argument should deal with concrete facts, which can be verified and evaluated on their own terms, independent of the motive of the person that provided them. Take it as a given that you can't completely trust anyone else's motives.
> You know, if I was invested in eg IPFS I would post night and day in all forums subtle not too obvious hints how great IPFS is (pump) and then I would dump them.
Credibility is much more apparent than you may think on sites like HN/Reddit. Shameless self-promotion without any substance won't get you far.
Fortunately software doesn't live or die on name recognition via random posts on social media but on whether people actually find it useful.
If this was someone's plan to make money on their investments they are wasting their time. Unless, maybe, they are a minor celebrity with a lot of reach.
Disclaimers on whether you own some tokens in a company is of marginal interest to me (authoring news stories is another matter), I'll judge the value of it by the proposition being made. Otherwise I'm pretty sure anyone who's been on the internet for a long enough time knows better than to take any recommendation at face value from comment threads. And being an investor is a sign of confidence, it doesn't automatically mean you are deluded by the idea or are only motivated in pumping it up for a cheap profit.
Either way if someone's plan is to engage in pump and dump schemes they'll always be at a high risk of being in a race to the bottom trying to exit before everyone else with the same half-baked idea of getting rich quick. It's not as clever as you make it out to be. There is always a far higher probability that they were the actual 'bigger fool' in any scheme than they people they hoped to recruit.
Maybe because there is no "investing in IPFS". I mean there is Filecoin on top of IPFS, but you can love IPFS even if you don't give a damn about Filecoin, as it has been a well maintained project for the last ~2(?) years.
Disclaimer: I don't hold any file coin, but I enjoyed using IPFS for some hobby projects.
May I ask why you are asking for my email address. My first impression when someone is asking for my email to download something for "free" is that he is a lying piece of cr*p and he just wants to spam me later on.
That's cynical. If someone spent their time making quality things people enjoy, they can charge whatever currency they'd like. If that currency is an email address so that you can be contacted later in hopes of selling you paid products or earning through referrals, then that's their prerogative. It doesn't make them a _lying piece of crap_.
If you use a catchall, create an address for that service. It it does something you don't like, cancel later.
I'm not disagreeing with that but a clean disclosure is missing. It's like paying for an item that you don't know the price of by putting your credit card details. I don't think you'd do that.
An email address is not a credit card. It isn't private information. Do you really think the amount of spam you will receive will change at all if you give one extra person your email address?
> An email address is not a credit card. It isn't private information.
You don't know what email address I'm giving you; I generate single-use emails for just about everything I sign up for, so when I start getting spam for it - like I actually did about 20 minutes ago - I can go straight to the source and start asking whether they got hacked, or sold me out.
That's the sleazy part. It looks like you need an email to get a "pdf download link" but if you read the reviews a little down you'll understand that it is just another newsletter but disguised in a "course".
So why give a 20 lines explanation of what you provide instead of correcting the error. This could have been done more cleaner: Have all the free courses available on-site. Have the purchase page available on-site too and from the free courses. Clean. Simple. No BS.
With Ethereum we have decentralized compute. With IPFS we get decentralized storage. Cryptographic keys give us self-sovereign identity. Build tools like Truffle make it easy to get started (think create-react-app for Ethereum). And libraries like Zepplin are helping standardize secure patterns.
And, to top it off, using web3.js we can write UIs _in the browser_ using JavaScript and the libraries we're already familiar with (Angular, React, Vue).
By the way, [shameless plug], if you're a web developer and you're looking to get started programming cryptocurrency and distributed apps, I have some introductory tutorials here => https://newline.co/