I wonder if most blatant bs ICO projects are not just clever (pre-regulation) transfers of wealth from retail investors to management. Tron is the quintessential hype > value project, and now they are bolting on actual assets through buying stuff with their war chest. Even better for management, they don't have a fiduciary duty to token holders..
What scares me even more is how overvalued everything else must be around us. It really can't be that people give money away in such way and other valuations are still sane, there has to be some correlation.
I see companies closing in to 1 trillion USD, housing feeling decoupled from reality and the entire crypto market cap even now is ~300bln USD for what mostly is pure speculation. Odd.
Look at the whole casino market. From Las Vegas to video game gambling websites, there is a huge amount of money in there. Now imagine one global casino playable from anywhere in the world and you have the cryptocurrency market. There's no way it's going to stop. On top of that look at religions and how they were created and how they survive mostly from their huge amount of followers. Now imagine that cryptocurrency followers are pretty religious about their "crypto". You now realize it might not be a crazy idea to invest there.
This is, most religious preachers believe what they, preach; unlike most ICO owners, who are purely in it for the money.
Cryptocurrency used to be a fun place to be in, before people started doing these ICOs that only made sense when you look at it from a cash grab.
Something that is entertaining... Get a coin daemon that was created several years ago (could probably get away with months at this point,) that happens to be on an exchange. You can trivially execute a 51% attack, by yourself, with no real investment required.
Crypto can still be fun to be in. If you pay attention to all the ICOs and the crashes and media hype, you're gonna get sad about it. But there are other places in this sphere you can find and still enjoy like the earlier days.
For example, for all the ICO bunk out there, there's also some awesome tech being developed. The lightning network for Bitcoin is really cool! I just paid 18 satoshis to a game the other day. That's less than a penny. There are people in that community building games and working on the tech and its constantly improving and that feels really good. It's pretty flakey, but you can watch it getting better over time.
There's Grin, an implementation of MimbleWimble which is under development. It has an origin story like Bitcoin - one day, somebody with a harry potter pseudonym signed on to the Bitcoin IRC and dropped a white paper and then left, never to be heard from again. Now it's under active development. There is no ICO planned, only an open genesis block, like the good old days. You can contribute, if you want! Or you could read the white paper to understand what makes it different and special.
Ethereum is working on scaling and sidechains. Those are not pump and dumps by private scammy companies, that's really cool new tech!
Whether you love or hate crypto depends greatly on which aspects of it you choose to pay attention to. It's easy for anyone to get disillusioned paying attention to ICOs all day. If you're actually into cool things and not just the "can i make a quick buck" aspect of it, go find those things. They're out there.
Most religions started with a bunch of charlatans as well, the second layer is filled with believers. I've seen the same happening with cryptocurrencies
things aren't overvalued if the money supply has been increasing, which it has
if more dollar units exist, and the same or less purchasable units exist, then purchasable units have a value in more dollar units
the people increasing the money supply had an idea about what other people would spend the additional money on, but economists never predict human behavior accurately. but it doesn't really matter, the primary recipients of the additional supply are their friends.
> things aren't overvalued if the money supply has been increasing, which it has
If housing prices disconnect and accelerate away from what incomes can support servicing a mortgage, housing is overvalued. If PE ratios start to become wildly unjustified, equities are overvalued. This is regardless of money supply.
> If housing prices disconnect and accelerate away from what incomes can support servicing a mortgage, housing is overvalued. If PE ratios start to become wildly unjustified, equities are overvalued.
> This is regardless of money supply.
When vast amounts of money are added to the ecosystem - the economy in this case - the recipients all have the same choices of what to do with the money so that they don't lose it or have less of it. When the expectation is the even MORE money will be added to the ecosystem, then the market participants need to increase their own money faster than the rate that an individual money unit has less ability to purchase its share of the economy.
You have choices across the yield curve which dictate the velocity in which you increase your own supply of money. Some choices are below the expected rate of new money units, so you are expected to lose purchasing power. Other choices are expected to be above the rate of new money units, and this includes housing and stocks.
If there is an excess of money and the purchasable units are not increasing at the same speed, then they will increase in price.
Regarding "overvalued" in the terms of particular asset classes, yes, things can disconnect from this rate of change.
The way we are using that term is fundamentally different and counterproductive to go into a hole about. I am using it to make a simple point: the money will go somewhere.
1) That assumes that what drives housing prices is residential ownership.
2) What is a "justifiable" P/E multiple? What is the justification (other than past values) for _any_ P/E ratio?
What were the drivers of either the numerator or denominator?
This is to say, that macro and micro economics try to model extremely complex systems. When trying to analyze "value" it's worth considering that your mental model might not be accounting for many/most of the relevant forces.
Ultimately a P/E ratio should be justified by discounted future expected returns, compared to the risk free rate. So ultimately, the P/E ratio is a market prediction of future earnings growth.
In the former case you're assuming houses are for living in. That's a human perspective (and one I share) but the capitalist perspective is that houses are stored value and can be even more valuable if they're empty and well guarded. They become another sort of bitcoin, but backed by the reality of tangible property.
Depends on the jurisdiction, right? In several parts of Europe, they put RE ownership restrictions in place because they value housing as housing above value storage. In the US, not so much. Note the decline in foreign purchases of RE in Vancouver when they started taxing those transactions because people living in Vancouver were prioritized over Chinese dollars flooding the market.
Does anyone have a script or app that can go in and delete every post I've ever made? Google turns up a few Chrome plugins that all look dubious. Be great to have an authoritative guide to deleting everything without fully deactivating Facebook (since there is still a lot of utility in it w/r/t rolodex, event planning)
I saw the one in the post, but it's a Chrome extension. I think this will be very useful for me, so I'm going to write a very simple one (basically you just log in with FB/Twitter/whatever) and it deletes every post older than what you specify.
It's going to live at https://forgetme.stavros.io/, if you want to take a look later on to see how far I've gotten. Hopefully, deleting posts will be doable from the APIs, and the app will be feasible.
I expect I'll have a useful app up in a day or two.
> an application that will delete all your old posts from social media every so often, to help your privacy.
I’m not sure this will help with privacy. If you keep posting, you keep giving Facebook data and helping them build their profile of you. There’s no guarantee deleting old data from your timeline will delete the data Facebook has on you. To help your privacy, you need to stop giving them data (i.e. stop posting).
That's true, but privacy is more than against Twitter/FB. You can also have privacy against a new boss, a new friend, etc. You aren't the person you were ten years ago, there's no reason your opinions should remain somewhere, immutable.
Unfortunately, this is looking very hard to do as a service, as most platforms don't let you delete posts at all (e.g. Facebook) or only give you access to a very limited amount of your own data (e.g. Twitter, where there's no way to access more than your 3200 latest Tweets).
Especially with Twitter, corporations literally have more access to your data than you, as accessing old Tweets is only done via an Enterprise API, and not via the standard API or even the website. You cannot access your own old Tweets unless you pay good money for the Enterprise API.
Well, you could use a generic blockchain to keep an audit trail of the label certification process. But yeah, special-purpose cryptocurrencies are just walled gardens in disguise.
That's an easy but lazy reduction, and not accurate.
- They raised from the public
- Founder comp tied to release of a product that works
- They are focused on making a product that works, not on optical theatrics (in fact one of their biggest weaknesses is they've been horrible at optics)
Not quite right. They raised from their own investors and the public, which may be part of the problem.
If their own investors bought into their own ICO to "seed" it, which tricked the public into thinking there was genuine demand, that might constitute fraud.
If a startup never finds any paying customers, it will never IPO. The IPO is a separate step from the initial investment, governed by rules intended to protect the public. ICOs don't seem to represent anything of intrinsic value (e.g. a successful business) so the public probably faces greater danger from unscrupulous behavior.
In the biotech / pharma world, it's common for startups to IPO years before they have a single paying customer.
The difference between a biotech startup and many ICOs is that the former typically has years of validated and peer-reviewed scientific research backing up the hope of eventually having a product.
In that case, the "customers" are other scientists and drug companies that _consume_ the research, will pay for partnerships, will pay for research to be done by that lab, etc.. ICOs on the other hand don't have an acclaimed lab or anything special other than a PDF with some buzz-bullshit.
> They are focused on making a product that works, not on optical theatrics (in fact one of their biggest weaknesses is they've been horrible at optics)
Is bad optics the new 'fake news' because it seems like the Breitmans have been focused on who controls the billion dollars they have.
The foundation is doing exactly nothing. They are not spending money on development, marketing, education, outreach, nothing. They are sitting on about a billion dollars raised for the project, and twiddling their thumbs.
It was a project that was and continues to be promising from a development and utility standpoint, but that has been marred by terrible governance, internal politics, and amateurish management
In fairness, the foundation arm of the token's development appears to be operating in a reasonable and pragmatic way along their planned roadmap. It is a related company, helmed by the previous "frontpeople" for the project that has run into significant bumps and legal jeopardy.
Whether or not that means that the project will ultimately release, I have no idea (nor vested interest in).
I sold some in the recent run up but by and large still think worth to include some now, given the following potential:
1. Store of Value: Bitcoin is better than gold at what gold does. Gold is about $7tn. BTC ~$180bn
2. Anonymous payments (Monero, Zencash, ZCash): Many use cases for wanting to pay in an untraceable way
3. Global payment network: Move large amounts of money around the world with only an internet connection; faster and cheaper than remittance options today
4. Censorship resistance: As hard as cash to censor, but you can move much larger amounts of it instantaneously, around the world.
5. Diversification potential: Sketchier since its early and return drivers are not yet clear, but early results show no correlation with existing asset classes, which if true would be a huge boon to asset managers
I am less optimistic about in near term about:
1. Smart Contracts: Think we are farther away from the vision of smart contracts creating a trustless society blah blah than most people think. Right now 99% of smart contracts swap ether for ICO tokens. There is potential, but IMO very very overvalued right now.
2. Most ICO funded start ups
Practically, I think due to BTC's head start it will win the digital gold box - it's my biggest digital asset position.
ETH has a head start in the smart contract world, but upstarts like EOS and Cardano promise better scalability and governance - so I have some of those. Plus my view is ETH will have a tough time once ICO bubble bursts, so not holding in short term.
Have some of the privacy coins too (XMR, ZEC). And have tiny positions in tokens from most promising projects.
> Store of Value: Bitcoin is better than gold at what gold does. Gold is about $7tn. BTC ~$180bn
I don't know many women who feel this way, and women's interest in jewelry has historically helped establish an important floor for the value of gold. If civilization collapsed tomorrow women would work hard to protect their gold, but not their Bitcoin (or similar). But of course , it doesn't require societal collapse to put downward pressure on Bitcoin.
You should look into interpretation protocols like Blocknet. Personally that's where I see the future going as it allows for more componentized blockchains and blockchain microservices....think Baas, Blockchain as a Service
