One event that helped sparked the wild cryptocurrency ride of 2017 was the remarkable ICO raise of Brave browser's Basic Attention Token. When the project first announced, the capital markets were both excited and scared by this new hybrid fund-raising animal.
The Basic Attention Token (BAT) ICO just raised 30 million dollars in 24 seconds. VC's didn't even have time to put on a sweater vest.
Now it's been a year since the announcement of the project, and many more aggressive and "creative" ICOs have since launched. At the beginning of this year, almost half of the projects were already abandoned. In July, Techcrunch, a cheerleader of VC madness, counted over 1,000 projects as dead. It is overdue for the market to confront the reality of this phenomenon. In an epic thread below, Brendan Eich, the founder of Brave and Javascript, debates Francis Pouliot and Bitcoin developer Jimmy Song on the merits and faults of the ICO.
In 2018/19 many projects that raised money in the ICO craze will realize that their visions are unattainable and their models don't work. I'll have utmost respect for the projects that admit their mistake and distribute the remaining money back to their token holders.
I've been using brave since it launched, and I've been a big fan. You may have discovered problems, but BAT is not a solution. It's terrible UX and the token itself is a scam. Instead of building a competitor to Google, you built a competitor to both Google *and* Bitcoin.
We used bitcoin, it was terribly slow and expensive to buy in moderate amounts. We also could not give users grants of it, because no bitcoin holder was willing to give us a big pool of coins to hand out. You might think those are not bitcoin problems. They were for our users.
Your situation is nothing like Satoshi's. Until a few tweets ago you thought he premined. Please, go look at the history of Bitcoin before you justify your own actions based on someone else's. That's a terrible moral standard (relativism) in any case.
"The problem with the [altcoin casino | altcoin issuer | rankings site] troika is how neatly intertwined all their incentives are, and how poorly-educated users are about each. In many cases, “exchanges” is a misnomer. These things are more akin to the bucket shops of the 20s, the boiler rooms of the 80s, the unregulated poker sites of the early 2000s which ran fractional reserves or granted insiders special access to the hole cards of unwitting players, or the unregulated forex or binary options venues that popped up in the last decade."
"Understandable is the desire for central banks to oversee monetary policy for issuance of fiat currency, but when it comes to providing settlement finality it comes as no surprise that many are looking to blockchain technology as a means to build a more resilient system. The Bank of England released the results of its proof of concept for the renewal of its RTGS system, in which Clearmatics' worked closely with the Bank, which we will cover in further posts."
"Stepping back, Apple has long had a complicated relationship with crypto in its app store. Coinbase was itself removed for a time early on (but that was a long time back). Plus an early game that allowed users to earn bitcoin for playing was also removed."
"The problem is not logging the facts — it’s getting the facts, and divining the facts — you interviewed someone, but were they telling the truth, or were they even correct? — and putting them into a meaningful context: why should the reader care?"
"Google paid Mastercard millions of dollars for the data, according to two people who worked on the deal, and the companies discussed sharing a portion of the ad revenue, according to one of the people. The people asked not to be identified discussing private matters. A spokeswoman for Google said there is no revenue sharing agreement with its partners."
