Topic: rpietila Altcoin Observer - page 106. (Read 387493 times)

So the big money moving into the IPO might be the salesmanship these (backstabbing) firms could be laying on their "qualified investor" clients?

Not much here


By order of magnitude, I think.


I don't.  Their banking sponsors would demolish them very quickly.  


Rumor is that Goldman is in.  Also heard on the street that Evercore is in, and some swiss firms, I forget which.  Total rumors.  I have no inside info.  And yes, they would want a privileged position, and a pound of flesh.  That's how they roll.


My expectation: Just like any dot-com era VC funding scam.  They have created impossible expectations in the mindes of the money people who will end up controlling them.  They will run in different directions at once, chasing blue sky, have a series of management changes, blow a lot of money on tiki bars and conference splashes. The layoffs will start about the same time as the death march starts.  Goals will be scaled down ad hoc to things which are achievable but useless, do not match or integrate the vision.  Finally the last new management will be chop-shop, and pieces will get sold off to the highest bidder.

@AnonyMint of course every system can be cheaten hence theres used "trust" system of friends giving to friends.
I like the idea of  rpietila as ineed almost 100% bounties always get dumped.

I got some cool bounties as i used to help many coins and never dumped [just out of respect to devs] but actually only like 5% of not dumping made me profit in future. Dumping right away was usualy the "best" thing to do.
Yet since im not in need of cash when i get free coins i keep tchem and not dump. If others start doing similar we may have better crypto-world

Risto I think you missed the point. Botnets have an order-of-magnitude or more lower costs, thus this lower cost basis means they can sell at lower prices, thus they drive the price of the coin down if they are too much of the float (which I theorize could impact the exponential share of the distribution and growth curve).

While the debasement rates are high, the price of the coin is modulated significantly by the cost of mining.

Thus for two reasons botnets are not a problem in the long-term, but they can destroyhurt a coin early on (when the long-term growth curve is being established and perhaps set in stone).

1. The difficulty eventually rises such that either the demand for botnets drives their prices up to parity with rented hardware or botnets fade as a significant % of the hashrate.

2. Debasement rates slow so the price of the coin is less modulated by the cost of mining.

I haven't had time to follow the discussions that have transpired since I was regularly posting in the thread last week. I don't have time to jump back into this thread, but I wanted to know if there has been any additional discussion or does any one have any comments now on the fact that Ethereum's IPO is approaching $15 million??

Is that the largest amount of capital that has been pledged to an unlaunched altcoin?

Does anyone think that figure might be fake, i.e. using the funds to buy from themselves again and again?

Does anyone think it is only our individual investor community, or has Peter Thiel brought the institutional investors in (e.g. other venture capital, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, etc)? Would they want to buy at lower prices in an angel investment earlier?

How does such a large initial market cap enable them and hinder them?

Interesting, but can it work with a coin, cascading a large amount down branches.

Is there a risk someone undesireable creeps in somewhere and intercepts a big chunk of the overall coin? if they are high enough in the chain it could be the same kind of impact as a scam dev running off. The person who might do that doesnt care about their honour.

Fair play for supporting people and trying something different.

Phil

That does not contradict my point at all.

I hold a few currencies, let's say USD, EUR, silver, gold, BTC and XMR. If anyone gave me a freebie in any of these, I would keep it and not search to convert it until in the next rebalancing.

If the freebie was in any of the other currencies, I would seek to convert it to some of the ones mentioned, to ease accounting.

Even if it was in the list, if it was large in sum, I would have to do the rebalancing sooner, converting some of it to the other currencies.

If it is very large, even if it was BTC, I would sell a part of it to keep a balance in my currency/metal/RE/project portfolio.

So the point remains. What coins you regard fit for investing, is a different set than what you might receive as freebies (even if counting botnet gains as "freebies" is disingenious, since mining a coin with your stolen resource is a clear business decision, it is just not an investment decision).

I have received genuine freebies such as 35,000 XRP last year, and the day I received it, I sold them for BTC.

To make giving freebies a good way to increase the popularity of a coin, you have to make a very good scheme, and nobody has succeeded so far. I am trying with personal circular donations here. That the giveaway is happening only via trusted personal relations instead of an open application, is a step in an uncharted territory, after all the charted territory has been proven to not work

That's quite different from running a botnet. A botnet might not have a direct operating cost but you still have to put time and some money into it. Whatever you get out of a botnet, you worked for it.

I general I agree with rpietilla though. There is likely to be little difference in selling behavior as a function of operating cost. Small differences are possible but not that important.

Re #2

Speaking for myself only, and note my name - when I get free coins on poloniex (via giveaway, trivia contest, etc), I sell them immediately if they have any aggregate value above, say, .005 BTC.  The exception would be if I had overwhelming evidence that the coin was rising in value.

I used to think it was an evil act:  Destroying someone else's value.

But now I think the bulk of the larceny in crypto is scamcoins, and I would support BCX, Luke-jr, anyone attacking scamcoins, to stop the harm they do.  I'm of course still concerned about the target selection process, always a touchy subject in warfare.

I thought that I read him denying using eligius hashing to attack the altcoin but acknowledging he used his own ASIC farm or something similar. I think he wanted to avoid people thinking he stole their hash from the pool.

It's funny because he posted about it and denies it completely, while everyone else says he did.

It's not about the number of cores, algorithms we talked about (https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo/blob/master/cuckoo.pdf) resist massive parallelizability. If you are interested in details there's a bounty that GPU can't beat modern CPU: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/cuckoo-cycle-speed-challenge-2500-in-bounties-707879 It's not our grandpa's PoWs which were moved to GPUs in no time. We'll see if the bounty will be collected or not.

I think their would be more small miners if the coins like BTC, LTC or whatever had better distribution from mining.  Many people were afraid to even get their feet wet and invest their time/money for fear they would loose both.  Many people would mine now if the distribution of the coins I'd mentioned were more fair IMO.

I agree with you. CryptoNote/CryptoNight algo FGPAs would be a good thing. An open market with anyone table to both buy FGPAs or rent hashing power from them is a much better situation overall I think.

That's part of the reason I've recently come to prefer scrypt again. It has a mature market where anyone can purchase ASICs or rent as much hash power as they can afford. Networks are pretty secure and no one is left out. It would be pretty expensive to mount attacks on a decent sized network. SHA-256 is always an option but with the scale of Bitcoin mining I would be pretty scared of pissing the wrong person off or something, as happened before when Luke-jr attacked some random alt with an ASIC farm.

I don't really see the point of all these exotic algos other than for marketing purposes. I mean, in theory I guess their intentions are good, they want to make it more fair for everyone. But in reality I think we've seen that's not really the case. But it's not a disaster or anything either. Networks can run just fine on some of these algos, but a tested and mature PoW is better I believe.

This is out of my depth, but here are my thoughts:

A GPU is different from a CPU mainly because a CPU is fewer more powerful cores, and a GPU is many slower cores. If this is the main difference, then building a CPU only algorithm seems like an impossible task.

In fact this race to create a CPU only coins only serves to give display driver hackers a chance to get rich.

I'm not seeing any benefit to a CPU only coin.

I mined XCN with AMD FX-8320 core 8, and got 500Kh/s. About mined 25-30 coins a day, so this is only a bit profitable, because electricity would costs 90% of coins.

Comparing the rank 1 miner in the pool http://xcn.1gh.com/,  the miner has 1500X power of me.  In this situation, i have to quit mining.

Theory strongly says that it is irrelevant, given perfect markets (which in the case of Monero actually is true!).

People earn in what they happen to get, and save in what they want. If these two coins do not coincide, they make a conversion between earning and saving.

Several people have already said that they know people mining with botnets, so botnets are likely a thing, however how much of a problem botnets are remains to be seen.

Also, I think that FPGA mining would be the best spot for us to be in. Anyone can get hold of a FPGA and the code can be loaded from an open source repo, much like today's GPU miners. However this might pull power away from CPU miners and end the constant FUD about botnets. Even if botnets are not a problem, FPGA's ending the perceived botnet threat would do Monero good.

I know at least one person who's mined or currently mines XMR with a botnet. I'm not saying that XMR is infested with botnets or making any other claims. But I've seen quite a few people outright dismissing the idea of botnets mining XMR and that's just incredibly naive.