rekt

Okay -- now that I understand what you are raging about, I'll even go point by point. No clue how to multiquote but whatever.

1. Re: Point 1 Disappearing Act. I owe this thread nothing, anything I post here -- in an Ethereum discussion thread -- is my own original thoughts (or thoughts shaped by other people in this space that I agree with) that is "discussing Ethereum". I even said I'd be back in a year (which I did come back) at what coincided with roughly all-time low prices for the year. How is that ducking anything? I'm not going to be around for likely another year, and probably won't make another post in this thread again if the only person in it I end up engaging with is you -- it's like toxic cancer. And to preface that, don't misconstrue that with anything else: I'll be doing that regardless of whether the price is $1 or $300 or $3000.

2. Did you sell BTC 20k? Did you call top? bottom? I've traded all of 2018. Most have been losers (measured in USD) but that's fine for me. What would you like me to update specifically? My portfolio has been churned many times over in the last year and I no longer own many of those. Some I've held the whole way down and actually bought more of. I'm not even going to bother saying what I have now (I'm diversified across about 2-5 assets) because it will just be misconstrued as shilling and inevitably I'd get vilified by morons like yourself depending on volatile short-term price movement whenever it fits your narrative. To be clear: I never expect gains every year, and 2017 was a monster year as far as price goes. There will be more years in the future like 2018 -- who cares if you're in it for the long haul and you manage your exposure appropriately? If your entry point was January 2018 I feel bad for you -- but what kind of mental gymnastics do you pull to somehow put that on me? My very last post around that time talked about projects that were interesting to me (some of the above, some which I am still excited about and haven't even launched, some which I have sold as I did even more research on them or some I even bought more of/have been averaging down) & specific trends that were interesting to me. For the millionth time, I even mentioned (not gonna dig it up, but that markets can drop ~70-80% and will in the future). The people I talk with about crypto everyday even know I spend tons of time looking towards the future/trends (some stuff I don't even own/isn't even launched) so my posting has absolutely nothing to do w/ "bags" (to use your terminology). FWIW I'd change absolutely nothing in that post because given that snapshot in moment of time it's what I believe as far as my own knowledge goes -- like all my posts.

3/4. And how does this post make me look bad? A neutral reader would say I nailed it. If someone read that post and blindly followed they crushed it up to 14x, assuming they realized gains, and if not they're breakeven with a story to tell. I even had the foresight to say stay away from ICO's and said most will be a crapshoot. What would I change about that? Nothing. Plus I don't delete posts. Back then I thought most ICO's are a crapshoot, now I think most ICO's are a crapshoot. Have I bought and sold some (some for profit, some for losses?) Definitely. I genuinely don't even understand how you can think this makes me look bad at all. Also if you somehow bucket ETH into an ICO scam: Short it all the way to zero and post in real time on BFI your entry points. You have no excuses now not to, given there are ways to do it that weren't available a year ago. You can do it without having exposure to it -- so yeah if that is your belief -- go ahead and stand up for what you believe in.

5. Ahh here we actually go at getting to the bottom of it. You clearly had too much invested in cryptocurrencies and you're feeling the burn. If someone has "bills to pay" and doesn't have a "6-month safety net" and all that jazz -- guess what? Crypto investing is not for you. These are all speculative investments (you're placing bets on the future) and I've consistently said that the whole time. I feel bad for people that lost all their savings in this, but once again you are trying to slide this responsibility onto me for some unknown reason. If someone asked me a year ago "Hey I really need this money, what should I do with it?" I would have answered: "Pay rent". My friends in real life/those who have talked with me throughout the last year all know that about me so it's comical you have this false imagery of what I stand for. I've managed my own risk appropriately, its time for you to quit crying like the baby you are about the market downturn and take responsibility for your own decisions as well.

Here's some unsolicited life advice: Now that you've had your chance to scream through a keyboard at me and I patiently went point-by-point through it, maybe it's time for you to let go of whatever it is you're holding onto.

Let's buidl instead of hate

I don't like aggo's posts or style for the most part, so I'm not bias in his favour. But come on man he has a lot of valid points. Your point 3 "A neutral reader would say I nailed it" No, no they would not.

Coming out with the classic of "trading most of 2018 and dont own many of these any more" after shilling them is just cringe. I think what aggos getting at is take a bit of humilty/ownership in a downturn and a bad year, many people have had them. It isn't that hard to admit or to accept.

My trades all lost in USD. The best trade I did was a very small bit of crypto -> fiat, but not enough obviously. I didn't sell the top. If I had to have guessed Jan 1 2018 where crypto would be Dec 11 2018, honestly, this would have been in the bottom 2% of distribution and the amount of drawdown has even caught me by surprise. Most of my portfolio "churn" were not winners by any means, don't want to somehow present in that way -- I got my ass kicked on the overwhelming majority and don't want people to read that as thinking of me as a guru trader. It's hard to measure my portfolio right now because over 25% of it is in illiquid assets yet to be priced on the open market, but if I had to guess it's just a smidge above or around (measured in ETH terms) than at start of 2018 -- so doing the math outside of me selling a little bit (maybe 2% of my portfolio, which I did @ ~500) I definitely have massive USD losses. A portfolio of 100% BTC outperformed me this last year. It's been a brutal year, and I would guess anyone with exposure to crypto bled hard this year -- me included.

I guess the main point I was trying to make is this isn't chalked up squarely to ethereum or any one asset. Across the board it's been tough. If this is your first time being in crypto and you're not super jaded, congratulations you've likely survived the worst part. For me this isn't the first time it's happened, and I don't think it'll be the last. I do feel better about this one than 2014 though. Hope that helps.

Have you ever written any code Kazuya ? I don't think you understand how monsterous of a task faces even just ETH development team...let alone any blockchain + video game ideas you think are even remotely possible in any reasonable time-frame into the future. I respect the brilliance + hard work of Vitalik and that's why I bought enough to stake if they somehow pull this rabbit out of the hat but I think it's more likely that other well funded teams who get to learn from the mistakes/progress of ETH will out-perform from here long-term (cough* ADA cough*).

What are these other 2-5 assets?

How can you not hold BTC? Lightning Network is THE most brilliant piece of technological innovation to come from the crypto industry thus far (and possibly worldwide since the smart phone). If BTC can't succeed with the brand name, security, and genius development it has had thus far...NONE of these other projects have any shot in hell.

BTC has no competition at all. ETH has its own competition of trying to innovate/fix what is essentially a train already rolling down the tracks at full-speed AND has competition from other well funded teams who got to start with lessons learned and a clean development slate.

To anyone entering now...you cannot go wrong just loading BTC here and not stressing yourself trying to find a winner amongst the current wreckage.

You *can* go wrong loading into BTC here.

Kazuya gets smashed by the most obvious crash of all time, yet at the same time does not see this blindness/total failure as in any way challenging an ability to model far more complex long term (technical, regulatory, economic, social) phenomena.

Loading into ETH right now at $90 = pay off the 10s of millions of coins that were bought at less than 50 cents with a 200x return.

Reasonable post by Duffman, apart from the ADA shill.

Especially the part about non-coders expecting magical things to happen without understanding how hard it actually is to execute all the grandiose visions into code.

Of course you can, from the most relevant perspective, with regards to the dollars you invest. But I think Duffman means if you want to invest in cryptocurrencies, then BTC is a very safe bet relative to other coins.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...n-sec-decision



& the ones that do not voluntary comply:


https://www.investopedia.com/exam-gu...rescission.asp


****s rekt

what's a good way to research the affected ico's? is there info out there on which ico's registered with the sec and which ico's are considered securities?

My general understanding is if the ico did AML KYC and prescreened investors (whether USA or not ) they are for now safe. Unfortunately it’s so bleeding edge idk if there’s a single site that has enough info. You’ll just have to google around.

What's ironic about this article is Joey Krug of Pantera did Augur sale back in 2015 and Augur did no kyc/aml of any sort.

It'll depend on:

Whether the underlying token/asset sold is a security

If they sold to unaccredited US investors and/or didn't file the proper exemptions

spoiler: Most utility tokens sold are actually securities.

There is still no case law to show that any of these are securities. A few charges have resulted in settlements: Paragon, Airfox, EtherDelta where the SEC claims they are securities or traded securities, but it's because people have opted to settle rather than risk trial.

Then there is the argument that even if they did the sale properly and filed properly, these tokens are now moving around on secondary exchanges and being purchased by unaccredited individuals. The BlockVest ruling the other day was positive for issuers on this front. Provided the issuers are not profiting based on secondary trading, then they are not at fault.

What if I told you

Icos that are broke now are trying to ico again to raise more money

I have written code for about ~50 hours lifetime. It would be a mistake to even call me a novice developer. I have paid developers independently to go over code & github and give me their honest thoughts (they're getting paid for their opinions, not whether it's "good" or "bad"). I've also spent more time than I wish to admit combing over dozens of developers & their insights/arguments and figuring out who is a dreamer and who is pragmatic and who is what. By the way, saying if BTC and their genius development doesn't succeed than nothing will is a non sequiter. Every project has different technologies, roadmaps, challenges & visions. For understanding dev work: Basically, I see that as part of my work-flow, it's my job to try and understand this and in doing so I better understand the velocity and risks of projects. There are many brilliant developers working in this space but that != good investments on many things. I do have my own estimates in my mind on when I think things could likely come to fruition, all you have to do is ask:

Q: When will ETH become actually legit mainstream?

A: Based on what I said above: not in 2019, not in 2020, possibly in 2021-2022. Speculation bubbles passing ATH's may occur before then, but I would put it at 90%+ chance there is nowhere near mainstream adoption before late 2021 -- there are technical challenges still yet to be solved, like cross sharding communications & storage that are still quite early in their research. BTW this is an answer based on technology and software, not price discussion, and it's my best guess at this time, which will of course change depending on how research is actually going. That's also just one piece of the puzzle. Dev tooling/libraries, which are still very primitive in the EVM model (but have been improving) & getting engineers/developers working outside of Blockchain into this space will have to be built out in parallel as well. By far the best usage of your time to understand Eth 2.0 and what it may look like is watching this video and understand the discussion being had: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDwaAnhSJk8&t=1165s

Furthermore, the biggest challenge I think in the future may be this: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/co...imistic_state/ . In Eth 2.0 first release, it will not have cross-sharding communication & only scale to ~15K TPS on layer-1. Neither of those are "good" enough for mass-adoption -- but it's a start.

Q: Lightning

Are you aware BTC has been trying to do lightning for around ~4 years now?
https://twitter.com/starkness/status/676599570898419712 . Elizabeth Stark is the CEO of Lightning labs. What about the lightning or its architecture do you find so elegant? I don't think it will ever work on a meaningful scale. I encourage you to do more of your own research on this, as a starting point you should try to answer these:

1) Where is it at with its development and what problems are they yet to solve?
2) How many people are currently using it and at what rate of velocity is it being adopted?
3) What is the current user experience, and what challenges need to be overcome to change this?
4) What are the security trade-offs? Is this something an average non-technical user will be OK with?
5) Dream big and imagine tens of millions of users using this as a layer-2 solution: What problems do you see mushrooming up with this architecture?

Q: ADA

As a thought experiment: If had to go through my mind about ways Ethereum could go to zero or lose to a competitor, say make a top 10 on this, ADA doesn't even come close to cracking it. I'm not a maximalist; I will continue to place bets on protocols/platforms that I think might have value in the future, but ADA personally isn't on this. Off the top of my head three quick ones: They're nowhere close to a functioning mainnet or implementing their features described in their paper, their rate of development is quite slow and I think there are more talented teams with better visions in this space, and Charles, the leader, is a major neckbeard (had to throw that in). I think there are much much better risk/rewards bets to place than on Cardano.

Cardano being slow doesn't scare me as much as it did last year at least it didn't **** the bed yet and can keep some hype unlike eos.

You're somehow making the mistake that technology & price are correlated in some meaningful way as of Q4 2018 -- from what I can tell the majority of the price movement is purely based on speculation. You could argue speculation is based on "what is going to work in the future?" but right now it is mostly just bots moving everything in tandem. The mistake a lot of people think coming into this space & looking at price is thinking this is somehow similar to stocks. Imagine tomorrow Apple said they laid off all their engineers & their cash flow from existing treasury & runway shrunk from years to months? I've seen basically the parallel of that in crypto as close as a ~month ago, and the token dropped 8%. The crypto market was down maybe 5% that day. Have fun trying to model that -- I'm not even going to attempt to explain that. Wait for X time into the future, when projects are truly decoupled from each other, and then we can talk about modelling this. We're still too early/in the experimental stage, to really model these things in a meaningful way.

There are projects still worth billion(s) that if you told me today I could buy them for 90% off todays price, but the catch is I'd have to hold them for 10 years, I wouldn't even take you up on it. The majority of projects I think will trend towards zero, but once again, I do think there will be a few projects that capture a lot of value in this space. The space (or pie) as a whole will grow over time, I am quite confident in that.

Better questions to ask are: When sharding? When plasma? When pos? Why did vitalik and other prominant eth guys attach their names to projects like omisego and rchain? why did those projects turn into dumpster fires? why aren't they taking responsibility for them?

Dream big and imagine tens of millions of users and businesses trying to transact daily on the base layer of ethereum. What problems do you see with this architecture?

V1 Sharding Q2 2020-2021.
V1 Plasma Q2 2019-2020.
POS Q2 2020.

Those are my estimations. If you want to do your own estimations, go read this and quit asking to be spoon-fed, all the research is right here for *anyone* to go read: https://ethresear.ch/.


Omisego: Vitalik has helped them w/ brainstorming plasma. He was given OMG tokens for being an advisor, which he promptly donated to remove a financial conflict of interest. He's never told anyone to ever buy or hold the token. How is this an ethical problem? How does this compare to other people in this space?

RChain: A project independent of ethereum which is implementing an iteration of CBC Casper, which Vlad, a researcher is doing R&D for. How is this collaboration an ethical problem? How is a researcher who's looking to build a consensus algorithm accountable for the treasury or business management of a project who's looking to use an iteration of it? Do you understand how open-source software works?

My turn. The question to ask yourself is: Why are you such an angry troll? Why would me pointing someone in the direction of someone doing their own research on XYZ with what I genuinely think are helpful frameworks to think about (in this case lightning) trigger you?

I'm not an angry troll but you're telling people the amazing potential of eth whilst pointing out flaws in btc and other projects. Your opinions are biased. I'm not hear to tell people eth is going to fail and btc is going to succeed because I'm not qualified to answer the question or even know if none, one, a few or lots of different blockchains will win out in the end. You bash lightning, which has a MVP whilst claiming eth will scale with x, y and z none of which are close to being viable. Hell they might not even work or be worth the trade-offs they impose.

If you don't understand why the promotion of ICOs is an ethical and legal problem when the person themselves are directly or indirectly invested in the project or related projects and/or take compensation for services performed then I'd read up on securities laws. People bought OMG because of vitalik's tweets about OMG and plasma/plasma cash. People bought OMG because he was a listed adviser on the project during the ICO.

Oh and if it wasn't obvious already, the questions I posed were rhetoric

https://www.coindesk.com/consensys-t...argest-startup



I remember in depths of 2014-2015 there would be a rumor that coinbase was going broke and had serious serious negative burn rvery few months. Somehow I feel that the issue at consensus bc it is self funded is much more serious/worse.

the sick jokes write themselves at this point.