However, when ICO's like this one keep happening where only 100 "accounts" own 99% of the ICO offering, you pretty much lose that argument of the tokens only being there for use of the platform. It's a private security sale, and I only see one way this will end. The SEC will make a case out of one of the ICO's 100%. They do not take advertising to unaccredited investors lightly.
My only suggestion, if you are involved in any way with an ICO (developer, investor on the team pre-ICO, etc.), either get out of the U.S. now and/or make sure all operations are happening outside the U.S. I was almost involved with a company doing essentially what these ICO's are doing (not blockchain/crypto currencies), and fortunately I figured it out before being involved, but it did not end pretty for them. Like the IRS, the SEC/others will come down hard, not a matter of if at this point, it's when and who gets the beating first. They love making cases out of someone to set precedent.
With the general public playing into an overbought token market fueled by Asian countries for the most part, the regulators/SEC will come down extremely hard on this.
I think investing in Ethereum/Bitcoin is fine, just know what you're doing, record your cost basis for when you bought it. And seeing first hand what the IRS does to people who avoid paying taxes, just make your life easy, when you exchange back to a currency that is considered a currency by the IRS, just pay your capital gains on it and move on with life. The IRS will catch up and many people will go to jail for tax evasion. Don't be one of them. Obviously, all this only pertains to the U.S..
Also for fun, if you really want to see the hysteria around the Ethereum price right now, check out r/ethtrader/ or even the Ethereum FB group. People are throwing their entire savings into this while not knowing anything about it besides everyone in the group hyping it up amongst themselves. It's really sad. Ethereum is now actively pumped heavily on MLM sites/blogs. It's beyond gross. I believe Ethereum is an amazing project and am worried that this hype fueled hysteria, once it collapses on itself, will give Ethereum a bad reputation. It is a great protocol.
The better version of requirements for accredited investors would be some sort of exam (hard enough to make sure you have solid knowledge about financial markets, financial instruments and risk/return relationship).
It is sad but many people would put their entire savings and next months rent into a risky investment that is not publicly traded on a regulated market and basically lose their money most of the time because they invest on hype and because their buddy told them.
If an accredited investor loses his money, the nobody feels bad because they had the money in the first place and the means to either hire somebody who knows what they're doing or be responsible themselves.
I'd be fine with zero regulation on it all together, as long as I, as a tax payer, don't have to bail out all the idiots will fall for ponzi scheme after ponzi scheme. But do we let them dye on the streets because they lost everything? Hence why the regulation is in place.
You are also assuming that being an accredited investor gives you access to better investments, which is not entirely true. Many accredited investors lose their lunch on investments. Look at the number of hedge funds that beat a market index fund, it's like 10%. Or look at VC firms where 1 investment makes up for the loss of 10 others. Many never do get that return and just lose money until they're out. The best investment definition varies widely, and in actuality, most accredited investors would be better off just investing in an index fund because believe it or not, they don't know what they are doing most of the time either. Which is why many investments are high risk. So a test would not help either.
Plus you can't raise more than a million dollars or so that way. And there's a limit per person, so instead of just sending ETH, everybody would have to go through the platform's KYC, and declare how much income/assets they have.
In the meantime, people in countries with more economic freedom than the U.S. can just deploy a couple pages of code, make some basic efforts to block U.S. investors, and be done with it.
Whether the code is already deployed, or depends on further development effort by the team, is one aspect of the Howey Test, according to Coinbase which released the results of some legal research on the subject: https://blog.coinbase.com/2016-12-07-blockchain-token-securi...
Yeah reading /r/ethtrader it's 95% hype and 5% caution. I keep feeling conflicted for not buying in at ~$120-$130, and every day I think about whether I should buy in. But then I try to answer the question "what about Ethereum makes me believe it will be worth more than $(today's price) a year from now?" and I can't come up with anything other than speculation... Any advice?
Chinese capital controls has a huge amount of blame here. Because the Chinese government prevents the foreign exchange market from clearing at a lower price, there's tons of unmet demand for converting Renminbi to anything that isn't subject to such restraints. Similarly, on the demand side - there's folks that would be induced to sell their foreign assets at a higher price if it was allowed.
So essentially, there's a "you can use this to avoid capital controls on your Renminbi" premium on all sorts of things. Real estate in Vancouver. Cryptocurrencies. Chinese companies acquiring foreign subsidiaries with no real business purpose behind it.
With this process, it doesn't matter if BTC is trading at $1 or $1000. Chinese citizens can convert the maximum allowed from Renminbi to USD, buy bitcoins in USD, sell those bitcoins for Renminbi, and pocket the spread.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/crypt...
Brave got $35M, unless Ethereum crashes very soon.
Some parties can now set the price for advertising within Brave to whatever they want. If Brave becomes popular, they become rich. If Brave fails, they lost their money.
If.
If, for example, tens of thousands of people only had tens of dollars invested, they may be less interested in making Brave a successful platform because they have little financial incentive and little to lose.
Also I sorta doubt that Brendan Eich is a drug dealer :)
Either way, you've got income from selling digital goods for cryptocurrency, rather than cryptocurrency with no socially accepted narrative for possessing it.
Step one is recruiting some people to be a "customer" of your game. You give them $500 of dirty money, they go visit various retail establishments and buy $450 worth of pre-paid cards, then spend the balances on those pre-paid cards buying stuff from your game. Various banking institutions and app marketplace owners take their cuts, you wind up with clean money earned from selling premium coins to your "customers", which you then report as taxable income and use for whatever legal-market purposes you want.
So, the short of it is that it's a two-part scheme. Part 1 converts undocumented cash into pre-paid debit cards. Part 2 converts the balance of those cards into business income from selling digital goods. The receipt of cash gets offloaded to retail establishments that routinely handle such transactions. The delivery of goods is cheap and verifiable, and the payment for those goods goes through legitimate channels.
Compare to laundering money through a literal laundromat. If you double the sales through putting dirty money into the laundromat's cash deposits, you ought to be using twice as much power and water. Auditors can find that out. Selling twice as many virtual battleships, though? You've got customer accounts you've "delivered goods" to.
Was Tesla's model 3 preorder basically the same thing? They raised $400M dollars ($1000 down payment on 400k reservations) on future sales of a product not yet built.
Meanwhile, if Brave completely fails and the BATs become worthless, I don't think anybody's going to get refunded.
Except the ads they're planning on showing?
If he's chosen to be the CEO of a company again, then he's also chosen to put his social/political views on equality into the public sphere again.
I think it's ok to care about the beliefs and views of the officers and board members of a company.
Put aside blockchain, ICO, and browsers for a moment.
Imagine an app that shows ads, nothing more.
The users of the app are credited in tokens for viewing and/or clicking ads.
The advertisers pay tokens to show ads.
There is a middleman (presumably brave) who manages the ad marketplace and distribution (for a cut)
The users can then take their tokens (acquired viewing ads) and sell them on the open market, ultimately to further advertisers.
The tokens become a CPM backed currency.
The ICO is how you create an initial pool of tokens and establish an initial value.
Blockchain is used as a clearing house and ledger of transactions.
Brave happen to be using a browser as the vehicle for ads.
1. What effect does this have on the spyware/malware side current ads? As an advertiser, I pay some coins to show my ads. Are they still served from the same ad platforms they are today with all the tracking/spyware/malware/etc or are the ads served from some central Brave ad platform where all of that junk is rejected/stripped out?
2. What prevents one actor from buying up all of the tokens over time and opting to horde them rather than showing ads/paying out to users?
I think many people have decided that regulation just ends up benefitting the established players at this point.
They used some kind of digital currency to purchase shares in an upcoming venture?
I'd love to try to explain this to my grandma
So if the Brave platform succeeds then you'll have a whole bunch of people who want to exchange cash for these "Brave Coins" so they can send micropayments. These early investors will hold all the Brave Coins and so they will get the initial influx of cash from people buying Brave Coins to use the platform.
Edit: Possibly the coins are being used by advertisers on the platform, not for micropayments.
The tokens paid for by the advertisers will then go into the pockets of these publishers, while a small portion will end up with users to compensate them for their attention spent viewing those ads.
Am I reading it wrong?
Thank you!
What advantages does it have over a different browser using ad- and tracker-blocking plugins, especially now that the Brave browser allows ads from these ad providers?
It seems that with this ICO, Brave users can also start earning tokens (ie. Basic Attention Tokens) when choosing to view ads on certain publishers' websites. If I'm not mistaken, this new model is targeted to launch by the end of 2017.
http://www.coindesk.com/web-browser-brave-to-launch-ico-for-...
Firefox is dog slow (sorry FF), Opera crashes on me regularly, and I don't really trust any of the other 3rd party browsers.
Brave is basically Chrome with ad blocking.
URL for the lazy: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.brow...
Bitcoin is boring, but it's a real currency you can use. Move fast and break things is a bug not a feature. If you can't buy things with it, it's not a currency, it's Russian roulette.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453783 and marked it off-topic.
[0] https://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/A_Short_History_of_J...
