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The Faces of Blockchain Success

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 16 2018, @12:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the faces-of-dogecoin dept.

takyon writes:

Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You're Not

Recently the founder of something called Ripple briefly became richer than Mark Zuckerberg. Another day an anonymous donor set up an $86 million Bitcoin-fortune charity called the Pineapple Fund. A Tesla was spotted with a BLOCKHN license plate. There's a surge in people looking to buy Bitcoin on their credit cards. After the Long Island Iced Tea company announced it would pivot to blockchain, its stock rose 500 percent in a day.

In 2017, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin went from $830 to $19,300, and now quivers around $14,000. Ether, its main rival, started the year at less than $10, closing out 2017 at $715. Now it's over $1,100. The wealth is intoxicating news, feverish because it seems so random. Investors trying to grok the landscape compare it to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, when valuations soared and it was hard to separate the Amazons and Googles from the Pets.coms and eToys.

The cryptocurrency community is centered around a tightknit group of friends — developers, libertarians, Redditors and cypherpunks — who have known each other for years through meet-ups, an endless circuit of crypto conferences and internet message boards. Over long hours in anonymous group chats, San Francisco bars and Settlers of Catan game nights, they talk about how cryptocurrency will decentralize power and wealth, changing the world order. The goal may be decentralization, but the money is extremely concentrated. Coinbase has more than 13 million accounts that own cryptocurrencies. Data suggests that about 94 percent of the Bitcoin wealth is held by men [archive], and some estimate that 95 percent of the wealth is held by 4 percent of the owners.

There are only a few winners here, and, unless they lose it all, their impact going forward will be outsize.

They also remember who laughed at them and when.

Related: 1600 Vine Street (similar story, we'll see if it makes you just as mad)

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Tuesday January 16 2018, @01:04PM (3 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday January 16 2018, @01:04PM (#623114) Journal

    I think it's now time for my own cryptocurrency.

    It will be a revolutionary concept: I'll replace proof of work by proof of dork.

    I think I'll call the new currency Ripoff. ;-)

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 16 2018, @01:10PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Tuesday January 16 2018, @01:10PM (#623117) Journal

    Weedon't need your currency. We already have WeedCoin [marketwired.com].

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Tuesday January 16 2018, @03:31PM (1 child)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 16 2018, @03:31PM (#623149) Journal
    Charles Mackay [wikipedia.org] had [google.com] this to say:

    „But the most absurd and preposterous of all, and which shewed, more completely than any other, the utter madness of the people, was one started by an unknown adventurer, entitled "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." Were not the fact stated by scores of credible witnesses, it would be impossible to believe that any person could have been duped by such a project... Next morning, at nine o'clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o'clock, he ... was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2000l [1720 pounds]. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again.“

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by captain normal on Tuesday January 16 2018, @06:24PM

      by captain normal (2205) on Tuesday January 16 2018, @06:24PM (#623208)

      Thank you, it's been years since I read "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Mackay. I think it may apply well today to many things such as economic scams and bubbles and political scams and bubbles.
      It is available for download at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24518 [gutenberg.org]

      There may be hope for you after all.

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