News: Me on launching an ICO, SEC on ICOs, CFTC subpoenas exchanges, KodakCoin and NBA/NHL, 51% attacks, Mona Lisa on the blockchain, EOS security, York retrospective

  • I’m doing an event on Thursday afternoon — “How To Launch A Successful ICO,” presented by TopLine Comms. The target audience is businesses looking to raise funding. I’ll be discussing why you’d better do everything absolutely properly, and talking a bit about KodakCoin (one of the case studies). It’s free, but you have to register. All three panelists are called David.
  • Jay Clayton from the SEC extends the offer of help — “Come see us” if you want to do an ICO.
  • The CME Group is running Bitcoin futures, and asked exchanges for Bitcoin trading data. The exchanges wouldn’t give it to them — so when the CFTC came calling, CME couldn’t give them the data. So the CFTC is demanding it directly from the exchanges as part of their criminal investigation into Bitcoin market manipulation. “The fight over access to bitcoin trading data was a factor in the CFTC opening an investigation into whether traders have colluded to manipulate bitcoin prices, people familiar with the matter said.”
  • KodakCoin’s pre-ICO buyer, Global Blockchain, is trying to apply sufficient thrust to make this pig fly — six National Basketball Association or National Hockey League arenas will accept this as-yet-nonexistent crypto token for … something, in the future, when they write some software. The SAFT is currently running!
  • I just got passed a document detailing how, while KodakCoin’s first round token offering was fully subscribed at $3,250,000 … the second round token offering was aiming for $6,750,000 — and netted only $880,000. I wonder how the current round — hoping for $73.5m — is going.
  • Somebody’s made $20m by scanning across the Internet for copies of Ethereum full-node client geth misconfigured to have port 8545 open. By default, it only listens on the localhost — but, of course, users fiddled with it. This has been going on since March. Be your own bank!

 

 

  • De Nederlandsche Bank experiments with blockchain technology. It’s not impressed. “Among the principal limitations are capacity shortages, inefficiency caused by high energy consumption, and a lack of full certainty that a payment is completed.”

 

 

  • The unparalleled experience of using bitcoins to book a hotel room through Expedia. You’ll be relieved to know it’s all the user’s fault, and definitely not anything wrong with the Bitcoin ecosystem, no no no.
  • Financial Times on “fintech” courses in finance education — “many of the crypto enthusiasts do not have a background in finance and misunderstand elementary concepts of financial theory. They care more about consensus mechanisms than adverse selection and only shrug at the intricacies of corporate finance.” (archive)
  • David Golumbia interviewed in Salon about how Bitcoin brought its right-wing conspiracy theories into the mainstream. The reactions to this article from Bitcoin advocates are incredulity — the crypto subculture seems to have forgotten the political aims of the cypherpunk subculture it originated in, and that these ideas literally sprang from goldbug and “international banker” conspiracy theories. Go read David’s book, The Politics of Bitcoin (US, UK) — I knew I had to write a chapter in the book about Bitcoin’s libertarian roots, and The Politics of Bitcoin put together my reading list for chapter two for me.

 

 

  • The York Festival of Ideas event “Cryptocurrency: Hype or technological revolution?” on Saturday evening was great fun. Rory Cellan-Jones moderated, Bebo White played advocate, Frances Coppola and I were the embittered nocoiners. I even sold five paperbacks — I would have sold more, but it seems like a surprising number of people in the UK just don’t carry cash any more. I don’t think we got a recording, but there’s some tweeted photos above.
  • Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain is cheap on Kindle Canada this month — CDN$4.49 for the ebook! Get one to go with your paperback!

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/dobes/status/1005387861019918341

 

 

https://twitter.com/somethingawful/status/1006290327039348737

 

 

https://twitter.com/DawnHFoster/status/1006220503873458177

 



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2 Comments on “News: Me on launching an ICO, SEC on ICOs, CFTC subpoenas exchanges, KodakCoin and NBA/NHL, 51% attacks, Mona Lisa on the blockchain, EOS security, York retrospective”

  1. To be fair, the most obvious advice I seem to be extracting from your writings on “how to launch a succesful ICO” is: Don’t!

    But, of course, there’s a lot of interest and maybe somebody does have something worthy they’d like to be funded. OTOH, how can you expect to be trusted if you go where fraudsters and scammers conglomerate? But of course, there’s still good advice to give: If you must, then at least be honest about what you’re doing.

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