At a casino, you are paying ~5% on the dollar and getting some entertainment in return.
With ICOs, in the long run, you might end up paying ~100% on the dollar and getting nothing in return.
The asymmetry between those issuing 'coins' and those buying is considerably greater than the 'average losses' of 5-10% or whatever a gambler might have at a Casino.
Also - a lot of Casinos end up losing money because they have to 'give too much away' to consumers in terms of the experience, food, drinks.
More wealth-per-dollar will be transferred to investors from ICO's than at Casinos.
Which is why Hedge Funds are lining up to back ICOs - and not Casinos - it's a better return for them.
ETH is scam and a marketing program. It's interesting that even the educated developer community of HN cannot see this and how effective flash marketing can be
It can be a little difficult to pin them down. As everything is surrounded in more flash sounded tech that doesn't deliver. It's like trying to say if Amway, the multi level marketing company is a scam or not.
First it's the pre sale of tokens. Very problematic way of raising money. Nearly all pre sales token campaigns follow the same story. Build flashy website and run a slick marketing campaign. Make grand world saving claims for this software you are going to build by really you aren't. Raise a lot of money (10M USD or more). Then after the sale fail to deliver of the claims and shameless move onto the next crowd sale.
There is also the past of etherium founder. VB tried to do another crowd funded scam before etherium that was a lot more blatant. VB also puts his name on many ICOs (initial coin offering) which all end in scams. The founders take the large amount money and then the product in vaporware.
Religions are scams and marketing programs, all be it with a bunch of other stuff slapped on to it. But it's all the same jingle, give us everything now and you'll get yours later.
Bitcoin is not anonymous your link doesn't say it is. It's easier to hide your identity than a credit card but it's more) not anonymous and there is a big focus on fixing this.
These ICO scams are so profitable right now. You would be crazy not to run one. They have the formula down too. The all look the same. And it's a scam with no legal consequences. Your product is vaporware and you get to keep the money
This is really not the case. It's been pair reviewed and testing for 2 years. Plus has been run on testnet since last year. It's technically superior and should be activated on bitcoin but it's been blocked for political reasons
You are reacting to something my comment doesn't say: that somehow segwit is not good enough. I only said it was somewhat controversial (which it is, for whatever reasons, didn't say it was technical) and that bitcoiners view it as a beta test, which is/was a widely accepted sentiment on both /r/Bitcoin and /r/btc. I didn't even say it needed one.
I said the latter more to illustrate the relationship between segwit+bitcoin and segwit+litecoin than segwit itself.
VCs fund vaporware all the time - the track record of blockchain investments is about $1.5 billion in, $0 out, per http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-venture-capital/ - so this is hardly an implausible statement.
I'm not getting funded to build Ethereum, I'm using Ethereum as a working technology stack. People pay me to build and deploy other projects on top of it, and some of the projects I've built are also in production.
There's a thriving ecosystem of startups, a fair amount of corporate interest, and a shortage of people good at writing smart contracts. I work for a company that provides dev and security auditing, mostly for startups, and business is good.
If Ethereum actually worked as an autonomy trustless network (which is what the project claimed to be) then there would be no middle man. But Ethereum is just vaperware and a marketing project
