harefield

Is the Klondike Gold rush over, and will we ever see the likes of 1,000x again (or for that matter the giant gains of firms like Pantera)? Answer: Probably not.

I recently had the pleasure of talking to a professional hacker, called Mr. X. (Actually, not his real name, but perhaps you already guessed that). Mr. X is employed to rain down terror and havoc on the defenses of banks and exchanges in order to find their vulnerabilities. When he succeeds, as a good citizen he reports the breech, and it’s repaired, hopefully.

Once upon a time, there was a race of giants who controlled just about everything in Fairytaleland. They did this through something called money, which was actually just pieces of paper with pictures printed on it, but the giants – who were called The Bankers – convinced everyone that money was a good thing.

Now I must stress that what follows comes from a random trawl, but I think it proves that the ‘The Man’ isn’t in control of everything. And remember, none of these picks are advice to invest!

Have you heard the plot of the new blockbuster thriller with Dom Fuse in the lead role as a CIA operative embedded in the crypto world? He’s the tough-talking all-action hero who is called in to the shadowy department, within a department, within a top secret corner of CIA Langley.

It was one of those moments where we get to witness the next big thing, knowing that the world will never be the same again. Like if you were taking a walk along the beach at Kitty Hawk when the Wright brothers first flew.

Native English speakers always make things fancy and more complex than they need to, whereas someone using English as a second language has to keep it simple.

Why are we looking at the failure rates for planes and medical drugs? Because I wanted to see if there was a context to view the failure of ICOs - and let's be realistic here, the numbers of ICOs failing doesn't make for a pretty picture. According to figures from Tokendata, of 902 ICOs so far this year, 142 failed at the ICO stage, while 276 crashed and burned within the first 4 months of the successful ICO. Bitcoin News confirms this with the 2017 failure rate running at 46%.

The cart is often put in front of the horse with ICOs. It’s quite understandable that the development team are focused on their amazing solution, but hey guys, pause a moment and tell us what the problem is! That way the solution horse will pull your problem cart all the way to the success of your ICO.

The brave new world of crypto is exactly mirroring the sad old world of conventional finance, and the whole Internet-as-a-men’s-club approach.

If you searched far and wide for a brilliant example of how NOT to do an ICO, you couldn’t find better than the sad story of the petro.

At some point did the template for the ‘perfect’ ICO whitepaper get standardized? Judging by the increasingly formulaic nature of whitepapers, the answer must surely be ‘Yes.’ Enterprises strive to tell us what is special and unique about their offering, but do this in a way so formulaic that it often seems simply cut and pasted from the last job done by the website agency.

As a teenager did you ever get passionate about a favorite band or singer? You must remember that feeling of wanting to tell the whole world how wonderful they are. But then when the world started listening too, you experienced that slight feeling of disappointment: Now that all the grey and ordinary people have tuned into your passion, and suddenly you don't feel so passionate!

So if crypto isn't just for the creation of overnight millionaires, what is it for? Many participants in the financial ecosystem predict a radically different scenario of ever-increasing normalization, and the opening up of mass usage of crypto currencies.