Quote from: TPTB_need_war on March 15, 2016, 05:54:51 AM

Re: All crypto with an IPO/ICO is trash - no exceptions. Just launch fairly.

PoW is superior, but even more superior if it is being mined by the users and not by those who (HODL or) dump their coins to those few in the powerlaw distribution of wealthy who want to stack (HODL) coins.

The only valid role of crypto currency is not as a "better gold" (such a concept is oxymoronic, because gold is as evil as fiat ... ask me to teach you!) but not as a store-of-value rather as a more degrees-of-freedom unit-of-exchange.

PoW ends up as a power-law distribution also:

Quote from: iamnotback on October 30, 2016, 03:59:01 AM

Currency is always distributed according to the power-law distribution¹, regardless of the methodology which you use to distribute it (e.g. mining versus sales).

¹ A. Dragulescu and V. Yakovenko. Exponential and power-law probability distributions of wealth and income in the United Kingdom and the United States.

The problem with an ICO is that it is not a free-market competition, because the issuer has an asymmetric advantage because he/she can buy tokens from him/herself at 0 cost. @smooth was the one who pointed this out to me, which I then regurgitated:

Quote from: iamnotback on June 25, 2016, 01:38:45 AM

1.

No ICOs: ICOs enable insiders to buy from themselves, creating a non-free market distribution of the money supply, thus manipulating all the market parameters and effects creating a controlled, non-free market.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1524111.msg15340159#msg15340159
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1413819.msg15343686#msg15343686

The controlled, non-free market result applies to the exchange price manipulation (and ecosystem investment) because the money supply is more concentrated than a typical power-law distribution, i.e. there are too few whales competing with (and distrusting) each other. But note this does not require necessarily that the consensus system is centralized.

It is a shame because PoW is unable to transfer any of the investment capital (of those competing to mine the money supply) to the developers. Rather it is expended on electricity and hardware rental.

However, there is another option. And that is to distribute the bulk of the money supply by some other objective means (other than PoW, or even by PoW) and only ICO a small enough portion that it can't become a concentrated control. Bingo!

@smooth is your mouth agape? Shocked