Monedas is my first web app. Although still very bare bones, the idea is to use different data points to explore crypto assets.
Like I say in the about page: "I think crypto assets are a different animal. Instead of looking at projects solely by traditional standards (like we look at equities), there should be more information on the code itself. Being that the important projects are protocols vs businesses that use blockchain, I believe data points on the code base should be considered.
With that said, I don't think commits, repo age or any one data point is a good determinant for the quality of the project. I do believe that, at the very least, it can signal something interesting. For example, a $X00M project with little to no activity on the repository should raise some flags."
Monedas is my first web app. Although still very bare bones, the idea is to use different data points to explore crypto assets.
Like I say in the about page:
"I think crypto assets are a different animal. Instead of looking at projects solely by traditional standards (like we look at equities), there should be more information on the code itself. Being that the important projects are protocols vs businesses that use blockchain, I believe data points on the code base should be considered.
With that said, I don't think commits, repo age or any one data point is a good determinant for the quality of the project. I do believe that, at the very least, it can signal something interesting. For example, a $X00M project with little to no activity on the repository should raise some flags."
Not sure why this post isn't upvoted to high heavens (HN is generally very anti crypto lately) but what you've made is absolute gold and something I will consider looking at for my future crypto investments.
It’s rare to see the word misunderestimate in the wild. Mind if I ask was this a mistake, or intentional irony, or is this word has just made its way into the general vocabulary now?
And to be less irrelevant, I do agree with you that a simple rubric that can be internalized by compelling stories can be very powerful in a person’s life.
What currency is not being used in the drug market?
I would love to have a rational debate and hear objective arguments agaisnt bitcoin vs gold that can be applied uniquely to bitcoin or rather that dont apply to both.
Scarcity?
No intrinsic value? Speculative?
Thefts?
Used in illicit ways?
All these apply to both gold and bitcoin.
"Gold has been historically valuable to humans". So have many other rocks, flowers, spices, etc.
I am geniuenly interested in seeing why Bitcoin should fail as being a store of value.
> I am geniuenly interested in seeing why Bitcoin should fail as being a store of value.
Oh, it's a great store of value. But that doesn't make it a good currency. Currencies aren't intended to store value, they're intended to facilitate the transfer of value. Assets (be it physical such as property, governmental such as bonds, or corporate such as stocks) are what is intended to store value.
In general, you want a currency to suffer from inflation and decrease in value over time. While this may seem counter-intuitive to having a healthy currency, it's the best thing for the economy, as it encourages the currency to continually be in circulation, and whatever cannot be readily spent to be invested into assets or placed into a bank, which then goes and loans it out to others who need it, stimulating the economy.
Gold has never been easy to use as currency. It needs to be weighed, and now its value is so high that in order to buy everyday items, you'd be dealing in almost immeasurably small slivers of gold. So instead people used it as an asset; They would buy it speculatively and watch the price rise as scarcity increased. As more people bought it, the scarcity increased even more quickly, leading to effectively a deflationary spiral.
What do you think will happen as we get closer to the 21 million Bitcoin limit? It'll be the same deal. Everyone will hold onto their BTC because it's scarce, and increased scarcity increases value, and before long, the entire BTC economy grinds to a halt.
"But this has never happened with gold!" I hear you say. Let me point you to the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, where the government basically said "Naw, dawgs, give us that gold back. We gotta get this economy moving again.", and made most private possession of gold illegal, in order to help get America out of the great depression.
Bitcoin is an amazingly cool concept. Bitcoin is an awesome work of technology. Bitcoin is not a currency.
BTC isn't really scarce, there's quiet a few newer iterations like Litecoin, Monereo, Ethereum, Dogecoin etc..
It's also worth noting the supply was minted mainly by miners doing very low difficulty work early on, using basic home computers.
Satoshi made an intensional design choice to gain control of the supply for a very low cost, exploiting late adopters as bag holders.
The incentive system for bitcoin mining might of anticipated gaining popularity as time passes and increasing the reward as the network grows, but the system was designed completely opposite of that, at the expense of the masses for the benefit of sending the supply to the mining nodes operating in the first few months.
Ditto. Maybe you read my comment wrong but I am arguing for a store of value - not a currency. And I am asking why it should fail as a store of value because I don't see how gold has any advantage over it.
Sorry, I guess I conflated it with your initial statement of "What currency is not being used in the drug market?".
The first difference to come to mind is that if you forget the password to your gold, the gold still exists. If you forget the password to your wallet, your bitcoin is pretty much unsalvageable. And assets that are so easy to destroy aren't particularly stable. And yes, most wallets have all sorts of backup capabilities and safety features, but in the end it's used by humans and humans are stupid [citation needed].
Wow what bullshit. India invalidated a set of currency notes and immediately replaced it with new ones. Is that "banning paper money"? If a government mandates that all petrol cars must be replaced with electric by 2025, does that mean they have "banned cars"?
I tried purchasing minutes after the tweet to find out someone had already purchased it. I reached out to the guy (midnight) to buy it but he didn't want to sell it. I offered my ideas on what he could to capitalize on the opportunity and so I ended up building up a store front with shirts/, coffee mugs, sweaters and other merch. I basically didn't sleep that night. I built the site, responded to purchase emails, etc.
It took some time to get the storefront ready because of issues with the forwarding (GoDaddy) but when we got it set up, we started seeing traffic. Not before long, sales. This thing started blowing up and as memes would start trending, I would immediately create new merchandise based on the memes and within minutes that same merchandise I had just created would sell. It was surreal.
We were up to ~$2k in profits with who knows how much revenue. Many emails started arriving and the owner would just forward them to me as (I think) he was not as savvy with business/negotiation/etc or just plain intimidated. It got so crazy that at one point Bloomberg and Inc.com reached out via phone to him and he told them about what we had done.
I kept pushing for him to put up the domain for sale on flippa.com and even got the director of the domains department to contact him directly. I also reached out to local newspaper outlets who were more than ready to write the story but since we weren't "partners", it wasn't "as" interesting. He promised to give me a stake in everything but I guess things and people got to his head.
As time went on, he starting drifting from the idea of selling because he thought he had hit something enormous. Which he did, just not the way he thought. He pitched me the idea to build an ecommerce store where he would basically sell anything (Amazon). I told him the only exit here is selling but if he wanted to go that route, he could (try) to build a brand (???). I insisted that the risk of continuing with anything other than selling the domain at peak hype was too great. That is, anything past hype days (1-4 days after the tweet) would drive the "value" to zero.
The days past and the opportunity quickly came to a close. He was offered (past hype time) $15k which he said he wouldn't take as anything below $X00k was dumb. Regardless, I kept pushing for him to sell the damn thing just so I could tell the story at the very least. He then told me he had partnered up with his brother (a lawyer), another marketing guy and he wanted me to take part in the team. He had me speak to his lawyer about equity for a whole 30 minutes which, again, I thought was ridiculous as I told him that this would soon die, if it hadn't already. We spoke over Facetime but soon enough, he kicked me off the storefront admin, stopped answering and now he still has the same domain forwarding to his merch store.
I think if he had acted quicker, he could have sold for at least $20k-$50k at the peak of the hype. Even if he sold at the solid $15k offer, he could have earned himself a great story.
>He pitched me the idea to build an ecommerce store where he would basically sell anything (Amazon).
Great story. That is the mind boggling part. Who knows, maybe we'll be complaining about the sweltering warehouse conditions of covfefe.com, king of online retail. :)
Think it's too late to exploit Dan Quayle's "potatoe.com"?
I understand there might be a crazy upside somewhere in the future (for example, the COVFEFE ACT). This can be done only in hindsight. The risk, imo, was way too high to do anything but cash out at the moment.
My point is that with the proper sort of marketing, you should be able to sell a LOT of merchandise to Trump haters out there.
Imagine being in year 3 of Trump's presidency and still making money off this signature blunder. We aren't even through year 1!
Imagine 20 years from now, when people are able to pin-point "COVFEFE" as a signature moment in Trump's campaign (just like Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky).
Imagine the search traffic for the term over the years. Imagine all of the ad revenue!
Imagine how much you would be kicking yourself for selling it for so cheaply back then...
The flip side of that coin is that no one remembers that moment. Only time can tell. I think it's a matter of placing your bets where you think it is most probable that you will win the most. I personally don't believe that the statements yoh made will be true. The owner thinks otherwise.
I launched an app a few years ago and sold it for $8.5k. I wish more people knew that exits don't always mean $1m. There's a big market for small project.
Cool story. Congrats on this accomplishment especially considering you only started learning how to program in 2014. Most people have a hard time even shipping a product. You did that and made money on it. Awesome!
Say it again! I learned this lesson a few years ago while talking to a guy who'd had a few "exits" totaling $200k or less. It blew my mind. Wait, you can sell for less than millions?! It led me to sell an app for $7k instead of letting it die a slow death desperately hoping for millions to fall out of the sky. Great perspective shift for me.
lol, I would have been happy to pay twice as much for that, as you had organic growth and paying customers. The ROI is pretty good even if you do nothing. But you did very well, congrats.
The 'killer app' for the time being are indeed ICOs. Unregulated, messy ICOs.
I do think it is too early to judge the cryptocurrency world or blockhain in general for not having 'killer apps'. Analogies to the early internet are no good either since there is no reason as to why this would behave like that. Time will tell. Can't deny it is an interesting space!
During the internet bubble fundamentals didn't matter because it was a new economy, valuations shot up, everyone was seemingly raising a lot of money to be the next best thing and then the music stopped. Reasoning of the form "this seems crazy but it must obey different fundamentals we don't understand so let the music keep on playing" should make us uncomfortable.
> Can't deny it is an interesting space!
I'd actually disagree exactly because of the lack of "killer apps". There are plenty more interesting things happening in technology when you consider no one really seems to know what to do with this. Right now blockchains sound like get-rich-quick catnip for geeks.
I built an app to help people build habits by leveraging the same addictive powers of social media.
Any feedback is appreciated!