Do not be fooled by fancy looking "whitepapers", professional websites, and cute mascots.
Whitepapers are bought usually from the lowest bidder who can bullshit technical keyword bingo. This person may not be involved with the company or even know much about the coin itself as often these job listings indicate the project manager themselves knows nothing about the coin they plan to offer except their own personal dreams of wealth. Same with every other part of these ICOs. The daily freelancer job listings are flooded with requests of this nature; I might estimate 1:25 to 1:50 of the offers are for ICO schemes.
I'm not surprised he's raised millions. (1) One of the best/easiest/most guaranteed places to make money is by investing in money/stocks/etc. ("You have to have money to make money") And (2) Actually, startup funders have a surprising amount of cash and they'll throw it on any horse that looks to win the race. From a civilian and from a startuper's perspective, gaining startup funding is like winning the lottery but from the other side of the table, really, it's just another investment, and they are looking to secure a healthy profit.
IMO I feel that the crypotcurrency market reached its saturation point a long time ago and that while technological advances are nice and new competitors are always healthy, the winners of this game have been determined a long time ago and will remain so as there continue to be new cryptocurrencies to the point of super-saturation.
Am I the only one concerned at the "Push button to win vote with spambots" approach that affected both the US presidential election and Net Neutrality? That combined with the millions spent in bribes feels so much like our government is based on voting by bribe dollars, instead of, you know, the citizens who live there.
> Serious (perhaps dumb) question, can the end of NN really be fixed with encryption?
I have some hope for a decentralized private internet like this one https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/15/pied-pipers-decentralized-... but I would see it as more of an enthusiast's space as this internet wouldn't be able to compete with the size of the current internet.
Allowing ISPs to charge customers more for the same service is not overblown. Basically it boils down to a trust issue, like the React World debacle, except these ISPs have already had horrible breaches of that trust.
> - This will be easy to fix when Trump is replaced
This has much less to do with the president and much more to do with corporate bribes. See here: https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15100620/congress-fcc-isp... Please note that there are no limits on how many terms Congress members may seve and that voting turn-out for non-presidential elections is quite low.
> - Comcast would be unwise to radically change the status quo when things will likely be "reverted again" in 3 years
Incorrect on both fronts -
ISPs stand to acquire direct profit for no additional cost, basically free money. This is because many ISPs have been caught throttling already, which means that they already have that technology built and ready to go.
Comcast specifically already has many technologies they can turn on and off as quickly as a phone call to change your service plan.
> - Internet companies (and techies) will call out bad behavior on the part of broadband providers if it occurs in practice
Sure, but with far less reach and effectiveness and an eventual decade-long tie up in courts. It's really less than a wrist slap to these large ISPs
> - This is a nuanced issue; regulating monopolies and utilities isn't easy
It's not nuanced, but yes, regulating companies and utilities isn't easy. But I just don't see how giving them permission to charge customers more money for the same service is going to help any of these mentioned issues.
This is a perfect example of misinformation used to confuse and pacify the masses - see how none of these arguments are related?
You have to understand that right now these ISPs have a near complete monopoly over most areas and have relaxed to the point that other companies, such as Google Fiber, can offer x100 times the speed at half the price or less.
Use that as a path to go see a professional therapist and psychiatrist.