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Post by robeiae on Feb 20, 2018 8:24:07 GMT -5
www.coindesk.com/venezuelas-petro-token-launches-pre-sale/The pre-sale will be for hard currency, only. That is to say, one will only be able to acquire petros by buying them with euros, dollars, pounds, or the like. I'm guessing the promised barrel-of-oil-to-each-petro value is what Maduro is counting on to drive pre-sales, allowing Venezuela to raise a quick billion or so in cash (oil is trading at around $60/barrel, so if people were willing to spend $10-$30 per petro, that would be $1b to $3b raised). Ponzi schemes make more sense than this, but I bet there will be some takers, regardless.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 20, 2018 11:20:20 GMT -5
There will surely be some takers.
God, it's hard to wrap one's head what has happened to Venezuela.
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Post by prozyan on Feb 20, 2018 11:55:41 GMT -5
Socialism funded by oil revenues coupled with government corruption. Worked great when oil was $100+ a barrel. Not so well when it wasn't.
That is, of course, a simplified version of the basic truth.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 20, 2018 12:40:47 GMT -5
yep. To note, a ponzi scheme also works out fine for the very first investors...
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Post by poetinahat on Feb 20, 2018 21:54:45 GMT -5
Props for the thread title!
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Post by Deleted on Feb 20, 2018 22:09:52 GMT -5
Props for the thread title! Shhh. Don't encourage him. He's insufferable enough already.
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Post by Don on Feb 21, 2018 7:13:14 GMT -5
I haven't found any implementation details, but it's quite feasible to issue a legitimate crypto-currency backed by hard assets. If each Petro represents true ownership of a barrel of oil in some bonded warehouse somewhere, the Petro's value would fluctuate against the dollar directly based on the price of oil. I'd buy some Petros in that case.
My guess is that the Petro will be backed by vague promises with no real ownership of hard assets. It'll be just another fiat currency with no intrinsic value, just like the U.S. Dollar, and its value will bear no relationship with the value of a barrel of oil in any other currency... just like the U.S. Dollar. It will have the value of the "full faith and credit of the Venezuelan people." But people won't put as much faith in it as in the U.S. Dollar.
To qualify as a Ponzi scheme, the Petro would have to be structured to pay "profits" to initial investors out of the proceeds of later sales of "new" Petros. That would mean somehow diluting ownership of the asset pool by increasing the number of Petros while keeping the stockpile of hard assets the same. If that were done with a blockchain-based currency, that manipulation would be apparent, frozen as accounting entries in the blockchain for all to see. That transparency would at least be an improvement over the Federal Reserve, which manipulates the value of the U.S. Dollar in ways unapparent to the casual observer, but with same impact of diluting the purchasing value of the dollars already in circulation. Over the last hundred years, the Federal Reserve has removed 95% of the dollar's purchasing power, while claiming that theft has been beneficial to society.
The transparency built into the blockchain won't allow Maduro's Petro to survive for 100 years using stealth accounting practices and mis-education to prop itself up, at least.
I would be no more interested in investing in fiat Petros than I am in investing in fiat U.S. Dollars.
Whether this will qualify as a Ponzi scheme is still to be determined, based on how the blockchain is backed and structured. To call it a Ponzi scheme at this point is premature, although my bet is that's the way it will go over the long term.
A far better example of a working, successful (so far) Ponzi scheme, paying "profits" to initial investors from funds "invested" by new suckers, with the full knowledge that at some point in the future there won't be enough new investors to pay off the old, is Social Security.
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Post by robeiae on Feb 21, 2018 7:47:37 GMT -5
I don't think it's a Ponzi scheme at all. Again, a Ponzi scheme makes more sense.
The point is that like a Ponzi scheme, it's a swindle, a con, a grift. But it's a fairly stupid one, imo. Basically it's "gimme all your money because crypto+oil!" But as you say, there's no apparent actual relationship; the petros aren't really backed by anything.
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Post by robeiae on Feb 21, 2018 8:31:22 GMT -5
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Post by Don on Feb 21, 2018 9:44:17 GMT -5
Meh. It's the same old game wrapped in some new buzzwords. That $735 million is seed money for the scam, and the bankrollers are guaranteed first dibs on the spoils in some underhanded way. There's a Jekyll Island in this scheme somewhere.
I'm still trying to figure out how they're going to defeat the blockchain. OTOH, I've never heard how, or even if, it's being implemented. If it doesn't have a public blockchain, it's not a crypto-currency, whatever they call it.
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Post by robeiae on Feb 21, 2018 17:13:05 GMT -5
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Post by robeiae on Feb 23, 2018 9:49:27 GMT -5
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Post by Optimus on Feb 24, 2018 14:58:29 GMT -5
I still have no idea how cryptocurrency works or what a block chain is. The whole thing confuses me to no end.
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Post by Don on Feb 24, 2018 17:03:04 GMT -5
Blockchain will impact legal and accounting practice as strongly as the internet has impacted the arts. Its use in cryptocurrency applications is just the tip of the iceberg.
A blockchain is a growing set of electronic records, distributed across many systems, and structured so that records, once chained, can never be altered. Think of it as a paper ledger that, once written in, can never be destroyed or altered. Those records can contain anything from titles to real estate to medical records to representations of money.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation looks to provide distributed banking without bankers to the two billion people worldwide who lack bank accounts. It will be done with blockchain technology. Records can even by designed to execute code; that means smart contracts that execute automatically according to conditions. Entire processes can be automated, like starting a new business or closing probate. The blockchain can also eliminate the need for trusted third parties to complete transactions like real estate transfers.
According to Wikipedia, "A cryptocurrency is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to secure its transactions, to control the creation of additional units, and to verify the transfer of assets."
A hard-asset currency like the Petro claimed to be would tie physical asset creation to electronic representations recorded in a Blockchain, but the first and third phrases above would still apply.
The Petro blockchain should show an initial entry of X million Petros, each representing a barrel of physical oil somewhere. Buy a Petro and you own a barrel of oil. Whatever oil's going for in dollars or pounds or Euros is what you'd pay for your Petro. The blockchain would contain a record of you handing over $X and getting 1 Petro in return. The Petro is represented by a string of encrypted characters that include your ownership information, and therefore cannot be transferred out of your ownership without your active participation.
In theory, at least. The devil's in the details. Color me skeptical when it comes to Venezuela's implementation.
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Post by robeiae on Feb 27, 2018 9:40:23 GMT -5
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