"This change won't affect a number of groups such as Pro Networks and Non-Profits."
Assuming this means that most of the small community-driven groups will be unaffected by the change.
Still, this is clearly a communication fail, as well as a cardinal sin for usability:
By charging users to RSVP yes, they are literally putting a tax directly on a key engagement activity for the whole site.
I also agree with the comment that Meetup has done a poor job of improving itself. The "design facelift" they did 2 years ago negatively affected the growth of our group, and they haven't added much value since then.
A better approach would be to take 15% of ticket sales done through the site in a way that could improve engagement and revenue.
Meetup may have a well-deserved PR hailstorm for this.
I think "non-profits" means something more specific than "community-driven" - if i look at what is included locally, it's stuff with a clear charity/social focus:
What happened on 1 August and with the prices immediately after suggests how the conflict over the blocksize has been widely misreported.
Bitcoin was not ripping itself into two in a civil war, but innovating new forms of governance and token distribution for new projects.
We now have a technically proven, and from the looks of it, established new method of token distribution that is arguably far superior to crowd sales and ICOs.
If you don't like the BCH or Bitcoin implementation, there are already hundreds of other cryptocurrytencies, but you can also fork your own from the biggest, original (and arguably most widely distributed).
BCH now has a "market cap" of about $3.7 billion dollars, probably a world record for a startup (open source project) that was literally released to the world a few days ago.
If you own bitcoins before the fork, you should now own equal amounts on both sides of the coin, and (hopefully) soon will be able to buy or sell either token, depending on your preference.
Bitcoin itself has a $52 billion dollar market cap right now post fork not only because it survived the challenge and may soon implement Segwit, but because it will be one of the best chains from which to fork new projects.
There is no need to take sides from this perspective. Just sell the token you don't like and use the gain to buy more that you do like. OTOH, it's perfectly fine to like and hold both just like it was once okay to use more than one web site.
> BCash now has a "market cap" of about $3.7 billion dollars, probably a world record for a startup (open source project) that was literally released to the world a few days ago.
You made me giggle. Market cap is a measure already debatable for Bitcoin, but for a currency for which most of the holders aren't yet able to sell, it's completely meaningless. As a matter of fact I made already 150% return by shorting it. I plan to make even more as people are slowly able to unload their BCH.
Using the term "bcash" when talking about Bitcoin Cash makes you look like a fool or at the very least shows you are not a neutral source of information. That term is a misinformation gimmick invented by people who want to see the fork fail and are using it in order to confuse people about what Bitcoin Cash actually is. As other have pointed out Bcash is actually a fork of zcash and nothing to do with Bitcoin Cash.
"...unlike traditional fiat currencies, cryptocurrency is technology — and thus, price depends on innovation potential... improving the underlying software of a cryptocurrency leads to predictable increases in its price."
Jean-Philippe Vergne will present his research in a presentation with the same title at the 4-year anniversary of the Bitcoin Wednesday Conference in Amsterdam on 5 July.
"The typical ICO very obviously meets all 4 elements, inasmuch as it involves a company raising money via an ICO..."
Do we really know what a "typical ICO" is at this stage? And as fast as the sector is changing, how do we know what will be typical by the time new legislation is
(a) passed and
(b) enforced?
Many (typical?) ICOs are not companies, registered as foundations to support free, open source software with crystal-clear terms of the token distribution:
Which explicitly state that it is not an investment and that it is likely that participants will lose all of their money.
This is just one exceptional example, and many more will follow.
Forward-thinking jurisdictions such as Switzerland which understand and actively support ICOs are quickly developing a strong competitive advantage against the more regressive ones.
> Do we really know what a "typical ICO" is at this stage?
Yes, we can look at the ICOs that have happened and draw conclusions.
> And as fast as the sector is changing, how do we know what will be typical by the time new legislation is
(a) passed
This isn't about new legislation. The Howey Test dates from 1946. The fundamental characteristics of ICOs are not new (and have nothing to do with blockchains).
> Many (typical?) ICOs are not companies
I have no idea why you think this changes anything. It doesn't.
> Which explicitly state that it is not an investment
As I already mentioned, fine print doesn't fix the problems being discussed here.
You've selectively skipped over critical parts of my argu
ment. But never mind... ;)
From your perspective, even in-game virtual limited-edition collectors items that might appreciate in value could be considered "securities". As would limited edition digital art work or, let's say, protected hashes of such works.
Or a limited gift voucher to purchase the first edition of a product funded by Kickstarter....
Basically you can try to draw conclusions of what a typical token crowd sale is or isn't at this stage, but -- at least in my view -- you would probably be jumping to a superficial conclusion.
> This isn't about new legislation. The Howey Test dates from 1946.
Which may or may not be suitable for technology developed and used in 2017, let alone 2018, 2019 or further down the road. So you're completely missing the point.
But if your only argument is that government authorities "could" interpret the law in the most aggressive way, few would argue.
> even in-game virtual limited-edition collectors items that might appreciate in value could be considered "securities"
If they were being marketed as an investment, yes, of course. "Buy a limited edition Golden Sword so we can launch our new expansion; you'll make a huge profit when you resell it to the people who join after we ship the expansion!"
That would fairly clearly fall afoul of the SEC; they don't care if you call it a "Golden Sword" or an "no-lose investment contract"; they care about how it behaves and (especially) marketed by the promoters. Scammers are constantly looking for new ways to package the same old schemes.
And because it would be so clearly illegal, no legit game company does that. Similarly, Kickstarter will shut down a project in a heartbeat if they even hint at doing something shady with the promotion. Did it ever occur to you that there's a reason why your examples of other equivalent things that would also be prosecuted by the SEC are all hypothetical? It's because if they existed, they'd be prosecuted by the SEC.
> Which may or may not be suitable for technology developed and used in 2017
But is undeniably applied to the technology used in 2017. This is like Zenefits arguing that laws about insurance brokers are totally not relevant to the new internet-enabled 21st century. Turns out, those laws were very relevant to Zenefits.
One of the world's authorities on the design and implementation of currency systems and author of Money and Sustainability, Professor Lietaer has become one of the leading critics of fiat money systems...
Maybe, our system gets 8k-12k transactions per second with full replication + crypto up to a few thousand consensus nodes (slows down around 4k nodes). That type of performance opens up a lot of potential applications.
As for "a horseless carriage with a horse" perhaps, we'll see. These systems do give you something that you can't get otherwise which is a distributed DB that you can share with competitors without worrying about them stealing from you/breaking it. Blockchain is to overloaded right now, but it's the name that has stuck likely because "a Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant Consensus database" (BFTCDB) is just too impenetrable. If one of these BFTCDB take off, if may not actually be a blockchain (though I suspect it will be because cryptographic data structures are just too useful for them) but I bet it will be called one.
But that the end of the day, that's what a permissioned blockchain is -- a DB you can share, which is a seriously new capability.
I think that there is no way to compete against the speed and relative non-complexity you can get from "closed group, trusted 3rd party" solutions.
There is so much hype and confusion spread around the issue - as there are some genuine threats to some of the bread-and-butter services the banks do, like accounts and payments.
But to put it mildly, the bank executives are for the most time not really in the right career to sort out what's what, and due to the way the banks work, they are not likely to listen to the people that actually know how to do that until a lot of money is wasted and very little has been gained.
