A Fool and his Money: Adventures in the Crypto Economy

I am 46 years old .. an elder in many ways although I feel like how I imagine an elder feels. Perhaps it explains my over cautious nature detailed here through my decisions.
I have been a computer geeks since first encountering a Commodore Vic 20 when I was 9.
I have been a professional web designer/developer since 1998, nearly 20 years. I have seen the rise of the internet and now the rise of the Crypto Economy. I have a reasonably deep relationship with the machines or our age and grok their transformational potential..

I first learned of Bitcoin in 2012 when it was around USD$11. I did a little reading and thought it was a wild idea but when I looked at the charts and the 1000x growth rate it seemed so incredible I thought it must be a bubble or a scam.

Next it came to my attention when it broke $100. That made me sweat bullets.

I read up much more at that point on blockchain concepts and bitcoin and discovered the built in 21 million coin cap and constant deflation to simulate golds finite supply, the mining culture etc. I felt the magical decentralised potential but a few points of bitcoin really bothered me and still do.

The deflationary aspect of Bitcoin seems so weighted to early investors as to be somewhat toxic. I have heard the justification that early investors risk so much on an unproven technology they deserved rich rewards. I buy it to some degree but someone closer to the source than me who threw in a few dollars early in the game was not, in reality, risking that much and was rewarded by millions. There is obviously some sour grapes there as I had a chance to get in relatively early but lacked the nerve. I know I am not alone in that boat.... Probably if I was an early investor I would feel I deserved the jingling purse and would no doubt buy the justification while sipping a martini by the pool. I don't mean to be a total cynic, I know many early adopters did their level best to distribute the coin far and wide, and thanks to those pioneers who shared it out we have a currency that works at all. It all depends on adoption of course.

Another troublesome aspect was the mining. It seems like an environmental disaster, all that wasted computing power, electricity and constantly redundant hardware turning over. All of it churning away on a hashing competition to see who gets to record the encrypted block and get the reward. And this whole story growing and growing as the price went up and the mining reward becomes more desirable. The greenie in me just could not abide that waste, and still cannot.

A third point of dissonance for me is the utility of it has never matched Satoshi's original vision. Bitcoin has become an investment asset, not a currency. There are no microtransactions and precious little daily shopping on Bitcoin. There are two obvious reasons for this, both stemming from the fact that Bitcoin is a victim of its own success. One is the deflationary aspect means it is always better to hold it than to spend it. I bet there are many who regret spending a few bitcoin buying craft beers at hip bars in NYC in 2012 when that beer money would now have paid off their mortgage if they had HODL. The other is that the mining industry is so bloated and dare I say centralised into mega-pools that the costs of moving bitcoin around are equivalent to the bloated fiat money systems it was designed to disrupt. :(

A final trouble point of Bitcoin is taking the onus of security upon oneself. The danger of putting one's wealth on the blockchain, where there is complete anonymity, is of course if someone snoops your cryptographic keys somehow they could transfer your wealth away and poof, it's gone with zero recourse. Possession of the keys rules. Probably the main reason that there is no big institutional money in the game yet. It is a sobering thought. Users of MtGOX learned the hard way.

Anyway needless to say I have watched intently as Bitcoin broke $1200 then slid back to $400, went through MtGOX and various other disasters and stagnated for long enough for me to congratulate myself for letting my cautions prevail, and then losing interest in it and no longer watching closely. Oops.

Throughout the Bitcoin doldrums I maintained a passive interest thanks to a subscription to Lets Talk Bitcoin podcast and came to admire the brain of Andreas Antonopoulos. Nobody does crypto-metaphors better than Andreas with his Lions and Sharks.

Hence I passively followed the birth of Ethereum with its smart contracts, the explosive appearance of the DAO, and its almost hacking, followed by the debate on a hard fork to solve it, thus birthing two versions of Ethereum. It is probably the most dramatic story ever driven by maths genius since the breaking of the ENIGMA code in WWII by Alan Turing.

After the hard fork of Ethereum and the subsequent price drop I thought "now is the time to get into this game" but I was busy with my young family and a change of continent from Australia to Europe. Financial and time stress did not allow any spare cash or time to play with it. It went on the "ToDo" list and before I have had a chance to get to it there is the second massive wave of the Crypto Economy rolling by with me left standing high and dry on the beach, board under one arm and boardshorts only half on. Holy Fuck. No chance to even paddle out. I believe I am not the only one looking sheepish on the beach at this point.

This state of things left me feeling rather scrambled, a bit stupid and kind of depressed. I feel like I was aware of coming swell and missed the wave twice. I don't want to dwell in this space very long except to say to others who feel stupid at this point, you are not alone, and there were many reasons not to jump in. Also the story of decentralization and the crypto economy is not over it's just beginning. Time to bone up on many disciplines (cryptography, game theory, economics, political science, philosophy) and make some smart decisions. Find out what you can offer to this space and get busy. The potential of decentralisation is not immediately apparent, but the more you peer in the more you realise how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Anyway if you have followed the ramble this far I am coming to a point, kinda.

Now a month or so ago I heard this fascinating podcast where Dan Larimer details the EOS project. Since then I have been reading rapaciously about it (discovering Steemit on the way).

I hope I am not a victim of wishful thinking here, feeling as I said, like I missed the wave twice and possibly now, through FOMO fuelled projection conjuring a third wave. It may be the case but I have done a good job convincing myself it is not .

Dan has convinced me of his vision, and his credential and track record of producing working systems with Bitshares and Steem speaks well for his ability to make it happen.

The exciting thing about EOS is it addresses pretty much all of the concerns I have with Bitcoin which I detailed above. It is not deflationary in an immutable way, it does not waste resources on mining like bitcoin, ethereum etc, the delegated proof of stake makes it arguably more decentralised, it has an identity system built in, it has a human constitution to solve problems unsolvable my maths alone (of which there are many), it can be altered through a democratic consensus (not by the whims of mining pools) etc. It ticks so many boxes, many I had not even considered before it is hard not to be excited by it.

I am convinced enough that I have started shifting some money into EOS tokens and now own several thousand. I have learned much about keys and wallets and contracts just getting some money in.

I would like to invest more, although it if I do so I will wandering near the rule of thumb of not investing more than I can afford to loose.

There are also some points of friction of me sliding more money in. The daily distribution system is very well designed to create a broad base of users, who will all get in for relatively low money. Hats off to Dan and Block.One. It seems to be very egalitarian, and also provides a clear timeframe to make sure the software is ready for primetime.
My friction point concerns the fact that Block.One have made it super clear that the money raised from the ICO distribution is revenue for them, which they are under no obligation to use to develop, stabilise or secure the network. They say they will not run the network, they are just creating open source software and leaving the rest in the hands of the community. I understand they are creating a legal case where it is possible to defend themselves against law that applies to Securities. I am not sure if the claims they make about the value of the tokens will be enough to pass the Howey Test in the US and if they are not then perhaps Block.One needs to make it all a bit more clear. I am not even sure if legally passing the Howey Test will matter in the global context anyway.

I say this not as an attack on the EOS project but rather out of concern and support for the project. I am already invested and as I said would put more in if some things were clearer. I even have an ambition to attempt an app for the network of my own in web assembly. Did I mention I am excited by the possibilities.

Block.One now has a huge stack of cash and I think they need to spend a bit more of it on marketing their concepts. In the marketplace of ideas clarity and transparency can only help the cause. Obviously the more people that participate in the distribution, and the deeper their participation is, the better it will be for the EOS network.

The project is very transparent on the software front, you can watch the code progress in realtime on Github. I believe some similar transparency about the funding arrangements would serve well to gain more traction with the distribution of tokens too.

If you take the content of the EOS website at face value then it could be read as a dicey proposal. If the final product is open source software, anyone could take it, rewrite the Genesis Block to suite themselves, (perhaps do an even more egalitarian distribution, eg sell the tokens at a fixed low price) and start a chain of their own. The token holder has no assurance that matches the size of money that has gone in to fund it. I think the creators of such a project deserve rich rewards, but even a small fraction of the money generated thus far could fund 20 or 50 developers and a marketing team for a project of this scale.

I would like to hear for example that the money that is going into the ICO would be used: to set up and resource some initial nodes, be used for ongoing code development, or be given to D.App projects to flesh out the ecosystem. I would be satisfied to hear this even in the form of some legally qualified hypothetical discussion, so as not to implicate EOS as a security. Is this not possible? I think it is a critical part of their marketing that is only addressed very slightly and without much reassurance. Is anything that whiffs of this already a danger for them legally speaking?

I like the way Ethereum handled the money raised, setting up the Ethereum Foundation to develop the base layer of the project. The fact it is a non-profit based in Switzerland also has good marketing appeal compared to a private company in the Caymans. I appreciate the argument that the blockchain will and should be self sustaining and requires the help of no foundation in the long term, but surely it needs some help when it is being birthed and it provides a reassuring story about use of the funding. That is what I am asking for? Can any Steemians out there offer and old man some reassuring words, even if it starts like this "There is this blockchain development team I know, kind of friends of friends of mine , who raised a big pile of money for their project and..."

If there is interest in this post I will follow it up, I still would like to talk about the crypto anarchist roots to all this stuff and what sort of world it could lead to. Dan Larimer talks about Free Market solutions for securing life, liberty and property.

These ideas, their history and future are probably the most fascinating aspect to the whole crypto-economic movement.