Old school thinking

I am old school. I grew up listening to old soul music. My dad was a saxophonist so we had ‘good’ music blaring in the house constantly. Some of the philosophical underpinnings of many of those songs are still imprinted on me to this day.

When I think about Cryptocurrency, one maxim comes to mind. It is from a Wilson Pickett song,

I don’t believe in nothing I can’t see
Can’t relate to things that hope to be

Dampener

Such thinking has tempered my enthusiasm for Ethereum. I deal with Rights, Contracts, Rules Engines and the ever increasing desire to automate just about everything in my day job. I understand the complexity. I also understand the gulf between the “Tech Guys” solution and what we as a business actually need. As it’s often my job to bridge the gap.

Snag

As you can imagine, given what I do, Ethereum and the notion of Smart Contracts on the blockchain peaked my interest pretty early on. There was on snag for me.

I like working products!

Anyone can sell me what they’re going to do however I don’t believe in nothing I can’t see. I know that even if I have a Supplier with a very good working product, that does not necessarily translate into something that will fit my need.

If someone making promises without an impressive product to demo to me... "Alright mate..." Is my initial response.

Jaundiced

However I try not to be short-sighted. I get that projects like Ethereum is a long term vision so I rolled with the hype and decided to download the wallet last year.

I kid you not, it took weeks to sync to the network!

What is this shit.

…Was the polite way to describe my initial response! The wallet was crippling my laptop. I’ve downloaded wallets, from one man bands that sync in seconds. It was clear to me that Ethereum wasn’t production ready, yet the buzz was fever pitch.

Again… I’m not shortsighted. I recognised my jaundiced view of ‘seeing-is-believing’. Smarter people than me were recommending Ethereum, so I rolled with it. I didn’t necessary have to understand it fully – yet. But I bought a small bag of Ether, using MyEtherWallet to manage my transactions.

Confirmation Bias

Then 'The DAO' came along. Again, grand plan, grand ICO. Effectively a decentralised funding organisation. Great. The first Company it was hoping to contract was Slockit. A company that creates smart locks that use the blockchain to manage access (if I recall correctly). Okay… Again, I was not sure how this would be used in practice. However Slockit was just one of many business this DAO could contract.

Not wanting to be shortsighted… I put some of my Ethereum into The DAO.

Then came the hack. I’m not sure how I managed it but I escaped that fiasco with a small profit. However the hack and the subsequent fallout for Ethereum only served to confirm my bias against believing in things that merely hope to be.

However I still held my small bag of Ether.

Flatter to deceive

Given my growing interest in the attention economy, I was naturally curious to explore the Ethereum based offering, Akasha. I downloaded Akasha. I would be the kind of person that would blog on such a platform.

The good news was it synced much faster than the Ethereum Wallet.

The bad news was that that gap between what the Tech Guys build and what the client wants was evident.

• Number 1 – I don’t want to pay gas in order to post. I could just stop there.
• Number 2 – it’s a desktop application. A social media platform has to have a mobile and online browser presence. With notifications and alerts to grab my attention.
• Number 3 - ....

I'm going to stop there. I don't want to bash Akasha. It's early days and it is a product that people can actually play with. However the fact that I only logged in once and never thought to log in again suggests that something about the product does not resonate in the way it should. That’s not to say that it can’t or won’t work. It just doesn’t work as currently constructed, not for me anyway.

Sign of things to come?

I mentioned Akasha because it’s reputation preceded it. It was suppose to be Ethereum's answer to Facebook. It’s success is predicated on user adoption. Yet I struggle to see how it is going to attract those users. Just like The DAO was suppose to revolutionise the way that Companies operate in the future yet is now defunct. I wonder if and The DAO are symptomatic of how a lot of Ethereum ‘Dapps’ are going to pan out.

However smarter people than me, are telling me this is the future… so I still hold on to a few Ether. And they seem to be right as the price of Ether keeps going to the moon! I'm not holding enough to be super rich however it's a very tidy profit. But I do have to confess I have no idea why it’s valued as much as it is!

Alas... I will roll with it…

ETH ICOs and Triple Jeopardy

So today I read that Bancor raised over $100m in 3 hours during their ICO. However I did not invest. I watched the 3 minute video, and I'll confess it's way to clever for me to understand! I'll wait until I see what kind of use cases emerge for it. It is at a point where there are so many ICOs launching these days it's very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. There simply aren't enough hours in the day.

Also to me investing in Ethereum Dapps seems like triple jeopardy.

• Not only are you banking on Ethereum not falling over.
• You’re also banking on Bancor being a success.
• Not only that, you’re also banking on some other Ethereum based token not completely fucking up and having a DAO style situation that undermines the confidence in the platform.

These tokens seem a nice way for some to turn a quick profit. Beyond that it is a case of free-rolling to see what happens. However given the funds raised I'm not sure that Bancor will do the usual x2 or x3 when it hits the exchanges but you never know.

Missing a trick?

It could be me. But I fail to see the long term benefit in investing (right now) in tokens built on top of the Ethereum blockchain.

Would I not be better off simply buying more Ether?

Won’t a successful Ether Dapp (be it Bancor or another) necessarily mean an increase in the value of Ether?

Just to be clear, this post isn’t me trying to shit on Ethereum or any other Ether based app. On the contrary, I’m trying to set aside my confirmation bias and understand whether I’m potentially missing a trick (beyond flipping an ICO for a quick profit).

Should I be betting the house on these Ethereum ICOs?

Am I wrong to reserve judgment on Ethereum and it's offsprings until after Caspar releases and the platform of the future starts to make inroads into the lives of average users?

I wouldn’t want to miss the boat because I spent too much time waiting to the Midnight Hour, whilst Mustang Sally passes me by...

Yours truly

One Confused Ether holder