Saying hello, introducing myself and feeling someone else's cryptocurrency pain... re: Polymath Network (POLY)

Hi Steemit and all you Steemians out there... I've been hesitating for a while as to what to put out there as my #introduceyourself posting to the Steemit community... Then today I was reading a contributor's cry from the heart on Reddit.... "What's happened with the price of Polymath Network (POLY) - what's going on?" Essentially that writer was asking that age old investor's question: "When's the bleeding going to stop?"

I thought that it might make sense to use the general tenor of my response there as my #introduceyourself post here on Steemit as my first dive into this social medium, call it a practice pool dive if you will...:

My initial thoughts in response to that contributor's post were: "we all feel your pain..." (especially if the writer in question is a newbie crypto-romancer that bought in at the top of the curve...). But flippancy aside there is a lesson to be learned here - especially if one is new to the crypto-currency game. 2017 was an anomalous year - the proverbial monkey with a keyboard could have written a bestseller. By most estimates the market capitalisation of the crypto space went from around $20 billion to over $800 billion in less than 18 months. Picking winners in that environment doesn't make most of the self proclaimed geniuses and so called crypto currency analysts the masters of the crypto universe that they imagine themselves to be... As the saying goes, "a rising tide lifts all boats..."

For my part I'm actually a fan of the idea being put forward by Polymath Networks - in short making the effort to comply with general regulatory compliance requirements when preparing to issue any sort of collateralised asset token onto the blockchain (on whichever network or platform that might be in the future: Ethereum, Neo, Waves, Iota, Quantum, Nem, Ark, Lisk...) and putting the structures in place to comply with the requirements that surround the release of anything that looks, smells, walks or talks like a financial instrument... with the regulatory principle being that if it looks like a duck, we'll be starting with the view that it's a duck unless proven otherwise...

Unlike many of those proudly self identifying crypto fundamentalists I do believe that rules matter, at least rules that purport to govern the the basic fundamental precepts that are the glue that generally bind functioning societies together - the social and legally based agreements that are supposed to govern and regulate our modes of behaviour so that we're all not living in an approximation of "Lord of the Flies"...

The "Wild West" of the current crypto landscape won't last forever and while it does people are behaving like outlaws and making out like bandits... and a lot of people are getting hurt in the process... "Boo hoo" some might say, "collateral damage", "if you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen", "DYOR", "FUD" and all the various fulminations put forward by proponents of "blockchain decentralisation and lack of government interference, oversight and participation..." Here's a wake up call that won't be popular in the crypto space...: "decentralisation is not the panacea for all ills...!!" At this point in our development as an economic society decentralisation of all utilities and/or services on the medium of the blockchain is not a magic bullet for every conceivable application or situation... Regulation and governance is inevitable - if only because there's so much gold swilling around in "dem dar hills" of this new wild frontier that governments, banks, corporations, charlatans, fraudsters and anyone with an idea that they can scribble down on the back of a Post-It note is going to want to hitch a donkey to a wagon to go prospecting and join the gold rush... That being the case a wanton free for all and general no rules apply bun fight ain't gonna be good for anybody in the long run... Although a nice cup of java and a doughnut is always welcome...

Turning back to the bleeding of Polymath - for my part I've been buying in at different levels from below $1.00 up to $1.60 and all the way back down again... However I made my last buy yesterday at a buck ($1.00) and had a healthy buy order at $0.80 which I pulled and moved to $0.70. But I've just cancelled that buy order as well... Right now with Poly we're definitely in "trying to catch a falling knife" territory so might as well keep the powder dry, forget about dollar cost averaging and save the ETH, sit on whatever losses have accrued in the interim, and buy back in at a lower price whenever we eventually start seeing some sort of a bottom forming... The logic being that over the medium to long term we should recover from some, most or all the pain suffered, as and when the price recovers - which it should do if the regulatory hammer does come down across multiple jurisdictions, which it generally appears would seem to be the way the wind is currently blowing the smoke signals in the aforementioned hills... Finally, to rub salt in those bleeding wounds, if you go onto Etherscan you'll see that one of the biggest holders of POLY has been dumping for days now - literally every few minutes "the bot" puts in a sale... (and whoever controls that "bot" still holds about 10 million tokens....!!!)

Questions really should be asked when "investors" are vested with huge allocations with no discernible lock in period.
Especially so when, of a billion tokens purportedly available, there are only +/- 200 million currently in circulation (market cap is currently $188 million) an inordinate amount of which would appear to be held by only a handful of "so called investors" outside of the company management and insiders. Plus, of course, of the balance of the tokens that are not currently in circulation - guess whose holding them... Those parties are free to immediately flood the market with their holdings, on a whim, and move on to the next kill.

Then there's the result of that fabulous marketing exercise that drummed up a lot of hype and built a "community" on Telegram etc. 250 tokens are "given away" to 40,000 people who mostly don't care one way or another about the project and were understandably happy to get free money... The token is released on KuCoin on 14th February, and the price rockets up from "0" (for the purposes of editorial license I'm ignoring here the private placement price investors paid of $0.20 prior to the airdrop and the listing and "zero" being the price the airdrop recipients paid...) to 0.001757 ETH on 19th Feb (about $1.66 on the day) before it starts it's inevitable "post listing" descent...

Just run the numbers: if somebody was prepared, or lucky enough, to catch the post listing wave early enough and "bought in" at $0.30 and the price then runs up to $1.66 - in percentage terms that's a 453% increase....!! If we take the private placement price of $0.20 and run up to $1.66 then we're talking about 730%... Happy days...!! So if that somebody is still HODLing at $0.80 and/or they received their tokens for free in the airdrop, or they bought into the P/P at $0.20..., then they're still well ahead in the game...!! Even as the market bleeds into the sand because there are no buyers on the other side of the trades to hold the price up.

Unfortunately for the newbie crypto-romancer, referenced at the beginning of this fulmination, that may have bought in at the top of the hype curve, at $1.66, that is the hard lesson to be learned here - for every buyer there is a seller and the value of the token that you're holding, and sometimes heavily emotionally as well as financially invested in, is only ever worth what someone else is prepared to pay for it... that's the beginning and end of it no matter how much research you've done, how revolutionary and game changing the concept might be, or what anybody else shilling, holding or selling might have to say about it...

We're going to be in for a period of consolidation once a bottom finally forms for POLY (and indeed the other alt-coins that are slowly bleeding into the sand at the moment) and if the project can hopefully become one that is more of actual substance over hype & marketing then the concept of a one stop shop for the preparation and provision of regulatory compliant tokens for securitisation purposes is one whose time is now... Otherwise why would the Goldman Sachs backed firm, Circle, pony up $400 million to purchase Poloniex... Circle's reason for buying Poloniex: "to provide the US's first regulated crypto exchange" to enable Circle to "list and provide a platform for all forms of emerging crypto tokens, including tokens that would be deemed securities..."!! Goldman Sachs are not going to back that play if the SEC would then bring the hammer down on Circle/Poloniex after the deal...

With that in mind, if the powers at be at Polymath Network don't pull their proverbial fingers out - they'll find themselves losing that all important first mover advantage and chasing a market that's being made by Goldman Sachs and their acolytes... And all of us who bought into the Polymath concept from the beginning will have to learn the lessons of what might have been...

FYI here's the link to the very big whale still HODLing 10 million tokens (by the way whoever that is IS NOT the biggest POLY token holder... There are at least 4 bigger holders....!!) https://etherscan.io/token/0x9992ec3cf6a55b00978cddf2b27bc6882d88d1ec?a=0x2b5634c42055806a59e9107ed44d43c426e58258

EDIT: Since I put this out it's been rightly brought to my attention, elsewhere, that this account could be an exchange account, possibly one handled by KuCoin. A fair point, well made, and duly noted. However, if the account was loaded up at the private placement price of $0.20 that would have been a $2 million pot. A not insignificant amount, but certainly not exceedingly large or out of the ordinary for many active professional traders...

NB: all usual pertinent caveats apply - the above are expressions of my opinion only and are not to be taken as investment advice. Always do your own research and never invest amounts that that will adversely impact your life were things to go pear shaped...!!