Note I added more charts and analysis to my blog. I found some new shocking information which may be relevant to the question of whether the altcoins are going to be slaughtered.

I think the crypto industry as a whole is stronger when people work together and leverage synergies rather than taking an attitude that projects must always be in direct competition.

Actually I don’t like to rehash this. Yet misunderstandings are easily formed, so here is my perspective on it.

Indeed that was also my preference since 2013…

…but unfortunately it started with the Monero community claiming that they were the end and be all of altcoins because they had a superior development team, open source, and the killer anonymity technology that would maintain the ultra-critical attribute of fungibility. In hindsight, that highly-exclusionary attitude looks quite silly doesn’t it. Some of them might disagree with my characterization of the community attitude or that individual members of the community aren’t representative of everyone in the community. (I have a counter argument but I don’t want to rehash it) In their defense, they were defending themselves against Bitcoin maximalists who had the same attitude, so they didn’t want any altcoin kiddies nipping at their heels in the context of that larger PR war. Also they belittled me when I said that working for donation pittances as volunteer didn’t fit my life circumstances. At that time, I was initially arguing that we should be open to experimentation and try not to be so territorial over projects we’re invested in. To exemplify how silly the entire war was, a huge lol for me recently is that @iCEBREAKER—one of my fiercest critics from the Monero crowd—praised my explanation of why Kurzweil’s Singularity is nonsense; and apparently he didn’t realize it was my post because I been banned so many times from BCT that I had dozens of username changes.

That began the bad blood that then carried over into when I joined Steem and was somewhat enthusiastic yet also skeptical because of the flaws. And then I was very outspokenly critical of EOS because for example the prospectus says they will not issue tokens to USA persons (to avoid SEC requirements), yet it is public knowledge even in the main EOS thread at BCT that people were using VPNs to bypass the IP address check. And in general the EOS prospectus tries to obfuscate that they are really issuing securities. And also I think it is a money grab. A $billion ICO to develop a decentralized ledger seems incredibly excessive. So I spoke frankly that either they have bought off the regulators (note that child actor dude Brock Pierce may be connected with Goldman Sachs, Steem had as legal counsel Gary Ross who was a former US Treasury official, and Circle which is backed by Goldman Sachs recently got an implicit waiver from the SEC for their purchase of Poloniex), or that this is not going to end well from a legal standpoint. Of course, they do not like that criticism.

IMO, the authorities have allowed the crypto sector to incriminate themselves w.r.t. taxation, AML+KYC, CFTC regulations, and securities laws. The blowback may come in the next crypto winter. There’s a lot of white collar crime in our sector. It’s not clear yet whether the corruption is tied in with the regulators such that the big money can buy their way via sharing with the likes of Goldman Sachs. Probably. So maybe we should bet big on EOS that they have Goldman in their back pocket, with Goldman Sachs having alumnus at key positions in the SEC, US Treasury Secretary, and formerly Trump administration economic adviser. Any way, I didn’t get into crypto to end up selling out to the status quo that has been destroying the global economy.

I guess the point is that I am all for people trying different projects and even making some money in the process, but I would like to see people focusing on completing worthy technology while not taking that to the unnecessary extremes of miring our efforts into the sort of legal quagmires that I think are going to crash our sector into another crypto winter. And then misrepresenting the material facts and banning those who try to inform others of the material facts.

I have resolved myself to STFU and code. I (and also I think @smooth as he was also highly critical of ICOs in the past) realized I was driving against the massive inertia driven by speculation fever and thus it was counter-productive for me to speak out and that I would be better served to produce what I think is needed and be ready when the blow-back comes with my well placed solution ready to take over as the others fail. I explain here only so you might understand the water under the bridge.

The health issue was delirium and inability to form cognition. I can’t trivialize it. Inability to make any forward progress day-after-day for many years, is a low-grade torture. So the only way I get to succeed is if that condition abates. Appears it is, but it is not 100% there yet, so I’m still in battling and struggling mode. So aphorisms don’t really reflect the reality with where I am with it at this point ^{_{(there’s no way for you to conceptualize how horrific was what I went through, the risk that I might be back there again, my ongoing struggle to get back 100%, and when we’re healthy we naturally trivialize the actual suffering that we don’t have any recent experience with, but at least you weren’t ridiculing me for being ill and bringing my children into a discussion as some people did on BCT and even the admitted corruption with the BCT mods)}}. I appreciate your well-intended gesture.

I’m not quite as concerned as you are about regulators cracking down on ICOs. I do think it’s worth keeping an eye on regulation and expect we will see a great increase in regulatory oversight in the next couple years, but I’m hopeful some reasonable middle ground will be reached.

I’m curious to understand your thought process. Why do you take that stance?

Do you believe the regulators are going to allow our sector to continue to violate the law? Or do you think the regulators are bought off?

I presume you think they don’t want to crackdown because they don’t want to discourage experimentation in a new important economy and technology akin to the birth of the Internet?

Let me counter and what if it is shown that 99% of the ICOs have produced nothing of value and end up going to zero value. Would the regulators not have an obligation to insure that investors were receiving proper material disclosure? Most of the ICOs are lying through their teeth and making claims that don’t respect material facts, including EOS.

When all boats are rising, everybody is cooperative but when the tides go back out we will see that we all forgot to wear our underwear (i.e. we were ignoring certain flaws that come to roost when the boat is sinking).

No doubt we’re in for some turbulence ahead before things settle though.

We don’t know. But the possibility exists for Bitcoin to decline from $50k to $10k from 2019 – 2021, and for ICO-issued tokens to go to 1% of their peaks. That is not prediction on the ICO crackdown, but I don’t think the probability of it occurring is less than 0.2. Did you not know there is a G20 meeting planned for this coming March or April (I forgot the details) where they will be apparently coordinating about ICO regulation? The US Treasury secretary, the EU regulator, and SEC and CFTC chairmen have mentioned this. As well, we know already that China, Singapore, South Korea and others are trending towards wanting to crackdown. And I also glanced at a news yesterday that Russia says it wants a new legislation for crypto completed this year.

IMO, the securities regulation exists not only to make sure to disincentivize (with legal repercussions) the promulgation of lies and non material facts claims, but also so that IPO capital has to be raised with the assistance of the elite players in finance. Do you really think the elite players in finance are going to willingly given up their cash cows?

Instead I think they will force ICO into a regulated regime. The question is what happens to tokens which were issued as illegal securities such as EOS? Are they grandfathered? Probably so, given Goldman Sachs is apparently involved in EOS and have a history with Brock Pierce.

Taken together, I feel that offers the potential for the next evolution of Steem to be built on EOS, hopefully one that solves the current problems inherent in Steem such as concentration of voting power and whatnot. I admit I have yet to read your arguments on consortium blockchains though, so will have to go through that and see if it alters my thinking.

Given that EOS is just DPoS, I presume it solves nothing about economic centralization. It purports to solve some technical issues with scaling and variability of applications as you summarized. Whether the economic centralization issue is important or not in the overall scheme of things, is for example what I was discussing with @smooth. One issue that came up in the EOS thread which caused me to banned, was that when Steem went down due to DDoS attack, it was the periphery nodes that were attacked, and DPoS provides no funding mechanism for them. Thus apparently they’re underfunded. That is I think tied in with the economic centralization issue, but that requires a deeper discussion and study than I want to do in these comments.

I think we also have to consider what is the economic model of the ecosystem. Steem’s ecosystem may be driven by extraction of rewards? Which would explain the importance of your work on SteemVoter (kudos for being pragmatic and it certainly made me review my strategy). Or is driven by the desire to blog? I only blog on Steem because I loath the editor of Medium (which is why I rarely duplicate my blogs there!), hate the way Medium can censor my comments, and because I have no other alternative at the moment that can reach my target market in the crypto sector. In 2016, I was blogging to survive financially because I had entirely depleted my savings due to my extended illness. Are most of the users on Steem also extracting? Or is there some social trust that we’re building something important and something with features we all need?

EOS’s economic model is apparently (afaik) that they expect app developers to HODL the token to profit on the appreciation? And maybe they will even donate some funds to seed these app developers, given they will have $billion to work with, presuming they don’t have to pay off the whales (Goldman?) with most of it (even if they only have $100m to fund app devs that could be quite significant). What’s the economic model for the users? Is it that features and apps will experiment and create features that are compelling for users and this will drive the value of the token higher due to widespread adoption?

What happens to that model if there is an ICO-crackdown. Massive failure. A lot of pissed off app developers. Lawsuits. Etc.. So they want to fork to a new token to retain their investment, how do they reach a consensus on the distribution of the new tokens? If they copy the prior distribution, then it’s still a security (and we did chat with a securities attorney about that and he warned us that reissuance was not a viable way to avoid being classified as a security).

I can’t predict the future. So all I can suggest is to diversify some as a hedge.

But I noticed that China banned EOS before they banned all the exchanges. They specifically singled it out from tokens that had been distributed by proof-of-work and less obvious violations of principles of securitization. And Trump appointed Clayton and Trump wants to clean out the swamp. And $1000m isn’t a lot of money when there are many $0.5+m mouths to feed. So EOS might end up being a Tragedy of the Commons of “app developers” extracting from that $1B and producing not much in the way of coordinated utility for the users. And then ICO crackdown, political infighting at EOS, discord, chaos, collapse. Maybe not. Maybe yes. A huge pot of honey attracts flies. This reminds me of the IQ test question for Google new hires that I corrected about a captain distributing the loot, in that the only Nash equilibrium is the Tragedy of the Commons to offer to share the loot with everyone who votes to agree to share it that way. The business models seems like more extraction to me. Extraction is a Tragedy of the Commons phenomenon.

My primary motivation is simply to live a freer life, able to do what I want when I want, pursuing my passions and enjoying quality time with my family.

That’s pragmatic. I’d like to change the world or accomplish something very important, while also meeting my personal freedom goals. So that makes me picky about which projects I want to work on. That is why I am investing so much effort to create a new programming language because I think we really need a better one. (Not going to explain those details here). And I think we really need a better technology for decentralized ledgers since I think they’re going to change the world.