Crypto-stupidity

I have to vent. Apologies in advance to anyone the holds the token the following rant refers to.

Grin

Specifically, Numeraire (NMR) - https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/numeraire/.

It is a token used by scientists competing for: https://numer.ai/

But it has nothing to do with what the scientists produce. You won't get that. The main site will. Which is open to institutional investors of $1m+ only. AKA - the rich bastards the crypto world is supposed to hate.

The token itself, should have no value outside their competition. Which they freely admit on the forum the scientists use on that site. The ones that "work" (produce data models) for the main site.

As you can see here: https://forum.numer.ai/t/nmr-deflationary-or-inflationary/289/7

Their "announcement" (they do not have one on here for obvious reasons) for it: https://medium.com/numerai/an-ai-hedge-fund-goes-live-on-ethereum-a80470c6b681

And their white paper: https://numer.ai/whitepaper.pdf

All of which talk about incentivising the scientists. FOR THE MAIN SITE.

Using ETH instead of BTC for payouts (the $ value ones) and the NMR token for staking (they - the rich guys - WANT it to have value for this obviously, but also know it really has none). And talk of moving parts of NUMERAI (the main site - THE BIT YOU DON'T GET) onto Ethereum as DAO's. Which is nice. But hardly essential for them. So use of ETH would help support the network for that. Fine. A nice by-product. Not not essential to them. And still wouldn't be any use to token holders as they are for THE MAIN SITE. The rich guy bit.

And yet, for some reason, it is worth $32.60 each as I'm typing this.

Why?!?!?! They're worthless to almost everyone!

I don't know how their staking system works in detail, but these guys are scientists, they're not stupid. If it enables them to all stake 0.xxxxxxx rather than everyone using xxxxxxx.0, you can GUARANTEE that's what they'll be doing. Or using low amounts. They admit themselves they should have no value outside their site, but we (the crypto "investors") have meant the token they use to stake confidence in a data modelling competition, is suddenly worth a fortune! The goose just laid a golden egg. If it was possible as a community for a while to sit on it, and get a nice big pile of cash, wouldn't you? (They get a cash prize too. But look at the value pre and post launch of the crypto .... lol ... you can find all this on their own forum.)

What they are working on will never do us any good. It's for the existing rich guys. (From their own forum, here: https://forum.numer.ai/t/how-to-invest-money-in-numerai/86/14)

So what if they reach a point where they have enough data/models/whatever. So they stop the competition. Then NMR instantly becomes worthless. (Although it already should be)

Or just change the system. They could. If they felt like it. They just pre-warn the scientists. (Maybe! They're rich guys, might not even bother with them!) They dump. The token becomes insta-worthless. They're not committed to it for some random crypto hodlers sake, that's for sure!

It has NO value in it's own right.

They (the data scientists) seem incredulous themselves as to it's value.

I can only assume people buying are it, think they are somehow buying into the main site, and the hedge fund behind it.

They're not.

It's not designed as a currency. It's an ERC20 token, yes, but was not intended to ever be used like a currency in the wild. So comparison to XRP I don't feel is entirely fair. It is at least designed to be a global flowing currency. I know a lot of people don't like it. Fair enough. I can see why you don't like it. But I can also see how it could work from a busines/financial perspective. Using the public version XRP token? It's a long shot. But why not. Crazier things have happened. Point is, it has a target market. And a use. It is FAR faster than BTC as far as I'm aware. Regardless if their core ledger software is not dependent on it, but can be easily integrated with it. It's designed that way. It is what it is. Like it or not. It fits it's purpose.

But NMR? You're buying into nothing. Except for the rich guys to get richer. Oh, and some data scientists. They'll get richer too. (But probably not as rich as the rich guys. They usually don't. Which is why rich guys are rich.)

There are others out there I think are utter shit or total vaporware, but NRM stands out on current value alone.

Maybe the cleverest thing about NMR is that the rich guys have actually conned the crypto guys into paying scientists to make THEM richer. That's actually pretty fucking genius.

Thoughts?

(TD;DR - NMR is worthless. Read the links. Some crypto stuff is just plain nuts.)