I thought smooth was too busy to reply but he replied in private because I had locked the thread. So here is my reply and includes everything he wrote. I assume he wrote this for public consumption.
All of these parasitic "features" can be removed by a competing forks, e.g. as Monero has apparently done to BBR.
Monero didn't do anything to BBR. Monero launched first.
My point is that the existence of XMR without that parasitic fee made it largely unnecessary to make another fork of BBR to remove it. Being first or second seems irrelevant.
The example I cited of BBR was that in fact no one has forked BBR to remove the fee, even with the developer being completely MIA. If the fee is reasonable (1% in the case of BBR, though the exact number that is tolerable is situation dependent) then network effects and inertia will cause people to just pay it. If you overreach (as in the case of BCN with its 82% ninja premine), then yes people will fork and not pay it.
As I had pointed out later in my prior post on this issue, it can be that since ostensibly BBR has lower adoption (no offense intended to boolberry), there simply isn't the available resources to fork it can remove the parasitic fee. My point is that if your coin is scaling out to the world in potential, then opportunity for someone to fork and remove the fee and the world maybe preferring that fork is probably greater. Although it is possible that the inertia makes it impossible to do such a hard fork. Yet I think it is very likely that if BBR was Bitcoin, many people would have made the argument and actions to remove a 1% fee on the entire world's debasement or mining income (is the 1% on all mining income including transaction fees?).
It seems like a potentially viable funding model for a coin until it gets large adoption. Yet for that reason, it probably isn't viable. I assume boolberry isn't making enough money on that fee to justify working a lot on the coin lately.
Again I reiterate that it seems to me the only model of development funding which seems viable is to sell the programming work to produce the initial code base which should have some major new feature for crypto that drives interest and adoption. Or try to mine your own coin at a "fair launch", but this requires getting people to basically ignore your launch ANN or some hidden form of premine or instamine (or as apparently in the case of many Monero developers means your coins are worth roughly the same or less than the cost you mined them and this is probably why there is no pump or fast appreciation of the speculation price occurring for Monero). Or go for the donations model of methodical open source that produced Linux and Gimp. But please note, many people are paid high salaries to work on Linux because corporations have a vested interest in Linux. This may be what is missing from Monero's economics. Monero can not afford your or my time. Monero can only afford volunteer experts or people from countries with a very low average salary for programmers such as Ukraine and Russia (but I doubt any of the experts working on Monero are inexperienced developers from these countries and the experienced ones have surely learned their true value on the international stage).
Everyone has told me that Monero developers are impoverished if just considering their gains from the Monero project. Thus they must be participating for ideological reasons, or some vision that one day the gains will come as the code base reaches certain levels of capabilities. For me 10 years waiting for gains is too long to wait. And a 10 bagger over 10 years is only a 26% per annum gain. Seems like a long time to wait with a very high risk of failure for such a low annual return. Inflation will eat probably 1/3 of that gain. There is some hope that with the coming economic collapse in 2016 that interest in anonymity will increase and Monero will benefit by being the technologically most advanced anonymous coin. That may be so. And they should focus on anonymity since that is where they are already strong and perfect that as their highest priority first (because they already made that their core focus and rewriting a code base is generally considered a very chaos inducing and dumb decision).
then the only opportunity to make a profit is either adding services and products to the ecosystem or participating in the ramp up of the value via the adoption of (demand for) the asset.
Okay, this is exactly the Monero model then.
Well you must mean adding services or products to the ecosystem, because the ramp up in the price hasn't happened as it did for other altcoins. And due to the "fair distribution" it should not happen ever. Monero can only appreciate by significant adoption that is not driven by speculative fever. Thus they will have to do some serious marketing into new demand for crypto. Or anonymity will have to naturally gain significant new adoption. But generally I think people adopt crypto, before adopting anonymity. Anonymity takes a while to learn about. Users are much more likely to look at other general crypto features first as being most important when they first come to crypto.
How to drive demand and network effects for new adoption is one of the key challenges of crypto. I have my plans and ideas about how to do this. I don't think such a viable plan and action will come from group action. It requires a creative force and leadership to push it in a certain direction. If I had to explain by committee my ideas, I'd spend more time jawboning thus removing the time to actually implement. And then one of the people in the discussion would go tell some others who would steal the ideas and launch a coin before I ever was able to. Open source as a model for profit driven innovation doesn't seem always to be well matched. Open source is for the finished product and the decentralized community that results from finishing the programming and releasing the protocol.
Also even if one registers the securities (as Ethereum may or may not have done, I didn't check)
Ethereum did not register any securities afaik. They are relying on the positioning of their presale being a product (access token to the network). May or may not work. May work in practice even if it is technically incorrect. The real world is not a law school classroom.
I hear there will be lawsuits. The USA security law seems to be quite clear. When you sell a share in something where you have an ongoing controlling interest which the purchasers of the share depend on for the value of the share, then you have sold investment securities.
Work in practice requires perhaps that either they've paid off someone at the SEC which may be the case since I noticed that Vitalik received a $100,000 grant from Peter Thiel, and because none of the investors bring a lawsuit or complain to the authorities. The SEC does not bring cases against their own (e.g. Peter Thiel).
another interesting thing is that if BBR's dev is no longer working on the coin, then even though he is receiving a revenue stream, then he is not really a controlling entity. Hmmm. That is another funding model in the sense that although the world can eventually remove that parasitic fee, if it is insignificant enough to motivate others to do so and for as long as the tech in that coin is more compelling than what the world has created otherwise, then that parasitic fee can sustain and if the dev is not working on that fork any more (after the initial crowdfund and delivery of debugged product), then there is an argument that he was never a controlling entity and only selling a product in exchange for an income and feature in the product.
Yup.
Yes but as I argued at the start of this reply, I am wondering if the level of income that can come from that is worth it. You wouldn't have significant transaction fees in low adoption. You'd need to be taking it from debasement so then it is basically equivalent to the level of premine for a static money supply. So if 1% of the money supply of a low adoption coin is worth it. Seems like it is just better to sell some coins in a crowdfund. Gimicks don't really payoff. Either you go for making your coin big and show the world you intend to, or you do some gimick that will show the world you are preventing it from becoming big. And given my interpretation of securities law risks, being an ongoing lead developer paid from some revenue stream taken from the coin, appears too close to being a controlling entity unless you actually stop doing any actions to maintain control (i.e. don't let all commitments and upgrades come through you only as the master and don't coordinate with others that do as if you are working together as a unified controlling entity). Even then given the ongoing revenue stream, it is probably necessary to do nothing at all on the coin, because it can be perceived that the exclusive control over the revenue stream is a factor which would cause the community to see you as the controlling entity. It is expectation of investors that matters in securities law. Where they expecting you to control the outcome of the development and thus performance of the investment.
The concept of a lead developer should be for producing the initial launched code base (debugged). Ongoing the lead developer should be a spiritual leader concept where his repository is widely respected, but not where every thing is controlled through him. Decentralized version control. Decentralized choices for the current code employed by nodes of the coin. The lead developer can lead quite effectively without retaining absolute control. Natural born leaders such as Linus Torvalds are respected because they are really good at what and how they do it. Being very intelligent is one important aspect, but there are other qualities that make a great leader. And note Linus is very frank and does piss people off. But he is usually correct.
all those were innovative at least is some facet (e.g. marketing for Dogecoin, and Scrypt hash mining for Litecoin)
No Litecoin was a clone of Tenebrix without the premine, identical to how Monero cloned BCN without the premine. Litecoin had zero to do with the innovation of using Scrypt for mining (limited though that may be). It was 100% a "fair distribution" play (which worked!).
My point is that Litecoin positioned itself with Scrypt so it was ready to receive the GPUs from Bitcoin when ASICs arrived. They probably didn't plan that, just got lucky. But they did choose the name Litecoin and market it as the silver is to gold concept. Are you sure it was "fairly distributed"? I've head of various things that refute that, such as those who got a lot of cheap coins when they were the first to port GPU mining to Scrypt. What worked apparently was the marketing, the timing, and the cheap coins motivating some to pump it. The innovation wasn't Scrypt alone, but in combination with the marketing and the luck on attaining "unfair distribution". Markets don't appear to work properly when the powerlaw distribution of wealth is eradicated with a fair distribution. Fair distribution is communism. It doesn't reward anyone for being first or producing more creativity. It destroys the value of production.
Open source is a tool, not a religion. Those who make "fairness" a religion will suffer I bet. Open source isn't really about fairness and transparency of all things. It is about sharing that which there is the predominant economic incentive to share. But not all things should be shared at all times. Should I share my house with everyone and leave my door open to all. Should every idea be shared, or is it better to go develop the idea and then release it in terms of those who have the vision to invest earliest. Wealth is unequally distributed so that those with the best ability of discerning and implementing improvements are entrusted with the most capital to do so (wealth migrates to those who are serially successful at doing so). Inequality is necessary in order to lift the prosperity of those even at the bottom of the wealth curve.
I know you know all those points of view. I am just stating for the readers and so you know I know also. And to see how you might relate your thoughts to this.
Monero had a very fast mining curve, so those who mined at the very start would have gotten more coins
Not really that fast (certainly compared to fast mine coins like ducknote, quark, etc.). Mining the very first day was only a little over 2x the coins as now. This is basically the same as BTC or LTC, although those took 4 years to get to halving, Monero took 18 months. I don't think "very fast" is really accurate (obviously subjective).
Okay then that further supports the argument that Monero's distribution is too fair.
It appears the only way to have gotten rich speculating in Monero thus far was to have mined it very, very early
There is NO WAY to have gotten rich speculating in Monero so far (other than
possibly active trading).
So there was never a point where the difficulty was low, not even the first day of mining?
So that explains it, no one got cheap coins.
The whole damn coin is only worth a few million. How much could any one person have made on it. If you mined 100% of the outstanding coins not the first day (literally impossible) for a cost of $0 (also impossible) you would have made a few million now in paper profit which you wouldn't be able to cash out due to liquidity.
Even a $100,000 cash out if I had mined it for $1,000 in rented hardware would qualify as "rich" for me at this point in my life, lol.
If anyone gets rich on Monero it will be in the future when there are large gains, which have not happened yet for anyone. You can still buy now for a price of approximately zero, help to construct a system that succeeds on a much larger scale and make an enormous profit!
Okay so this explains why so many Monero folks suggest this to me. Btw, I have never looked at $4 million market cap as the right price to enter a coin. As a lead developer I want to enter at $100,000 market cap. The earlier investors should enter at < $1 million market cap.
Because unless you challenge Bitcoin or expand the crypto userbase, then the realistic upside for any altcoin right now is in the range of $10 - $100 million market cap. If you happen to create a Bitcoin killer or a product that causes new adoption outside of Bitcoin, then we can start talking $billion market cap potential.
I understand there is great hope that crypto adoption will spread in general, but it is also quite possible that by the time that happens some new development will have changed the landscape. To look too far into the long-term when dealing with technology that is unfinished and in great flux is very, very risky investment. So no, I am not very motivated by a $4 million market cap, lead by a group that thinks the way that they do about the way to organize development, marketing, and distribution. I would be fighting with a core culture that is different than my philosophy of venture capital formation.
This is exactly what most of the people who have made a lot of money on Bitcoin did. (I'm not suggesting you do this, and I agree with your later comments about your personal style of working alone. I'm actually impressed you are self-aware, grounded and realistic enough to recognize that. I was just pointing out that it is a realistic possibility.)
Thank you. Yeah I don't want to force another group to change their culture to match mine. I understand that if I become a Monero developer, then I must change. Besides they really don't need me, they have enough really smart people contributing (smarter than me in their fields of focus, e.g. Shen-Noether is more knowledgeable about wide ranging cryptography and algebraic algebra than myself). And I could change if that was my only option to survive. I am capable of subjugating myself. But I don't think it is wise for me to do so because there is still so much opportunity to create in this crypto space. Btw, there is a slight cultural difference between you and I which is what makes me apprehensive about whether we are fit to co-develop a project. I wanted to protect you from my idiosyncrasies. Skills wise we appear to be really well match in that we are each strong in the area where the other may be slightly weaker.
My main mitigating issue is I stopped being self-funded this year and my health issue drained me over the past 3 years. So I became sort of discombobulated (as well as in foggy brain for example in September) and fretting over what to do. But I've had reasonably solid health since I started the antibiotics + NAC. And even more stable thus far since I added the alpha lipoic acid, and restarted my 20,000 IU daily vitD3 and daily coenyzmated B-complex. But in these 16 days of reasonably good concentration (and no exercise since that horrible relapse), I've had 3 days where I had mild relapse and one of those days I had a horrible relapse (6 days into the antibiotics). So I can't tell yet if I am finding a cure. Exercise seems to trigger relapse but if I don't exercise eventually I get worse (or that was my experience in the past but now I am on a new therapy). And I need to review information others have given me. And maybe lose more time searching for diagnostic tests. Damn this health really fucked me up from what I wanted to do in crypto. But maybe now finally I have it under control. We will see over the coming week and weeks.
Compare to Dash (DarkCoin's) rise from near $1 million to $53 million marketcap ... Why?
othe explained this pretty pretty well but I will expand that when you have a coin with a very small float (because the insiders instamined it and didn't dump into the pump, at least not right away) then it becomes highly volatile and people come in to play zero sum trading games. The end result of that is a few people with all the profits and most of the rest of the community either nonexistent or so far underwater that they give up and move on. It is not a healthy way to build anything, except profits for a few rich and talented traders. Good for them.
I am not saying I like the greater fool theory of investing. I am saying that apparently nature does and
a theory is that anyone who tries to do otherwise may under perform.
If you want to produce a product or service and build long-term value, then don't go public. Just sell your products and services at a profit and serve your customers. But that won't apply here, because crypto-currency is inherently a public token system.
Thus I assert Monero is trying to apply an ethics which is unnatural in the space in which they are applying it.
As the lead developer, I shouldn't concern myself with trying to void nature, and instead should make sure that my innovations and creations are widely exposed to the market. The market price can do what ever it is going to do, and the usership due to the value of the creations can continue on. Speculative traders provide a service to the market by promoting the creations far and wide in exchange for their profits. This is symbiosis at play.
If you feel you are good at playing the speculative trading game, you should stop messing around with developing coins and just trade. The achievable ROI if you are skilled is extremely high and the your money problems will be over and you can do what you want with the rest of your life, including developing revolutionary technologies. If you don't feel you are good at playing the speculative trading game, you should ignore these market dynamics and stop trying to chase a pump because you will just lose money to the better traders when you try to do it.
Speculative traders are opportunists. They spend their time with their eyes and ears open waiting to leverage some lead developer who is good at creating. If lead developers spent all their time doing that, then they wouldn't be good at creating. Thus the division-of-labor applies. The two can come together to provide the symbiosis so that the developer is financially motivated as well as creatively motivated.
If a developer has earned a lot of capital and wants to change vocations to become eyes and ears, the problem is (as was my case when I had 18,000 oz of silver in 2007 at the $21 price) that we are not naturally attuned to be speculators. After 2002 when I was a millionaire (inflation-adjusted), I was always off doing some creating (all nighters coding, researching tech, learning Haskell, etc) when I should have been 100% focused on my investments, thus I ended up losing all my wealth due to be unprepared. The typical absent minded scientist that is too busy to even take a shower or care that the socks he grabbed are two unmatched colors. I predicted the rise from $25 to $48 of silver back in
a published article on marketoracle in 2010, but when the time came to sell at $48, I called my broker in Philippines and he said he can't sell there are no buyers. I was in physical and I should have been in paper silver! Ideological shit trapped me! I made so many errors like that. Then got sick at the very moment that Bitcoin was developing (2012). I have learned my lesson about focusing on core talent, interest, and vocation.
then your coin is going to suffer from a boom and bust
Let me make an interesting observation. There has been little in the way of boom and bust in Monero. Yes there was a small pump or two but if you look at the market cap chart, it is still in the same range it has always been (few million). This is VERY unusual.
Indeed. That was the observation I was making and leading me to propose this theory about required symbiosis with speculators. You can argue it as a positive for Monero, but I positing
a theory that is a negative.
Most other coins (including all the ones you mention as your highly pumped examples) are WAY below their historical range.
But of the ones that had any semblance of unique and worthwhile features, they remained in the Top 10 once they got there. The core usership was grown.
Monero has suffered a bit from weak price action as more coins have been distributed, but not so much as to destroy the market cap. There are some people -- not even early adopters -- who are net profitable in Monero now (who bought last year in the 0.001 to 0.0015 range). Most of the rest are slightly down (bought between 0.002 and 0.004) but not so far down as to throw in the towel. This is basically healthy, especially given the state of the overall market. Huge pumps and dumps are not.
Speculator performance != user performance. Users of the coin buy to use the product not for appreciation.
Some have argued that huge volatility is a negative for adoption for currency use case. Well I disagree. Volatility is necessary for the speculation case. And for the main use case the crypto can beat fiat and credit cards which is microtransactions, then I argue volatility will be mostly irrelevant. I will have to show in the future why. Not now.
What I would propose is to create new coin with the killer feature that challenges Bitcoin specifically block chain scaling
1. That is sort of already "hot" feature being claimed by Bitshares, Dash, BTC's lightning network, and maybe others. If you want to be "first" you better hurry up and you are probably too late.
May be too late. Seemed I looked at the tech for those three and they all are lacking in some significant way. I will look again and comment later.
2. Okay, but do it because you think it will succeed, not because some whale traders will (may) come in and rape your community, and maybe you can dump a small amount of your coins to them at a profit. You won't be able to dump a lot unless you can outtrade them, and you can't (probably).
I basically take the attitude that I should be invested in my own work. And that speculators are going to do what they are going to do. And that I should be smart about when I take some partial profits and when I reinvest in my own work, holding a core position long-term. One of the key things is never again will I hold the majority of my investments in something I can't trade with my finger at a moment's notice. Thus physical gold is out of the question, except as a long-term holding. Also remember as a lead developer I hold the trading weapon of when to announce new developments and release them.
I think the developer should be excel at his role and responsibilities and the tools which he is most expert at deploying. He should not try to control what is not his role, rather roll with it deploying his natural tools and role.
May explain also why PoS coins have had ramps?
Somewhat. As I said the whale traders look for opportunities where there is way to get in at a low price, a small (remaining) float, and tight control (if not by them then by others who they believe they can front run on the back end of the pump) over remaining supply. Then they make a play. If they're good at what they do (and the ones still doing it certainly are), then they can be successful. The starting conditions have to be there.
Rather than see them as the enemy, one could look at them as natural; and my attitude is for as long as you don't actively collude (e.g. discuss and coordinate a market manipulation) in a way that makes you culpable under the law. A small float early on is a good thing and then the float widens over time. Speculator purchasing low, reducing the float, then sitting on the ask to drive speculative fever is free market activity and performing a service to the market by drawing many others interest and then basically turning them into long-term shrills for the coin because they are underwater. Some boom and busts during this process seems to be natural and beneficial to growing the userbase and adoption as well as funding the development.
Cryptonote does wipe ass on one aspect of anonymity, but anonymity is more of an all or nothing proposition
No it isn't. It is only an all or nothing proposition if you want to be anonymous from the NSA (and I respect your goal of doing that certainly). As you move down the hierarchy of observer capabilities, the extent to which imperfect solutions become useful increases. (I think even against the NSA this may be true because they won't devote infinite resources to every single potential target.)
Right. But sell that to a market. I don't trust anonymity because Tor and I2P are not sufficient. Thus I don't assume I am truly anonymous. One of the reasons I did this recent expose in this thread about the securities law research I did recently, is because I realized I couldn't really be anonymous. And the desire to be anonymous so I wouldn't be culpable to securities law is why I had long-stated I wouldn't announce a coin in my name. But after much reflection (and now desperation) I realized that to be legal I really need to avoid a controlling entity on the coin entirely. And I couldn't be anonymous to the government. And that I wouldn't worry about the government attacking me over anonymity, because I wouldn't even be the one pitching that feature. I would focus more on scaling and anonymity could be implemented as a plugin.
Right now there is an entire industry being developed to analyze the explicitly public Bitcoin blockchain and use it for commercial (and probably what I will call "lightweight intelligence" meaning low level law enforcement, private investigators, insurance industry, competitive, etc.) purposes quite similar in overall scope to the currently-pervasive web tracking. That is something that is certainly addressed (if imperfectly at the moment) by Monero's obscured blockchain even if you do little to nothing about network-level monitoring, and certainly even if you don't become secure against pervasive network-level monitoring.
Well but the anonymity has to be combined with some useful features to make it even worthwhile to be using crypto currency any way. I don't think deciding to put all a companies financial trades on Monero is very realistic absent some incentives other than just anonymity on a block chain. Many businesses aren't even using a block chain so they don't need anonymity on a block chain. First you have to get them interested in using block chains, and so the first step is they will be looking for features to motivate block chain use. Later they may get around to wanting anonymity, but by that time others will have added anonymity to those other products that provide more features compelling businesses to adopt block chain.
I think I remember I had thought of a way to do rings with balances.
There is a paper addressing balance ledgers with homomorphic encryption. I don't remember what qualified reviewers said about it when it was released.
For me even using masternodes to limit supply is a clever innovation. You are thinking idealistically that the goal is to produce technology. But technology is useless if it doesn't produce market results.
Short term volatility that attracts whale groups and gives your the wider community whiplash is not positive "market results" in my opinion. If you want
long term market results then these supply manipulations are irrelevant or harmful.
I don't know if Evan consciously designed masternodes to limit float. He I think was just trying to find a way to solve the jamming problem of CoinJoin that I was pointing out to him. Serendipity of nature. Perhaps Monero is too anal? (trying too hard to control ideologically) I have always felt something culturally alienated from Monero. I think it is something like this desire to be holier than thou. I have appreciated though all the tech interaction, the 10
BTC and all that, so please don't take my words as one-sided. Just throwing out there
other ways of theorizing about it. I am not sure.
think you can effectively pump some copycoin with nothing to get investors excited about other than the attempted pump?
This is totally wrong. Those coins get pumped all the time, even ignoring the fact that LTC and DOGE were literally copy coins. I mean smaller more obscure and more worthless ones. That is the bread and butter for pump groups. Sure there is always some spin about how the coin is going to succeed to help drive the pump (pull in ouside money). That is part of the game. But it doesn't take much, and creative pumpers are very good at making much out of little (especially to an audience of suckers without good skills to evaluate the claims).
What I was thinking was you can't pump some featureless copycoin to the Top 10 and have it remain there. Sorry sometimes my typing fingers are struggling to keep up with my mind. Takes so long to write these long discussions.
As I have always said, the "fair distribution" was the initial death blow to Monero. I have said that so many times. There is no incentive to create any momentum, neither in capital structure nor in development
The pumps you cite don't really create momentum at all. Once the pump is over there is less momentum than ever. LTC is slowly dying. DOGE may or may not be. Both certainly lack what you call "momentum" today, a year or two after their big pumps.
That is because they stopped adding features. Dash and Bitshares haven't stopped. And none of those coins had really Bitcoin killer features. Bitshares is still trying to. I need to go study again their Bitshares 2.0.
DASH may or may not be (at least they seem to be continuing development). If anything Monero has (or at least may have -- time will tell) more "momentum" than any of these coins. Think of the momentum of freight train compared to a hot rod or a motorcycle.
Monero certainly has more intellectual developers contributing. And this attracts a certain breed of community that are strongly in belief that if you get a bunch intellectual guys contributing on open source, then you have a powerful freight train.
Again I am not sure. I can see your cryptographer matched my best effort on the convergence of rings and homomorphic value.
Competing is exciting. I get to play sport again but on the programming field. Whether the communities see any released competition from me or not is totally dependent on my health.
When Linus started, he didn't port FreeBSD or other Unix OSes
He started with something that had some good ideas but was extremely rough, unfinished, and largely unusable. Very similar to Monero in fact.
But the problem is that for Monero to implement something Bitshares DPOS they would have to complete restructure their block chain code and probably their database code, etc.. Major rewrites of large code bases become progressively unlikely or unwise. The larger the code base becomes, the more unlikely to rewrite it.
You and I know that but many readers may not.
There is no way to really force an upgrade on an established decentralized community
Now you get it (I think).
Yet othe says Monero forces a hard fork every 6 months.
Btw I was very, very sleepy when we were discussing burned upgrades.
Are we closer to agreement now?
Yup.
So what is unsettled from my view is whether a methodical model such as Monero is superior to a model that raises a lot of capital
Superior? Who knows. Only way to find out is to continue to try. You point out a lot of problems with these "raise a lot of capital" models, legal ones included. I have pointed out others. So maybe Monero's model actually sucks, but sucks less. Or maybe it sucks more. Who can say.
Agreed only theories and the few anecdotal cases we have as evidence thus far.
And I am not 100% sure that Monero is doing what they need to do to be immune from USA securities law. Appears there is some things they are going which appear to be like an organized controlling entity. Of course much less likely culpability than what Evan or Ethereum have done.
Speculative investing is not holding a gun to anyone's head. Everyone is free to make their own decisions.
On this I agree with you, and it is a somewhat unpopular view among "responsible" coin developers. Investors are adults and if they want to trade badly and lose their money, that's their problem. But I also don't think that setting up a situation for whale groups to come in and rape the less-skilled traders in your community (which is always going to be most of it given the distribution of trading skills) in order to leave and take the BTC and/or fiat with them is good for a coin long term either. I wouldn't say immoral, just strategically ineffective. But who knows if one of these massively pumped coins ends up succeeding in a major way (thus far none has), I will be proven incorrect.
I am not sure either. See my argument that those underwater become promoters for the coin instead of throwing in the towel. especially if there is ongoing hope from new developments and a strong tech from the outset.
if a coin is undergoing hard forks then it really isn't decentralized in the purest/strictest sense
That's mostly true. No one claims otherwise. Still you can't actually FORCE people to adopt a hard fork. They could reject it and stick with the old protocol (even if that requires modifying the open source on their own).
Same argument could have been made against my burnable code coins. But in reality the investors don't control the mining nodes, so thus I think your response is incorrect.
Monero work is fit for those coders who have made already a lot of money and want to make an ideological contribution to crypto. Or who are young and live for example in Ukraine or Russia
Or people who have another financial motive for doing it. For example, starting or investing in ecosystem businesses. Raymond called that "Indirect Sale-Value Models". Others have written the same thing about open source (I don't remember if earlier or not, so I'm trying to avoid giving incorrect credit).
Agreed. I also have that motivation (e.g. the dating site I created but needed permission-less micropayments so I shut it down). But it is too indirect and removed from my current financial stress.
Except one problem. Bitcoin's block size can't scale to large data [regarding factom]
Factom doesn't store large data on the blockchain. It stores only a hash and then stores its data elsewhere, so in a sense it could be viewed as a sort of "solution" to the block chain size, not a victim of it.
Then it isn't really decentralized. Do it isn't a solution to decentralized block chain scaling.
Finally some unsolicited advice.
Work on something outside of crypto and get paid for it. The money is way better and easier. Someone with your intelligence and skill set can be paid good money for all sorts of things. Then having the financial security you need you can focus on building crypto, either part time or after your are done with the other work.
Trying to: a) get rich from crypto, b) get enough low-risk income to support yourself and resolve financial problems from crypto, and c) ESPECIALLY doing both at the same time, is like getting blood out of a stone right now. Go where the money is.
And d) trying to do it with past 3 years history of chronic fatigue syndrome and pain/headaches that limit production.
But the problem is #d also may limit what I can get hired to do outside of crypto as well. Really I have to solve my health issue or better prepare to live in the jungle eating grass.
As for doing a job outside of crypto first, as you said it is do or die time on block scaling. And I have invested a lot to come up to speed on crypto and designs. It is do or die time. The work outside of crypto will still be there.
Poll
