WHY VALUES WILL (AND SHOULD) DRIVE YOUR SUPPORT OF THE NEXT HOT ICO
If you haven’t heard, ICOs (initial coin offering) are a way for projects to garnish resources from international supporters who are flush with cash.
When I say cash, I mean digital cash in the form of cryptocurrencies. Unlike most forms of money, cryptocurrencies are borderless and the vast majority are controlled by a decentralized community of users.
This distinction is an important when you consider the socioeconomic gap that is widened when a government imposes rules on investors. In the USA, for example, high risk investments are limited to folks who make $250k per year or have a net-worth of a million dollars.
ICOs come in many shapes and sizes, but the long and the short of it is, if you’ve ever participated in a Kickstarter, you have experienced the fundraising aspects of an ICO.
If you have ever invested in the stock market, you also have a taste of the experience of owning an ICO token where the monetary value is driven by the market.
ICOs often have whitepapers that often explain the problems a group plans to solve and what technology they will use to solve the expressed problem.
Once a whitepaper is published, a group will, during an ICO, exchange cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, for their project’s token.
Some tokens are designed to be used with a project, but start out as place holders until the promised tech is alive and kicking.
To dissect and see the heart of what an ICO actually is, you need to first take a high level view at who is throwing money at an ICO, examples of ICOs, and the odds of profiting from an ICO or seeing the project execute a shared vision.
The people who invest or support a project either do so out of a desire for profit or out of a value match between the supporter and the project team
New projects seek to blockchain-ize some new or pre-existing technology or concept. Here is a brief list of ICOs that exemplify this approach to innovation.
- Programmable money — Ethereum, EOS, Neo, Waves
- Rent-able Computation Power — EOS
- Rent-able Cloud Storage — StorJ
- Decentralized Internet — Maidsafe
- Digital Collectibles — Cryptokitties
- Self Sustaining Blog Ecosystem — Steemit, Yours.org
- Video Games — Huntercoin
- Decentralized Social Network — ONO
If you know of other examples of projects for these categories please add them with comments.
Some of you may be wondering how this new category of tech has blossomed and part of the answer is because of the Internet. Another more thoughtful answer is that money is power and power, like the mighty river, will find the path of least resistance.
Some of you have a strange twinkle in your eye and you may have ideas for categories of blockchain mashups that are brand new.
If you still have that twinkle in your eye, please take a selfie and make sure to have said selfie set to your cellphone background while you read these thoughts.
THE PROPHECY OF TUUR
Tuur Deemister is someone I revere, and until today, I have refrained from openly worshipping because I know he is human. (He is human, right?)
It was his video (Bitcoin prophecy) that I used to show some folks who just didn’t believe there was a use for the cryptocoin technology that I was trying to explain.
The Prophecy of Tuur is based on expectation that part of the vast amount of wealth in the world will be converted to cryptocurrencies. When this happens the value of the cryptocurrency will rise as several cryptocoins have a limited supply.
The prophecy that follows a simple progression build on the idea of 1% of various types of wealth buying up Bitcoin. This prophecy was initially uttered in 2013. The next image details chapters 1–3 of the Book of Tuur.
Apostle Tuur subsequently talks about what I consider the end times, where crazy shit is going on in the world, and Bitcoin’s price is going through the roof. These are chapters 4–6 in the Book of Tuur.
Chapter 1: Hedge funds allocate 1% to BTC
Chapter 2: Argentines change greenbacks for BTC
Chapter 3: Gold owners sell 1% for BTC
Chapter 4: Half of the shadow economy uses BTC
Chapter 5: BTC becomes the new gold
Chapter 6: BTC becomes the world’s reserve currency
Based on this prophetical timeline, we are somewhere between the third and fourth chapter where some series of events has brought the price of Bitcoin to nearly $6500. When this prophesy was released, the price of Bitcoin was $130.
I am going to repeat this again.
The Bitcoin price before The Prophecy of Tuur was $130.
Five years later Bitcoin’s price is 50 times that value.
For those who shared the vision and values of Apostle Tuur, their portfolio grew to be 50 times larger. It is hard to know who is a true disciple of Tuur, but the main question you, astute reader who has made it this far into my tome, must ask is, were the investors that saw a 50X gain in their portfolio driven by the potential for profit in their Bitcoin holdings or by the values that Bitcoin enables?
Either way, these folks had a decent amount of coin to play with. If Bitcoin enabled the quick transfer of value across the world, having $1000 puts a person in a good position to support Ethereum, a project that enabled fast smart contracts (aka programmable money), in its early days.
January 10th, 2016 was the last time ether (Ethereum’s currency) was worth less than $1. Today it has grown to just over 500 times that value.
If I had $1000 kicking around when Ethereum launched and I supported this project when it was worth less than a dollar, I would now have $500k.
As you see, if you have chosen the right project to back, the ICO or even picking up discounted coins on an exchange can be very profitable.
What do you do with this profits? Do you just let them sit in some paper wallet? Or do you toss a small portion of them at a new ICO? How do you know when you have found a good ICO?
Many Tuur disciples feared that he wouldn’t share any more prophecies, but he has spoken about ICOs.
Tuur’s council for finding a good ICO is as follows:
- The team behind the ICO must have a good track record with other successful projects under their belt.
- The whitepaper published by the team should be peer reviewed to identify any shortcomings in the tech or the logic behind a stated solution.
The brain logical side should be satisfied when you see that the developers listed on the upcoming ICO are indeed legit with a track record for successful blockchain projects.
When the tech is proved sound or shortcomings have been addressed, the next question needs to satisfy that other aspect of your personhood.
When you are seeing 50X profit that is followed by 500X profit, you begin to ask bigger questions instead of trying to chase 5000X profit.
Brock Pierce and a few others have even gone as far as to say a billionaire is someone has influenced the lives of 1 billion people.
You, at this point, start to see the world around you and notice there are major problems with equality, centralized systemic abuse of power, and people living shallow lives on social media.
The presence of this problems guarantee other humans see these issues, but you can be sure enough people deal directly or indirectly with these problems that jeopardize the present and future freedom of humanity.
Right now, a large amount of the tokens launched on Ethereum occupy the most valuable blockchain networks.
With more and more opportunities out there for those profiting off cryptocurrency projects it is so important to help new users find projects that match their values and to make sure projects misusing their supporters funds are publicly listed so the ecosystem can remain healthy for the future.
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