Month: July 2016
Slockit Enables Scamming
Wednesday July 27, 2016
A scam is a scam by any other name, and unfortunately the Ethereum Central Bank fully endorses and runs on scams to keep ether huffers addicted. The company behind The DAO fiasco, Slockit, is one of core hype units for the Ethereum bubble. Their promise of their so-called “Slock” has investors drooling for no reason other than use of the word “blockchain” in the description. The DAO fiasco proves Slockit is ignorant of scammers to the point of enablement.
Usually when one doesn’t acknowledge the existence of scammers in relation to a business model, the business itself usually unfolds into a scam. The government’s solution to scammers is retroactive coercive force – putting one in prison for fraud after the fact. Bitcoin facilitates a mindset where one honors contracts because it’s the right thing to do, while acknowledging the existence of, and identifying scammers without the use of coercive force. As with children and their parents, trust must be earned. When one knows what a Web of Trust is and how it works, scammers are caught in a self-imposed filter, while building relationships with trustworthy peers over extended periods of time – business as usual. Read more…
A Steeming Bubble
Thursday July 21, 2016
In my mass adoption as a Ponzi article I noted that a market requires whales in order to have liquidity at increasing prices. With shallow order depth, an exiting whale will crash the market, it’s only a matter of time. After Steemit made Qntra headlines I did some research and posted a comment indicating the sheer lack of liquidity for such a high price.
The next day, STEEM was listed on Poloniex, so I posted on Steemit-itself warning users not to irrationally trade; 24 hours later, only 3 users bothered to comment, the rest likely deafened their ears to resist acknowledging reality. Read more…
Closing the Loop
Sunday July 3, 2016
Peer to peer markets have quickly dried up as Bitcoin has grown in value and market cap. It’s difficult to make OTC trades with bitcoin directly between peers to receive goods and services. Proponents of a block size limit increase always fail to propose a solution to establishing peer to peer trade routes. The consumer has come to expect Amazon.com as the standard user experience for online shopping, thus this same consumer wants an identical experience while substituting credit cards for Bitcoin.
The irony behind this consumer’s mass adoption mentality is the frequent citation of the Bitcoin whitepaper’s abstract: “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.” Mass adoption consumers tend to overly rely on centralized solutions such as Amazon, instead of directly trading with peers. They focus on strictly the idea of electronic cash, while ignoring the idea of peer to peer trading completely. Luckily due to consumers revolting, the anonymous enterprising entrepreneur has more opportunity than ever to establish profitable trade routes that have been completely untapped in the peer to peer network.
Read more…
Consumers Revolt
Saturday July 2, 2016
Autumn of last year I wrote an article about consumers beginning to revolt. Interestingly, the prediction the article was constructed around is slowly playing out. Companies like Shapeshift and Poloniex sound exactly like this prediction:
…one of them is that consumers revolt, entrepreneurs intervene, before the end of 2015 there’s about a thousand to a million different Bitcoin forks, each with its ten million-ish monetary base worth about a dollar, on global average. The size of the inter-Bitcoins market, the complexity and confusion ensuing makes pretty much everything unmanageable for the “ordinary person”. Hedge funds and banks (the ones a little ahead of using Excel) that trade in this murky complexity make a killing and become the principal driver of economic growth worldwide