There is a common investment strategy on Wall Street that says “ Invest in the company leaders, not in the company itself”. While this strategy might have been successful on a regulated market where someone can’t just walk away from a project with all their money, I would say this strategy is a terrible one to use in the crypto space.
I am not saying that good developers are not important because they absolutely are, but finding someone and making them an oracle is a terrible idea. Oracles are only people and many assume they know what they are doing, but I can tell you that many of them don’t. If a project relies on the brand of one or two people you have a problem. What if one day one of them was hit by a bus? Does that mean the entire project needs to go to a standstill?
The biggest problem with oracles in the crypto space for me is that I have seen so many people here throw away their reputation on completely stupid moves. Ill admit when I first came here with bitcoin I saw Gavin Andreesen and Roger Ver as oracles, but now I have no idea what they are thinking and disagree with a large amount of what they are saying. Gavin vouched for Craig Wright as Satoshi and Roger has made a bunch of mistakes getting himself involved with the wrong people.
I think this post is more of a warning more than anything, that if you oraclize someone eventually it will probably come back to bite you in the ass. These people are only human and they will eventually make mistakes, but I think the batman quote “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain” has a large amount of relevance here.
The problem why having oracles in crypto is so bad is mostly because people can create a project on their name and slowly exit it when they have made tons of money, or just exit their position on a dime and disappear. Both of these situations we have seen again and again. There is no penalty like there would be in mainstream investing if someone did that. There are very few ways to pull of scams like that without eventually getting caught. There are exceptions obviously but we are still in the wild west here.
When evaluating projects, look into them yourself and don’t base your investment on who runs them or on a name because the project could ultimately be crap. Before you invest do your due diligence and make sure the project is what it appears to be. Theres nothing wrong with liking certain developers and people, just don’t make them your oracle and blindly go with whatever they do because sometimes, like human beings, they are wrong.