I am still puzzled by the 24 seconds (2 blocks) of Brave's Basic Attention Token (BAT) crowdsale.
I have never bought through an ICO but definitely couldn't participate as many others. I personally think the Brave team is tackling an issue that needs immediate attention/implementation:
Nuking annoying ads, nuking middlemen and making it easy for users to directly pay publishers for content they like.
The irony is that Ethereum and the coins on top of it, are supposed to be "distributed". Then how come we get this scenario:
Source: Etherscan
one address buying 24.42% of the BATs.
Greed will ruin crypto. For instance if Satoshi kept all the Bitcoins for his/her-self, bitcoin wouldn't be worth a dime. We've been promised decentralization through participation, fun, experiments, innovations. Let's keep it that way.
There is an issue on the Ethereum EIPS repos to make write much fairer contracts. This should be a priority.
For instance, I waded through a bunch of bitcoin articles but nothing is close as to the first time you buy something with bitcoin. In the back of my mind, I was like holy-shit, this thing actually works. Then realized that this thing has never been shutdown and operates 24/7 and no holidays, let's appreciate how robust it is (I mean it was bootstrapped).
The counter intuitive thing with bitcoin is that sharing some bits of it to total newcomers just grow the ecosystem much more, everyone benefits. Quoting Metcalf’s law, the value of the network is proportional to the square number of users in it. Doing anything (power grabs, greed) just discourage both individuals, small players and newcomers.
i.e: Keeping all coins to yourself and not sharing with anyone else may render them worthless in the long term.
The total supply will never be more than 21 million bitcoins and we (human beings) are more than 7 billion. If you own a single bitcoin right now consider yourself lucky and privileged. If you own more use it, buy stuff, help others get their “ahah” moments.
Greed can just ruin everything.
If we have figured out how to deal with internet traffic congestion with packet routing we can surely write contracts to rate-limit the people/entities driven by uncontrolled greed. They are toxic to any crypto ecosystem.
People looking for quick money schemes with no appreciation to the financial innovations, are on this bucket too.
On the positive side though, the BAT contract was audited by Open Zeppelin by Manuel Araoz. I think these are extremely valuable because most users won't carefully read and figure out critical bugs (like malfunctions contracts that will burn users coins a.k.a. hard earned money).
Though it would be great if they included another team for a macro analysis like what could potentially happen if some entities acted in hostile manners (toxic behaviors).
I am quiet surprised that Vitalik, Vlad, or the Ethereum crew didn't press on coming up with a concrete plan. My main suspicion is that a Hedge fund or a bunch of them were behind this. The only one I have heard about is Polychain Capital.
Ultimately, a hedge fund is totally a bad idea. Getting a bunch of money from rich dudes and gals, who won't care about how the financial innovations and "ahah" moments but only the profits will only stifle innovations or rig it in vicious ways.
I'm all for ICOs, they are great. In a way that's crowdfunding on steroids, cutting out the middlemen (Kickstarter / Indiegogo, ...) and giving the ability with anyone with a digital wallet to participate.
We will make mistake writing faulty contracts and hopefully we will learn from our mistakes. But we know in the back of our heads:
Greedy big players will just discourage newcomers at the very least and spoil everything.
Takeaways:
- Hedge Funds == bad in crypto land.
- We need to incorporate rate-limiting against hostile/greedy buying in the ERC20 token standard.
Good reads: