I Read the Whitepaper So You Don’t Have to. You’re Welcome.
I’ve gotten a lot of flack for this title. Before shitposting and claiming its clickbait or “FUD” read the article, thanks.
Before diving in I’d like to make very clear the Odyssey team is clearly engaging in market manipulation. There are two sides to this. One side being who cares, its an unregulated market AKA its all manipulated, just depends how heavily. Flip side being they have taken price manipulation to the next level using social media. I wrote about how the LUX and OCN teams manipulate markets weeks ago, and just recently OCN dumped 40% pre-airdrop announcement after weeks of heavy shilling.
OK. brushes sweat off forehead Lets dive into it.
OCN Mission Statement
“The Future of Decentralized Sharing Economy The Foundation of Global Peer to Peer Ecosystem” ¹
OCN Whitepaper, No Page Numbers… Did you get an understanding of OCN from their mission statement? Probably not. Neither did I.
Summary:
- oBike: I used Citi Bike in New York City to commute to work. I have traveled and used bike share programs in Israel (Tel Aviv), Ukraine (Lviv), Romania (Bucharest) Washington D.C, Raleigh N.C, and many other U.S cities and towns. I will say use of a cryptocurrency in this situation would be quite useful as foreign visitors can easily pay without hassle. However, a small highly volatile difficult to access no fiat gateway coin like OCN is a terrible solution, whereas Bitcoin or Ethereum would be much simpler for the general public.
- The clearest parts of the whitepaper are the 4 pages of legal disclaimers in the beginning and various legal statements sprinkled throughout.
- The Odyssey whitepaper is heavily lacking in substance. Full of generic and vague blockchain jargon, it is difficult to understand what OCN actually is trying to accomplish. A self-defined “Sharing economy” with no further explanation. Because of this, its near impossible to read and understand the whitepaper. I have no idea what the real goal, problems being solved, and use case of Odyssey is. I have no clue what “sharing economy” means. Odyssey has an equal chance of being a decentralized dildo sharing economy as it has being a decentralized pillowcase economy.
- Any platform that utilizes cryptocurrency must address volatility. Not doing so ignores a fundamental problem that will prevent any crypto-based platform from being successful. You cannot have a shared, decentralized economy with a highly volatile token as its main currency.
- Given privacy is such an important aspect of transactions its surprising OCN is not privacy oriented, even though it plans to be used as the cornerstone of a “decentralized sharing economy”.
- All profits generated go to “service providers”. Without fees of any kind I have no idea how Odyssey will sustain its platform. Service providers are undefined.
- The voting system is abhorrent. Votes are weighted on credit, which is established over years on the platform, and holding of OCN. Larger the holding, more voting power. This clearly rewards the richest users. To top this off, voting is actually entirely meaningless as the Board of Directors has absolute control and is under no obligation or requirement to follow through with the community votes.
- Their advertising plan is ass backwards, for lack of a better term. After the platform has an established user base, only then will they begin to advertise.
- Suggests rating and review systems on current platforms (5 stars, thumbs up) are biased as the voting rules are centrally developed and votes can be manipulated to benefit said platform.
While OCN specifically lists this as a current detriment, depending on how you view it, their solution either changes nothing, or makes the current system worse.
Using Steem as an example, using upvotes as a payment system leads to a glut of terrible content and upvote bots. How Odyssey will identify “improper interactions” is not elaborated on. Considering this was a specific critique of the current system, their solution is surprisingly terrible and extremely vague. They attempted to solve this problem with this solution:
This is not a solution, its a process with no purpose. What happens during the 7 day freeze? How is Odyssey able to identify click farming from genuine clicks? This is a very short paragraph considering its a massive problem.
Again, without a stable currency an economy cannot function. Services available for purchase are not elaborated on.
This is a clear catch-22. Where do the first community operators come from? The previous “Service Consumer” paragraph implies data is collected over a lifetime.
This is in direct conflict with the entire mission statement of Odyssey. If voting power is determined by OCN holdings, the richest have the most power and control. To top that off, the votes actually don’t matter as the Board of Directors has absolute power and control and can veto any votes.
Very vague, no clarifying information whatsoever. If incentives are to high OCN will begin to inflate in price.
Incentives are left undefined in this paragraph, and throughout the whitepaper. Odyssey’s peer regulated review system is in direct contradiction with the rating system, as the rating system is able to identify and remove “improper interactions”. Why this can be done with ratings but not reviews does not make much sense, especially considering how closely related the two are.
Generally advertising is done to build traffic. I’m curious as to why they are choosing to advertise once the platform has a “reasonable scale of user base and traffic”. How are advertising profits realized? By users joining the platform? How is the advertising paid for if there are no platform fees?
I Need a Coffee Break. Here’s a Summary and Laughingly Terrible Whitepaper Excerpts.
I read through the entirety of the whitepaper, and have decided to stop critiquing further passages. The actual concept of Odyssey is so vague even after reading the whitepaper I still have no idea what it does. The amazing thing is, even with an unclear purpose, its extremely clear what its doing wrong. I’ll leave you with some absolutely nutso excerpts from the whitepaper:
Closing Thoughts:
As always, DYOR. I have no doubt OCN will continue to perform fantastically price wise, and I am a large bag holder. Why? You should know this answer by now. Greater fool theory. Shill power. Don’t overthink it. Remember, tech is dead.
For Funsies, Read A Significant Bulk of the Whitepaper, Legal Disclaimers!
