When Whaleshares started up many hated it, many were skeptical, many called it a steemit clone. But im someone that likes giving projects the benefit of the doubt. I gave it a shot and for a while things were going ok. There were promises of massive development, of some kind of secret update that would change everything (still dont know what that is) so i stuck around.
I did my best to talk positive about Whaleshares and to be part of the community and for most part it was enjoyable. I met some great people and some not so great ones but overall the positive camp was much bigger.
Whaleshares in a couple months will be 1 year old and looking back i cant say i see them ever achieving much. There was a lot of promise, there were passionate people involved, there was a solid ground to build upon and a solid idea...
But unfortunately passionate people and solid ideas does not necessarily translate into success.
THE PROBLEMS:
Lets be honest here. When Whaleshares came to be, it came to be from a few disgruntled individuals that thought they could create a better Steemit. A fairer community with better token distribution and rewards for the best contributors. They thought they would eliminate bots and vote buying..
They were wrong.
They failed so badly that they didnt achieve any of that. Vote buying turned into whaletoken purchases on Bitshares and the fairer token distribution went down the toilet with "curation projects" like V12 lead by Scipio that would basically vote up a post with a small percentage and then upvote the comment on the post in question of the V12 account saying: "You got curated!" (Im paraphrasing) with a full vote.
Then you had guys like Haejin or Vladimir self voting just like on Steemit and nothing was being done about it. Now i dont know if they are still on Whaleshares. I dont care to look but a month ago when i last dropped by that was the case.
The problem with some Whaletokens (Not all allow trading) is that the purchase of a vote would get you around 2 times more WLS then if you purchased WLS directly. This ofc acted as a downward pressure on the price.
What some people did, and what i did for a time is simply sell the WLS i get from powering down, purchase the vote and then again just sell the WLS.
Bam! You just made a 200% return on your purchase and that just compounded over time. All you need to do is repeat this over and over. There was no point in buying WLS. Only selling it.
So those are 2 things..
The biggest issue though, i will talk about next is the behavior of the people heading the project. Again, i have to repeat, the devs in charge are really nice people and i cant say a single bad thing about them in terms of their actions towards me nor have i ever seen them act unfairly to anyone.
But.... i have to touch up on themost important thing which is why im basically done with Whaleshares for now...
THE UNREASONABLE FEAR OF THE MARKET:
I have discussed this issue with the devs in the Whaleshares chat, DMs and on chain on a number of occasions and the responses i got were extremely discouraging and showed me a complete lack of understanding of how the crypto market works along with an irrational fear of leaving their small corner of Bitshares.
I will not name names but you can always find the conversations in the Whaleshares discord chat or on chain if youre interested.
I have talked to a number of people and the strange thread of thought they had is the following:
If WLS gets listed that will lead to whales taking control of Whaleshares and then they can dump WLS and that will destroy the price.
The feeling i got from this is that they want to live in a bubble hidden from the world. They fear they will lose control if investments come in.
That was very strange to see because the price has already tanked by 99.6% in 10 months. (now at $0.003 from a high of $0.75). The smaller your market cap is, the easier it is for anyone to manipulate the market. Someone with a few thousand dollars could do it. Without money coming in all you have is WLS going out, votes being purchased and the price tanking even more.
It seems to me that the unreasonable fear of the market, the fear that Whaleshares will end up like Steemit (in their minds) is the downfall of Whaleshares and WLS.
It is a sorry thing to see from a project that had potential. Sorry even more so because those are some good people there that put in work and dedication to create something "better". Unfortunately their mindsets are not well suited for success in the world we call crypto.
Just a few thoughts and ill see you guys later.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://scrips.io/blog/lordbutterfly/the-sorry-state-of-whaleshares/