Are you suggesting the ICO only sold out after bitconnect closed the lending??
Let's put this one to bed once and for all... I'll come clean. Let me tell you a little story, the answer is in here.
When we first started out, we actually did have an algorithm that did make a bit of profit. We had it running for quite a while and we were making a half-decent profit. This worked pretty well, but as the markets are turning even slightly more efficient (essentially, more like the real world) we see that the profits are decreasing. I don't actually recall what our back-of-the-napkin calculations said now, but we could see that we would have to start over from scratch in around 12-24 months. That is, provided we don't get an infusion of capital to speed up the actual income.
Well, let's be honest here, finding real world investors that are willing to cough up a few million in this "shady world" is not the easiest thing. So well, you (the reader) know that there are very viable alternatives to get an infusion of cash.
So, Bitconnect was born.
There were all around good intentions, we actually *did* have an idea, an algorithm that made a difference, the people to execute, and of course, the developers. We were on to something...
But let's back up a bit, not much. You do bring up a good point...
As you correctly state,
1. many projects (ICOs) are actually requests for donations where donors are hoping to get returns by selling to others that are hoping for returns.
2. Some ICOs provide an intrinsic value in the distributed coin/token (think SelfKey)
3. Some ICOs give a dividend (sometimes by muddying the water) (think Kucoin)
4. Some ICOs are a combination of some or all of the above
The ethics of each of the project types above ... are up for discussion, but this is really not the place nor time for that. But let's say that at this point in this story, we saw ourselves as a combination of #1 and #2, or maybe, possibly, kind of #1 and #3. But you know, due to regulations in various territories we sort of, kind of, maybe ... knew that we really do not want to be #3. It's pretty much bad news.
In hindsight, how we (and many others) differ from the above project types is that we are pretty much promising extravagant quantities of profit, and actually, we were able to. This was down to our "magic" or "secret sauce" -- which we obviously could not share as that is our entire business. The kicker here is of course ... we needed capital to actually beat the curve. We had a runway of, and this is from the top of my head, 1-2 years, before our "magic" was dead.
But I digress...
Bitconnect (the idea) was already born at this point, parts of the team as well. But... How can we get profit as much as possible, as quickly as possible with as little risk as possible...
Well, I don't recall exactly when, but we're somewhere at the end of 2016 and Bitconnect (coin) the ICO was born.
The plan was essentially: get an infusion of capital and trickle down our profits to whomever believed in us. I don't know about you, but try selling an algorithm with the above statement... We needed more.
So, and this is largely a huge credit to one individual of the team, we needed to convey the message of "wow, that is fucking amazing" to a lot of people... and you know, you can try doing that. It's a lot of work, and not nearly as fast as you want. So what you want to do is "one up" that and have others do that for you. Generally this is largely a pipe dream, but I guess the timing and the message was right...
By the way, you'd be surprised how many people just tag along on a project that they have no fucking clue about. In fact, very often when I saw people posting about us I was almost certain that these people were bought, were involved or that it was one of us posting. But no, it was actual people that had no prior association with us. At all. When you see a shill or an alt, think twice. Many of them are something else, we naively ended up just calling them "fans" (okay, I lie, we did call them something else. Something similar, but not quite as nice).
I digressed again!
Back to the story, we, like many other projects, are faced with doubters and people who are accusing us of wrong-doings (well, just check the history); at this point many (perhaps all) of us actually think it's unfair. We have something that works. In the real world. It makes a good profit even when markets are going down.
Indeed, with us monetarily encouraging our (this is a bit hard to phrase with hindsight) "investors" to recruit other "investors", criticism would undoubtedly pile up. But hey, over all it seems that people are believing and the loudmouths are actually silenced by money coming into our platform. At this point it actually becomes pretty easy to ignore the naysayers (as you can imagine).
Up until this point we're actually happily scurrying along, in fact, not only happily, but almost in a euforia. We're providing a real service and we're raking in quite a bit of profit -- everything is going according to plan.
I'll digress again, but instead of saying it afterwards, I'll just tell you upfront. I am digressing:
While all this is going on, we *are* often faced with people essentially asking us and the populace as a whole: "in which scenario in this cryptocurrency world do you see letting strangers in on using your "secret sauce" more profitable than, you know, just using it yourself and collecting ALL the profits?" Well, I hope that is obvious in this story, but that (paraphrased) question is more or less what I ask myself at more than one occasion as it all unfold.
The question itself is not that interesting, I mean, when I first saw it phrased as such, the answer was quite simple; "this scenario". Whilst everyone else answered "I can tell you, there is no such scenario. You need to continuously get fresh money in so that you can pay the ones that are exiting."
I'll end the digression with (and hindsight is 20/20), "Luckily, with these lavish returns, no one will exit for very long."
At periods here we did have to put quite a bit in to keep the value of BCC up, surprisingly not nearly as much as we expected. And at other times a lot more than we expected. We did manage to control the value ok-ish, and sometimes we were incredibly surprised and at other times we found ourselves headlocked with some bigger owners and had to back out. But often this was more or less bugs (or naivety) that were dealt with. When the price went up a bit too fast, we sold. This was according to plan. Perhaps not ethical, but in our defense, it's not like we were the only ones.
But, and this is important, due to the MLM (multi-level marketing) or hell, pyramid scheme as everyone else called it (I won't argue with that today), that is placed on top of all of this we hoped and DID end up with players having thousands of followers. These users or accomplices if you wish, who attracted the most people (they themselves often call themselves marketeers) ... well, they actually became our biggest enemy. This was the elephant in the room for a good while, we actually were slightly blindsided by it. They were the ones that would cash out all the "bonuses" they got from their followers, and they would do so immediately while still have a sizable loan locked up. I mean, sure, they would put maybe 5% back into the platform, but they would withdraw a a fair bit too much than we liked.
I don't recall the actual timeline here, but we're pretty much forced into reasoning that our users have three kinds of money at this point (this becomes relevant later) "money they put in", "money that they got from our algorithm" and "money they got from their followers". This is a bit wordier than how it was referenced, but essentially, that is the idea.
The most important thing that is happening behind the curtains here is that these users eat into our profit. Noticably. When we first notice this, it's not making us well, ... not bleed, perhaps. But it becomes a concern. The problem here is that it's pretty hard to do the maths on this; how much is each "team leader" bringing in and how do you put a value to the message they are spreading. Punishing our best sellers is out of the question.
I am guessing this is the first time where someone might have thought "we can make a run for it!". This is irrational and I am making this up for the narrative. In my experience, a problem is merely a challenge, everything can be solved.
While we were making profits and definitely not bleeding up until this point. Enter the period of...
Bitconnect is bleeding.
The pace at which bleeding happens in a scenario like this depend on a lot of things, but one thing is for certain, and will always be the case in a scenario like this, the bleeding will always accelerate and never slow down.
(hindsight again: that is, until it hits the wall... I recall thinking at this point "well, we had a nice run". But you know, that would be giving up?)
Luckily, we had a team of pretty smart individuals (actually, smart does not cover it .. smart is overrated, they could execute). We are still accelerating, and with that bleeding heavily...
So, again, back to the numbers -- and ironically -- we estimate that we have a few months left before we are more or less dead. Ironically, our initial estimate of our algorithm lastin rouhgly 12-24 months approximately coincide with the death of Bitconnect (funny old world, really).
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We have become increasingly arrogant, and blinded by the speed.
Enter BitconnectX...
A lot of dull events take place here which you can pretty much follow in real-time on previous pages...
Now, you SHOULD ask: Why let people pay for ownership in BCCX with BCC when we need actual BTC/ETH? BCC is frankly worthless without our backing. The answer to that is: The BCC holders are an army of free marketing. They are already sold on our magic. Add to that; if we do not make it very easy for them to board, they might start asking questions. That is the last thing we (or anyone!) would want at this point.
I am not proud of this part. But the sad, and embarrassing part of this all is... we did not know what BitconnectX should be. We needed an idea with the sole purpose of bringing in money to keep ... this thing ... alive.
Today I ask myself: "Why? Let it go. It did not work.". There was perhaps a day in the past where things were that simple. Unfortunately a lot of jurisdictions and, primarily, users that would not be okay with that. We had a lot of loans (our users money) locked up.
So, yes, we needed an idea. This is pretty ugly, but it pretty much boils down to this:
- What looks impressive
- What can be done quickly
- What can be done cheaply
So, some back and forth, we went with the idea of "yet another exchange" as someone sarcastically mumbled as we exited a meeting. The saying goes pick any two out of fast, cheap, great. Well, thankfully there are an *awesome* bunch of open source developers out there so we can actually pick all three. This comes as no surprise to some of you, but the vast majority of you might not realize that with one developer and a few weeks time ... you can get a *lot* done by just modifying a few (but great!) open source projects, and this includes:
- Fullfeatured exchange
- Blockchain explorer
- Desktop wallets for all platforms
- Mobile wallets for all platforms
- Mining platforms
... well the list goes on.
The point here is really, you don't actually need someone who can program, you just need a developer that can *read* code and have a grasp on how to put all of this together. It can even be done quickly.
So, let's just say that, BitconnectX, to my embarrassment is very easy money (primarily thanks to open source developers out there).
Now, how this story ends ... well, that's really up to you ... because I am out of here.
(just logged in)
