Notoriety on Bitcoin talk where he posted a whitepaper sketched out to a school boy standard making little sense 9 months ago. The only business document I've ever seen that shows photos of people showering in dollars with speech bubbles clarifying the authors greed.
Following I think a 5000 odd Bitcoin investment by Sept last year he then deviated from the original crazy escrow plan, and subsequently enjoyed a 1000% Major Bitcoin rally that was enough to turn a joker into a serious contender (Given that the exodus funds is now at 1000 from 5000, I wonder what would have happened to this project without the major bitcoin upturn).
Anyway what this guy started 8 months ago as a part time work from home project around his full time job, he can now sell half of for $10m and buy back that half nex month for $1m.
Has the world gone mad?? or is it just me thinks this whole things nuts?
I think the world is full of situations exactly like this in emerging markets. imagine how many people invested in nonsense initiatives during the gold rush, or the late 90's internet pump. The fact is, in emerging markets, the ratio of high dollar investors to investment experts is near zero, so millionaires are throwing *s__* to the wall to see what sticks, and in the past, these investors tend to benefit the most from emerging markets, however, the vast marority are losers. This is just the name of the game, someone saw his vision, someone had a lot of money, put 2 and 2 together, and there you have it.
I don't know enough about planned initiatives of the Mastercoin project to say whether or not they have accomplished as much as they said they would by this time. I have not done due diligence, however I have heard the contrary, that they indeed have come forth with very little. The sentiment in the Counterparty Community seems to believe strongly that indeed Counterparty did much more with much less in much less time than the Mastercoin Project has done. If that is true, it is pretty interesting.
I think that PhantomPhreak, Xnova, and Matt Y, beginning to travel and go to talks, preferably which are filmed and placed on youtube or other media, will be a huge jumpstart.
In my phone conversation with LED_LCD, he brought up the point that Counterparty reflects the ethics of the original Bitcoin project and I agreed. What I'm not in agreement with however, is that in this competitive climate, something with no funding can survive. I do not believe that technology can necesarily speak for itself. Is it possible ? Sure, but why take that chance. We have seen that the core developers of Counterparty are interested in one thing: The success of the protocol in decentralizing asset issuance and trade, with an extremely high level of security. The initial distribution method along with the progress that has been made, along with the attitude of the developers, especially PhantomPhreak, has been incredible and fair. Phantom's attitude mirrors Satoshi's, in that he is very much concerned with protocol happenings, and completely disinterested the drama that crops up around it.
If you ask me, you have an ethical center which has emerged, with virtually zero ego involved, along with incredible developer talent. You can tell both by words and actions, that the developers feel they have to prove nothing verbally. They let it all in the open because they believe 100+% in the project.
We need to take this ethical group of developers and give them the funding and recognition they need to help the project survive. My central point is that, the competitive climate is not comparable to 2009 when Satoshi got started. Of course open-source communities got involved at the outset, the ethics-based, "donation-only" sentiment started this space, mostly because at the time, including even now arguably, no one could imagine that a share of a network, could be that secure and distributed, let alone valuable!? The point is, greed has been introduced, the get-rich quickers are out on the prowl, and thus we have seen the capitalistic nature as an offshoot dominate, starting with the altcoin market. What are the altcoins but in large part arguably a way for some developers to get together and scheme people out of their bitcoins ? I apologize if I have offended any developers, but it at least appears that way when you look at the IPO initiatives versus the value history and of course the post-IPO initiatives that seem to deride the initial promises; it appears conspicuous that the goal is quick gains for everyone involved, that invariably means tons and tons of losers and only a few winners.
I'm not going to just talk up Counterparty, because I invested during the burn process. I'm not just protecting my investment with my words, although of course I and you all have a vested interest in doing so. No. I'm going to tell it like it is. How often have you been berated by the developers of Counterparty for donations ? Never. What was arguably the fairest launch of a new decentralized token ? I would say Counterparty, without hesitation, I'm sure there's some alts which try to accomplish similarly, but I believe Counterparty was the first protocol/token with a burn period issuance. How often do you see our developers here ignorantly gloating about how much better the protocol is than others ? If they do compare, it is based on facts, and they leave out the unnecessary adjectives. This is a mature group, with a quickly maturing project, and being that it requires XCP to purchase asset issuing space on the protocol, XCP is largely undervalued.
I think it is without a shadow of a doubt, clear, that we as a community and the developers need to take the marketing initiative to a competitive level, but I think the marketing should always be pointing to initiatives, progress, etc., and it should be clean and simple like Apple, or Google.
I believe that we need some great leaders and visionaries to step forward and put action and money toward the marketing initiative.Counterparty has a shot at a multi-billion dollar emerging market. With just over two and a half million shares of something in that space, how long do you think that abominably low XCP price will last ? Well
I can tell you that if we do not allocate resources, time, and passion into marketing, talks, activities, events, in much the same way that the developers have poured their hearts and souls into the protocol itself and surrounding infrastructure, the price will fall into the noise of the alts, just like it is currently doing. We've already seen the core devs taking initiative to this I believe largely shared revelation, with Xnova announcing an identity reveal, along with the developers possibly starting to travel to functions, this is the very beginning of that idea coming to fruition. Bitcoin had virtually no competition. It was first to market by an indomitably large margin; this is no longer the case.
Look at how awesome Linux and all it's various distros are. Linux has virtually no marketing, virtually no funds, while some distro groups do, they have 1% market share in the computing industry dominated by Microsoft and Apple. We don't want a 1% market share in this emergent space, we want much more than that, for the very reason that this project is not built on greed, nor is it built on anything else but the spirit of development innovation.
We have to compete, this won't speak for itself, but
you can speak for it.
- Halfcab123
