Real talk: you may need to hold this coin for months before you see the x10-x20.
Yes, FLO has been a live blockchain since mid 2013. Yes, Alexandria has been in public development since at least mid 2014. Man that sounds ancient in crypto land, doesn't it? They must've been blown past by now by other competitors, right? Turns out nope. I've followed Alexandria and the FLO token very closely since late 2014, here's why I'm still bullish and holding for years:
1) Development has been consistent. There has never been a single period in the past 3 years that I've wondered, "where did ___ go?", "is this thing dead?" If you ask for updates, if you look for the devs - you will find them. They will talk to you. You can see their work.
2) They do not pump or try to be opportunistic with the market with their insider power. Ever. This project has been active through multiple altcoin bubbles, the dev team has never done anything to purposefully take advantage of the market to turn profit, their demeanor has always been the same. They've never lied, nor given unrealistic expectations, nor spent time on fancy infographics instead of code, etc. Arguably this is a bad thing, and they will need to improve a bit on the marketing side of things once they do go fully live, but I'm listing it here because it's a huge reason I have so much confidence that they're in this for the product, and the product comes before profit with these people.
3) Blocktech (the people building Alexandria) started out just using FLO for its features (tx messages) - they had no connection to the FLO team afaik. Over time, the FLO dev team and the Alexandria team have steadily grown closer together and are basically one big happy family these days, collaborating and working together on the whole ecosystem. Watching this evolution over the years has contributed to my confidence that this team is full of workers focused on producing a real product.
4) The product is real. It is tangible. You can use it right now in a sort of alpha/beta state. You can go talk to the devs and easily get invited to help them test new features or even contribute to the project directly. Vaporware is a huge problem in crypto projects - Alexandria is not vapor, and incremental development has been obvious every step of the way.
5) Lack of serious competition. LBRY is the only project that I've seen that has a tangible, usable product which is doing something similar to Alexandria. Every other project claiming to do the same things as Alexandria or LBRY is so far nothing but words and claims. So there are only two real ponies in this race, and this is a discussion for another time but the economics of LBRY's LBC token are not nearly as attractive of an investment as FLO. I do not have nearly the same familiarity/access to the LBRY dev team as I do Alexandria/FLO, so I cannot comment on the development side of things for LBRY. Obviously I do hold some LBC as well.
6) Last I heard, they're going to migrate away from IPFS eventually and use an incentivized storage solution, ie something like FileCoin or Sia. No idea on timeline, but incentivizing the storage part of their back-end will take this to another level.
7) Imogen Heap has published content on it. Ok this is rather minor and old news, but it's pretty neat that major artists are experimenting with it! She published stuff in 2015 and had considered releasing an album on it. She published again a few months ago so she's still using it.
... wrap this all up for consideration and then notice that...
8 ) The marketcap is insanely low. Vaporware projects dwarf this thing. No place to go but up, considering everything above. Easiest fucking hold ever.
Yes I am a FLO whale. Duh. Shit was 200-400 satoshi for months at one point. It was solo mineable for years and I had an A1 ASIC. Yes I will get rich(er) if you guys all agree with my points and buy in. Doesn't make any of it less true, this is already in profit for me and I'm already financially independent - which was achieved by altcoin investments over the past 4 years, by the way. My FLO makes up ~3% of my total crypto worth. Make up your own mind if this is just shilling. Keep in mind I said you will need to wait probably months for huge gains, and cheers to those that also see the potential.
What a wonderful post, we need more people like you on the forum. It's been years that I'm reading Bitcointalk (even though I decided to create an account only recently) and I'm tired of all the lazy people out there who don't do the research themselves and expect people to tell them everything without any effort. Not to mention all the people who FUD, who are constantly negative and/or who are completely dumb (kinda like the one, few messages above, who answered aggressively to your post). Don't bother these guys, they are a waste of time and don't deserve to be answered. You are already too kind by giving so much infos for the new investors.
Special thanks to the OP also, I was looking at FlorinCoin since some times already, still thinking about when would be the perfect time to invest and your post made me take my final decision. Already made x2 in no time but I'm in for the very long term with this one. You are one of the investors I like to follow, because your calls are always very interesting, and it's always nice to have people to rely on to not miss out awesome opportunities. Keep up the good work, it always pays off !
I'm pretty confident one day people will realize everything you guys did for the community at its true value.