But please let me ask, do you think there is something fishy with the way the Synereo development team have handled this presale?
Afaik, I don't think overly so, as compared to any other ICO. Note someone wrote
an expose at Steemit about this:
@stellabelle I will give you an unbiased opinion on Synereo. Let me give you some facts. Synereo started as an ICO, and very cheap one at that, the coins they started to sell were only a small part of 800 million, however after the ICO was done they started distribution with a script, the distribution script screwed up at night when they were sleeping, and when they woke up they started two instances of the same script, and ended giving some people double Amp's, making the situation worse. To resolve this situation they immediately shut down the distribution doubled the coins they initially issued and started giving people double what they bought. What was wrong with this? nothing except that the ico was only for part of the coins and another ico was supposed to take place which did not. They doubled the coins they hold and the coins that were initially set aside for development/foundation etc. That put a lot of question marks on their method. They then abandoned the coin to dump slowly on bittrex. No news, no developments. Even the devs were surprised when Amp was listed on poloniex. I will not tell you why now, because I do not want to start fud. On that day me and some other traders purchased a large sum of amps on bittrex and dumped it on poloniex at an extremely high price. The next day one of the devs who lives in Tel Aviv and never in his life left that city showed up, he was shocked at the news of amps making it to poloniex. Of course the dumping of amps started, they no longer needed another ico to dump two billion coins. And yes in the process they created a lot of bag holders, some of which are poloniex whales. So in short before poloniex added Synereo it was virtually abandoned vaporware. And Synereo is still vaporware, alpha or not. Now we have whales on amp that want to exit, recover, or make money. But over their heads looms the fact that there is at least a billion amps left in the hands of people who abandoned the project at one point. I would certainly question the come back when poloniex listed it. I would certainly advice you to be careful and not bet on the underdog. I won't even compare Steem to Synereo. One of the devs of synereo is involved in ETH, and the initial marketing they used to sell the ICO is very sketchy. I have not looked into it recently as I do not look back on such projects, even if they do bring about a new social network as they promise, there is a lot of questions they did not bother to answer on their shady start.
Their tech stack is still unproven, and a work in progress, compared to Steem's tested and proven tech. They already have funds to come up with something good in the end, they surely did sell a lot of amps at an incredible price. I bought mine at 13k satoshi on bittrex and sold them for 90k satoshi an hour or two later on poloniex. People always say in crypto you have to DYOR, take that literally. Promo videos are not research, I take that with a grain of salt. I did upvote however, because I agree with you that we have issues in Steemit and the devs and witnesses discuss that on daily basis trying to come up with solutions. Given time they will reach a consensus that pleases everyone, because everyone is vested in Steem for the long run.
But
Scenario's communication has been spread out over numerous 1+ hour Google Hangouts that can bore the shit of the viewer and no one has the time to watch all that. And their white paper doesn't teach the process calculus, so it is difficult for anyone but perhaps a few experts in the world to know what the hell they are actually attempting to do.
It is sort of feels like they been figuring it out as they go along to some extent; to some extent it may or may not be technobabble BS (which they may truly believe in, I dunno).
And the entire concept seems to be economically and marketing non-viable to me, as I have detailed in other posts (mostly in the Steem pyramid thread lately).
The onboarding problem that every crypto has is the same. They can't get many users until they have many users.
Afaik, Synereo has no viable plan to solve that onboarding problem. People buying AMPs to promote content to users, doesn't work until you have many users. It is always the chicken or egg dilemma. Steem has showed how to onboard cryptogeeks, @dollarvigilante followers, and their gfs. But afaics (and
stats agree) hasn't figured out how to onboard the masses.
I am interested to see what happens with Synereo. I am mostly biting my tongue lately about Synereo (although I commented freely in the
recent Steemit.com blog about it), but I offer this summary above of my opinion.