Say No to FOMO. EOS ICO: A Call to Rationality

in #eos7 years ago (edited)

If you've followed my Facebook or Twitter feeds or my Steemit blog, you know I've been re-sharing posts related to EOS because I think it has the potential to be one of the greatest blockchains yet created. I know that's quite a claim, but how many projects in the cryptocurrency space are being developed by someone with a proven record of success stretching back for multiple years? Dan created ProtoShares, BitShares 1.0, BitShares 2.0, and Steem. I think he's a genius, and his technical accomplishments speak for themselves.

EOS is going to be huge.

Now let's talk about the ICO. The EOS initial coin offering seems to me to be the perfect antidote for the FOMO fever we've been seeing lately. There are people throwing value at any and every ICO possible in hopes of hitting the next big thing. In many cases, they are using pure profits in the process. For example, if you bought ETH at, say, $10, and it's trading for 20 to 40 times that, spreading that ETH around is a no-brainer.

I do think, however, the space is becoming irrational. I remember seeing someone send 100 ETH (over $30k at the time) to a random address someone posted in a Slack channel. That's enough money to buy a really nice car. Who sends that amount of money somewhere without verifying things first?

That's incredibly irrational.

Greed and FOMO, The Fear of Missing Out, are driving a lot of this craziness. ICO's selling out in minutes if not seconds. Whales buying up most of the coins before anyone else can get in. This is the landscape we find ourselves in.

EOS is different. This ICO is a year long (including an initial 5 day starting period). Not only that, we don't know what the price will be per EOS until each ICO period is over.

There's already over $10M going for 200M tokens in this first round (edit: see the update below as not all of this is for the first ICO window). We're at $0.05 per EOS which sounds great, but we're just getting started.

I saw Dan post this in the Telegram:

Please, be careful here. Ask yourself what price you're willing to pay for EOS. Wait a few days into this 5 day period to know if you'll get anywhere near the price you're looking for.

The same advice applies for every one-day ICO period from then on for the rest of the year-long ICO period. If, for example, we come out of this ICO period with a price of $10 each, do you think it's rational that people will continue to invest $20,000,000 into the ICO every single day for almost a year? If not, then $10 will not be the best price throughout the year. The price will have to go down. If it does, that means you can get a better price later just by being patient. $10 is just a random number example. The price could end up lower or higher.

"The stock market has a very efficient way of transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient." – Warren Buffett.

It also means, some people are going to be pissed for overpaying for EOS early on. I can see it now already. There will be massive cries of SCAM! and This isn't fair!

The reality is, many people aren't spending the time to learn how this unique ICO actually functions. This is the ultimate buyer beware situation. If FOMO drives your decision processes, then you're not thinking rationally.

Please, use some math to bring back some rationality. Keep an eye on this address:

https://etherscan.io/address/0xd0a6e6c54dbc68db5db3a091b171a77407ff7ccf

Do some simple math during the 5-day period using the numbers there:

<ETH USD value> / 200,000,000 = Price per EOS during this period


So that would be:

11,155,994 / 200,000,000 = $0.05577997


Just while typing this post out, we're already up to $11M. So now we're at $0.0558 per EOS. It'll only go higher.

You can do this same process each day during the ICO. Just change 200,000,000 to 2,000,000 and use the right address for that period. Figure out what the price will be per EOS and decide if that's the price you're willing to pay. Obviously, you'll have more accurate information towards the end of the ICO window, but then again, so will everyone else. I expect to see a lot of last-minute orders which could throw off the math entirely.

We also don't know what will happen once these tokens hit the open market. There's so much we don't know. To make rational decisions, we need reliable information.

Hear me clearly: I'm a huge fan of EOS, and I plan to end the next 300 something days with as much EOS as I can get for a long-term HODL investment. At the same time, I want to be smart about it. I want to be rational.

I hope you do too.

For more on the EOS ICO, please see this excellent post by the official EOS account on Steemit: Logically Consistent Principles for Token Distributions. Be smart. Don't trust information unless it comes from an official source such as https://eos.io or https://steemit.com/@eosio

Created with ChainBB to help support that project.


Update June 26th, 12pm:

Since I'm in the USA, I haven't seen the interface created at eos.io to work with the ICO contract. Big thanks to @sandwich for providing these screenshots.

Screen Shot 2017-06-26 at 6.50.52 PM.png
Screen Shot 2017-06-26 at 6.50.54 PM.png

Apparently it's possible to contribute to future EOS ICO days now, prior to those windows starting! @dantheman verified that in Telegram:

So what does this mean? It means we have even more information to make rational decisions. We can start evaluating the future price of EOS on future days of the ICO contract right now. This also means there probably won't be a "cheap day" you can get into because the same information is available to everyone.

Fascinating stuff. Of all the things I've been reading about this, I wasn't aware of this one feature allowing contributions now to future ICO windows. What do you think?


Update June 26th, 11:20pm:

I wrote a script for you! You can use it to view the current, real-time price of EOS per ICO window. Check it out on ChainBB here: Script You Can Use for Finding the Current Price of EOS per ICO Window or on Steemit here.


Luke Stokes is a father, husband, business owner, programmer, and voluntaryist who wants to help create a world we all want to live in. Visit UnderstandingBlockchainFreedom.com

I'm a Witness! Please vote for @lukestokes.mhth

Sort:  

Luke, amazing post with two particulary important points

  1. Wait until the end of the 5 day period to contribute your first time. This gives you time to digest all of the information and read about the various potential pitfalls.
  2. If it's easier to send in batches a month or a week at a time, you can do it in advance by contributing across each window.

A point I would also make is that the secondary markets are going to ultimately price EOS.

Thanks Bill.

I think the secondary markets will ultimately price it, but I wonder if they will be able to keep up with the daily ICO option increasing supply. I might say, "Sure, I'll trade my ETH for EOS as I think EOS will be more valuable long term." But would I pay $200 for EOS right now knowing that every single day for the next 300+ days, people will have to buy up 200 x 2,000,000 ($400M) worth of EOS to support that price?

This is going to be really interesting. I want to figure how how to analyze that contract to determine what the daily contributions are at any given time.

A voice of reason, so refreshing to hear!

I didn't know about the tool for investing in future windows - I'm grateful that you've shared this information.

I'm really excited about EOS, but I'm also not in a rush to invest in this just yet. I think that I'll stick with the adage of being

"Fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful"

Warren Buffett

Great post Luke, It is cool how one can put ETH into any of the windows. For fun I might drop a bit on #201 which is Ben Franklin's birthday. I wonder what a guy like that would have built on EOS?

Seriously though, I was going to dump about 10 ETH into the first window today, and then I realized, meh...? "Why don't convert my ETH back into bitUSD and wait this general correction out a bit. Perhaps I can get a couple of extra ETH in a few days (perhaps a couple less) and then I can have more EOS.

I absolutely love the way that this ICO is orchestrated. @dan is the man!

That's a good idea. I wish I was smart (and quick) enough to move to bitUSD or SBD during these market corrections. It seems to me the upswings are so much faster than the downswings, I'd hate to miss out. Just holding has, so far, been the best strategy for me, but I sure wonder sometimes. I've talked about that at length here.

Ben Franklin's the man. :)

Luke, thanks for the info & insights - in case you didn't know yet, @pyo made a pretty cool tool http://eosscan.io/
https://steemit.com/eos/@pyo/introducing-eosscan-io-the-real-time-eos-token-price-tracker

Hear hear!
Buying huge piles of EOS NOW makes sense only if you try to manipulate the price (and you are whale enough to do that).
For Average Joe like us:

This hype is crazy. Will be interesting to see how many hundreds of millions are raised the first 5 days.

Luke, Well written and excellent logic...Thank You...

UpVoted, Following from my 2nd Week ( been here 5 weeks ) AND...

ReSTEEMed !!.... Thanks Again !!

Some pretty good investment advice. Why do you share this publicly ??

I want to help create a world we all want to live in.

Rationality, I think, is an important key to a better world. The more people who get rekted by this because of irrational action, the more setbacks we'll have towards achieving our goals of a better world. I don't want to see people get hurt. I want them to benefit from rational decisions.

You are an idealist and I respect that.

I am also in favor of rationalism, and that's why I believe we should try to profit from these irrational people. With less money, they will breed less, and reason will triumph.

With less money, they will breed less, and reason will triumph.

That's not a rational position. See birth rates in poverty stricken areas. The facts show the exact opposite in areas with low income, low access to birth control, low education, high infant mortality, etc.

We're not in a simplistic Darwinian survival of the financially fittest situation anymore because we're controlling or own evolution as a species. The path forward, IMO, involves education, empowerment, moving more people up Maslow's Hierarchy, etc. I wrote a whole post on that How to Improve the World.

I dont think people from Africa, or more generally speaking, undeveloped countries are going to invest in EOS. It's mostly amer-euro rich people. You should have 0 regrets of using your brain to profit from these people, they would do it.

For me, it's not about regrets, it's about a rational position to improve my own wellbeing and the wellbeing of those I care about.

Let's assume for a moment a bunch of amer-euro rich people get massively butt-hurt here. What do think they will do next? They will run to mommy and daddy government to pass more legislation to protect them from themselves. Further restrictions on cryptocurrency will form and the government will be more than happy to have even more control over their human farms.

A competition mindset, IMO, is a primitive, archaic approach. We've dominated this planet as a species not just because of competition but because of our ability to cooperate through our language and technology.

I understand your point of view, but I am sadly more pessimistic about the human race. No matter if people get butthurt or not, legislation will happen, because of human greed and thrist for power. It's only a matter of time.

I hope your vision comes true. Mine is close. I guess we just disagree on the way to get there. Whichever the way, people need to start owning themselves and be free. There won't be any room for brainless people who need permanent assistance in our future. You believe it's possible to convert them all and transition without problems. I believe many people will struggle and won't be able to do it, ending up in major social disasters.

About humans on this planet... Firstly I wouldn't say 'dominated this planet' as there are actually some people who think we were created by God and put there as the master race of Earth. I would use 'top of the food chain' instead. And no, I don't believe it's through cooperation, language or technology that we achieved that. Imagine a simulation of a small earth, which is biologically as diverse as Earth right now (including some humans with no language, no technology). These humans would end up dominating as well, without developping tech or language. They would just hunt for hours, and sweat, follow the tracks of animals and find them, exhausted, only waiting to be finished off.

Good discussion.

I think being pessimistic or optimistic has a lot to do with our perceptions and data exposure. If we call reality "normal" then pessimism or optimism could be seen as thinking something outside of what's normal either based on delusions or a lack of information. For me, having read books like Origins of Virtue and The Better Angels of Our Nature, I'd like to think I have an accurate view of humanity as it is today. I tell myself my story is accurate and rational based on the inputs I have, but in reality I'm probably skewing things based on my personal, subjective experiences. In the same way, someone could read all kinds of books about how great humanity is right now, but if their own lives are miserable, they will probably be pessimistic.

people need to start owning themselves and be free

I agree.

There won't be any room for brainless people who need permanent assistance in our future.

Ah, but compared to AI, won't we all be brainless? Using the philosophical veil of ignorance, I hope we take a more cautious approach here as any one of us could have been born less fortunate either genetically or environmentally.

I believe many people will struggle and won't be able to do it

This is a very real possibility. It's why I've been exploring blockchain-based UBI concepts. I also appreciate the many posts @dantheman wrote on the concept which I linked to here.

As for whether or not humans are the "top of the food chain" put there by God or if they evolved to dominate the top of the food chain, seems to me to be different words to describe the same result.

These humans would end up dominating as well, without developping tech or language.

I disagree. There are many species which are far more effective killers than humans (sharks, lions, etc), but we overcome them through our cooperation and technology. I don't think that's just my opinion, I think there's plenty of evidence to support this position.

Thanks for sharing! It certainly has got all the hype! I just don't know how to play it. I feel like the price could drop as time goes on (for a little while) we shall see. I also wonder what it will do for Ethereum!

Check here to confirm that you are not a U.S. citizen, resident or entity (a “U.S. Person”) nor are you purchasing EOS Tokens or signing on behalf of a U.S. Person. that's the part that scares me How is a US citizen to get EOS? Just lie I guess?

Or wait 5+ days and buy them off an exchange once they hit the market.

That means that prices are almost guaranteed to go up on the exchange, because there is certainly going to be a lot of demand from the US for this ICO. Is it clear why they decided to exclude US citizens?

Good to see you on Steemit! :)

Most ICO's have been doing this lately to avoid scrutiny from the SEC, I think.

It may go up initially, but we should also keep in mind the ICO continues for 300+ days. For the price to go up on the market would mean people would have to continue buying the ICO to support that price or else people will just get it from the ICO instead of the market which would cause the price to fall.

Makes sense. Will be very interesting to see how prices go on the exchange. Do you know what exchanges it will be traded on initially? I suppose I can wait... :)

ok, thanks for the post. And the response. waiting is ok I think. At least I don't need to ha the FOMO!! You are appreciated!