BLOCKTV to feed next FOMO mania

The crypto markets may bottom this year and the “Main Street” investors will become more involved in this mania no later than 2021 or 2022. BLOCKTV has launched with memes such as “SUCK MY BLOCKCHAIN” and CHAIN GANG with the deadpan humor of JED & NEHEMIAH.

The thematic format appears to be a memeified hybrid of Bloomberg, Max Keiser and Saturday Night Live.

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Pump-amentals

The episode FIRESIDE CHAT: Dash Core Group CEO Pumped For Major Update exemplifies the superficial journalism and focus on the “pump-amentals” FOMO economics (c.f. §Rise of the decentralized digital, intangible goods economy at the linked blog).

For example, from the ~6 minute point in the Dash video, the “Dash CEO” denies he’s a CEO, denies the existence of a shady premine at Dash’s inception, and his puts lipstick-on-the-pig by spinning — the ongoing debasement tax (aka money supply inflation) awarded to the Dash foundation — as community controlled funds. @smooth and I have explained before (c.f. also) that the Dash anonymity technology is abysmal, the InstantX real-time transactions technology was insecure, the premine was obfuscated as a shady instamine and via the compounding whomever controlled that instamined “premine” are likely controlling a majority of the masternodes and thus influence (and voting power?) in the community.

In short, Dash is probably more of a mine-the-greater-fools-shareholders paradigm (c.f. also) than one of technological excellence. Ditto the crypto speculation markets in general. And thus BLOCKTV is of course catering to the diversionary memes, humor, and disinformation that drives this phenomenon.

Altcoin Funding Mechanisms

An alternative to an ICO is selling shares of a newly founded company (or DAC) that receives a share of the token money supply distribution (regardless whether that’s a premine or ongoing debasement). In the masternode scheme the conceptual analog of company shares is that extant tokens are locked up in order to receive a share of the ongoing token distribution.

If that share of the token distribution is awarded (or becomes free-trading) over a long-period of time (so the company can’t just sell all), then one might presume that company has an incentive to invest some of their funding in the development of the ecosystem and also because if they don’t then the token hodlers have an incentive to fork the (open sourced) ledger to remove the said company’s ongoing share of the token distribution. However, if the token hodlers’ expectation of future profits rely significantly on said company instead of predominantly the free market, then per the Howey test, the tokens would likely be investment securities as regulated by the SEC in the USA.

That’s why it’s important for the Dash founders to obfuscate that they actually premined it and likely control the funding that is awarded by the “community”.

Perhaps it would be better to offer shares in more than one company which all receive a share of the money supply distribution. If these multiple companies act independently,¹ then it would be more difficult to argue that the expectation of the future value of the tokens is secured by any single entity and isn’t predominantly subject to free market outcomes.

Decentralized Funding

An idealized mechanism for funding the ecosystem would be decentralized and free market driven wherein the ledger protocol is immutable yet flexible enough for all technological innovation to occur competitively as decentralized experimentation and multifurcation of a protocol layer on top of the ledger protocol layer. This would though require solving at launch all the technological challenges of the base ledger protocol such as transaction volume scaling.

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¹ _{Yet would this be a tragedy-of-the-commons in terms of their incentive for the stewardship of investing some of their funding in the ecosystem because they’d also have an incentive to freeload on each other?}