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One of the reasons that I love the Coinlist platform is the fact that it had in the past run initial crowdsales in a relatively orderly and structured manner. Full KYC and a fully documented and compliant crowdsale meant that everything ran pretty smoothly for all the sales. Also, the KYC and regulation compliance meant that there were quite a few people who would not be eligible for the sales, especially some of the more crazy get-rich crowd and the "aping-in" attitude of the current hype space!

Much of the on-chain IDOs and IEOs are heavily weighted towards whales who can pay gigantic fees for either holding "private-access" tokens or those who can just hammer a HUGE transaction fee to make sure that they are first in line. Or have an army of bots that can swamp the sale.... That sort of thing just isn't for me!

So, boring sales of relatively boring tokens! But projects of serious worth when it came to changing the plumbing and infrastructure of our existing systems.

All of that changed in a bad way with the recent Casper crowdsale. Like all the previous crowdsales, I registered early... and it was clear from the volume of interest that there would be a wait-list being implemented by Coinlist. Fair enough... however, there are wait-lists and wait-lists.... and the one that was implemented for the Casper sale was best described as a Poop-show!

So, firstly... they took down the most of the functions of the exchange and platform in preparation for the sale traffic. No problem, I had registered when the sale was announced and had prepared my USDT/USDC on platform over a month in advance. That's the plus about being a loyal and long-term user!... You have your assets already pre-placed and ready to go!

It did mean that there was a queue system already in place in the day before the sale. Annoying, but no problem.

However, the implementation of the sale queue was pretty terrible. The hour before the sale, there was a pre-sale queue pool. From this pool, you would be allocated a random place in the queue when the sale started. Anyone joining after the sale started would be put at the back of the queue.

Again, no problem... clear enough. Although, from the Twitter furour, it was quite clear that not everyone took the time to read and understand the rules properly... or at least didn't have enough comprehension of the rules (that is problematic if your native language isn't English...).

Bots were prohibited and so all I thought that I had to do was just to join the pre-queue pool and hope for a lucky lottery number for the actual sale queue.

... except it turned out there was over 150-200k people in the queue for Round 1 of the sale! From around 20-30k registrations (Max). Weird...

It turns out that some people just opened multiple tabs on multiple browsers and multiple devices to get more queue lottery tickets! There was no requirement to log-in to Coinlist before hand, so the queue system just differentiated people by browser id instead! So, no bots... but definitely gaming the system!

Needless to say, I completely missed the first crowdsale of Casper. However, seeing as the problems were well known (people were showing how they gamed the system on Coinlist communication channels), I assumed that the loophole would be fixed for the the 3rd crowdsale Round.

Nope... people gamed the system even HARDER! Using the same loophole!

Sigh.... well, I learnt my lesson. Play the game that is being played, not the game that you think is being played. In the following Discount sale, I played the right game and got in. I'm a bit disappointed in Coinlist... but I still think it is the best option for crowdsales at the moment.

To say that people are angry is pretty much understating it... they have suspended withdrawals as well, so that adds fuel to the fire, as people missed the sale AND have their tokens locked up... with relatively high withdrawal fees!

Coinlist have tried to make amends with "loyal" long-term crowd like me, by offering a 4th smaller crowdsale that would be whitelisted in order of REGISTRATION. Something that they should have done the first time... I am hopeful that they will have learnt their lesson from this debacle in time for MINA, but I'm not really holding my breath.

It really feels like they sold out their loyal long-term user base in the pursuit of hype. Sadly, I think that is a near-sighted choice, as the people who flocked to Coinlist seeking a 100x only aren't the people who will support them when another "get-rich-quick" platform pops up.

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