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Tezos Raised $232M in a Hot Coin Offering, Then a Fight Broke Out

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Re: Tezos Raised $232M in a Hot Coin Offering, Then a Fight Broke Out

#11
post #6
post #3

I've read half the article and still don't know what a Tezos is.

I skimmed their white paper[1] and saw this beauty: > In order to reduce uncertainty regarding the monetary mass, addresses showing no activity for over a year (as determined by timestamps) are destroyed along with the coins they contain It is, however, followed by this footnote: > (inactive addresses will no longer lose their funds after one year as initially proposed in the white paper, they will only lose their st…

Yes, it's easy to penalize hoarded money. The hard part is penalizing substantively hoarded money. If I just make sham exchanges back and forth between some ring of addresses that I own, then we're right back to square one.

Does it do anything to distinguish sham transactions from real ones? Or have any theory about the difference? If not, then it's not doing anything novel.

(I know you're not the advocate of this, just a general reply to technical solutions to low money velocity.)

Re: Tezos Raised $232M in a Hot Coin Offering, Then a Fight Broke Out

#12
After the ICO, I started trying to figure out who was on the board of the Tezos Foundation. I found it strange that there was very little info about who was on a three person board that controls hundreds of millions of dollars. What I found was that one person seems to be a company formation agent, Mr. Schmitz-Krummacher. Another is, Gevers, who is now being accused of self-dealing by Arthur Breitman. And the third is a virtually unknown software engineer named Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons.

I'm assuming that Diego Pons is a friend of Arthur's because they are both from France and both lived in NYC. I also have a hunch that there is a secret agreement in writing in place that compels Mr. Schmitz-Krummacher to vote according to someone else's wishes, perhaps Mr. Pons. If there is such an agreement in place, hopefully Mr. Pons is staying loyal to Arthur Breitman.

Handing over 200-400 Million to a three person foundation that is 1/3 company formation agent, 1/3 alleged crook, and 1/3 random software engineer seems like it may not have been the best idea after all. But the reason for this is probably to take advantage of the lack of know your customer laws in Switzerland.

https://forums.tezos.community/t/who-is-running-the-tezos-fo...

Re: Tezos Raised $232M in a Hot Coin Offering, Then a Fight Broke Out

#13
post #9

It's still an interesting project, even if drama like this sucks. Of course, I'd have preferred to see a technical article about the engineering backing the project. Rather than one about a bad apple making its way to a foundation board member sit and caught self-dealing by the rest of the team. But, it's not the end of the world. I hope people will move on soon. Guy was caught. He has been suspended. I guess his rem…

Do you have Tezos tokens? If so, it’s polite to disclose your stake, like on stock investment forums. Promoting an ICO that doesn’t have a shipping product is much like promoting a penny stock.

Re: Tezos Raised $232M in a Hot Coin Offering, Then a Fight Broke Out

#14
post #13
post #9

It's still an interesting project, even if drama like this sucks. Of course, I'd have preferred to see a technical article about the engineering backing the project. Rather than one about a bad apple making its way to a foundation board member sit and caught self-dealing by the rest of the team. But, it's not the end of the world. I hope people will move on soon. Guy was caught. He has been suspended. I guess his rem…

Do you have Tezos tokens? If so, it’s polite to disclose your stake, like on stock investment forums. Promoting an ICO that doesn’t have a shipping product is much like promoting a penny stock.

No one has tokens, it doesn't exist yet.

Re: Tezos Raised $232M in a Hot Coin Offering, Then a Fight Broke Out

#15
post #13
post #9

It's still an interesting project, even if drama like this sucks. Of course, I'd have preferred to see a technical article about the engineering backing the project. Rather than one about a bad apple making its way to a foundation board member sit and caught self-dealing by the rest of the team. But, it's not the end of the world. I hope people will move on soon. Guy was caught. He has been suspended. I guess his rem…

Do you have Tezos tokens? If so, it’s polite to disclose your stake, like on stock investment forums. Promoting an ICO that doesn’t have a shipping product is much like promoting a penny stock.

I'll edit my post. I have donated what I could afford to donate at the time ($200). Thanks for the heads up.

Re: Tezos Raised $232M in a Hot Coin Offering, Then a Fight Broke Out

#17
post #15
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have Tezos tokens? If so, it’s polite to disclose your stake, like on stock investment forums. Promoting an ICO that doesn’t have a shipping product is much like promoting a penny stock.

I'll edit my post. I have donated what I could afford to donate at the time ($200). Thanks for the heads up.

I’m confused. When you say “donated”, what does that mean I’m this context? I thought ICOs are something you buy into to own the coins.

And as a follow up, why donate to an org that has $200M+?

Re: Tezos Raised $232M in a Hot Coin Offering, Then a Fight Broke Out

#18
I had been following Tezos closely since November and was really excited about the ICO. But it became incredibly apparent that the Breitmans were dishonest.

Firstly, the compensation structure was ludicrous. Many people were upset about an uncapped ICO -- I thought this was fine, until it became apparent that they would make hundreds of millions of dollars IMMEDIATELY. They have absolutely no incentive to continue the product or work another day in their lives. A huge portion of their new found wealth doesn't have a vesting period or depend on any tangible benchmarks.

Secondly, the background of Tezos is completely revised and modified according to their whims. They claim they had a large team working on the project for 4-5 years full-time. Even a cursory glance exposes that one person worked on Tezos while working full time for a major bank and that the team grew insignificantly 6-12 months before ICO. They even changed their LinkedIn profiles to revert this history.

Lastly, both Arthur and his wife are completely inept socially, or knew they would get rich enough to not give a fuck. I'm not one to judge a person, but its certainly not ideal as a manager and figure-head of a billion dollar project. I didn't even think it mattered until I heard they were incredibly rude to just about everyone in their Slack channel asking the most innocuous questions. I thought it must have been one bad experience. I joined the channel and the very first few words I spoke were met by flaming from Arthur himself. Not a couple hours later, he's raging on another person in the chat room at a time when there might be 100 messages/week. Every interaction he had over the next week oscillated between flaming and get rich memes. Later they would delete channel history and eventually shut them down completely under the guise of "preventing fishing attempts", though I never saw a suspicious link anywhere. Arthur stepped down as President because of these issues, but his wife did not fare much better (although I never interacted with her directly).

The ICO seemed worse than burning money. It would be like giving money to organized crime or the opposition party.

IMO they have no intention of delivering anything, except maybe to save face. If the past is any indication, they don't give a shit about saving face either.

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