A Store of Butthurt: A guide to Neo’s Noisy naysayer
Before we get started, I feel it’s important to make something clear: I’m heavily invested in Neo. It’s currently (by far) my largest Crypto position.
Furthermore, everything from here on out is my personal opinion. I try to provide evidence on everything I say, but it’s still all my own thoughts.
Do your own research on everything. Don’t take financial advice from anyone on the internet, especially me. Hell, don’t take advice from ANYONE on the internet about anything.
This is called a Financial disclosure statement. It lets the reader know if the author of the article you’re reading has any sort of agenda or bias they might be trying to promote. I start off with this for two reasons:
First off because it’s simply the right thing to do. Credibility is something that’s hard to build and easily lost.
Second, because this article (as you can probably tell from the title) is about this Store of Value Blog, (hereafter referred to as SoVB) who somehow manages to pump out hitpiece after hitpiece on Neo somehow manages to fail to mention that he’s heavily invested in Qtum, arguably Neos main competitor.
One should note that this is especially remarkable, considering that after his first hitpiece was submitted on Reddit last year, readers pointed out the lack of disclosure was borderline unethical and at minimum outright misleading.
It’s remarkable because even after it was pointed out, he managed to fail to mention his bias in his first, second, third, fourth, or fifth hitpiece on Neo!
He DID manage to mention it in one of his blogposts in January, and yet somehow managed to go back to omitting this in his most recent posts. Madness.
Side note: I already know how he’s going to respond to this. As another person on Reddit put it:
“[he] loves to argue and refute any valid arguements with “SEE YOURE PROVING MY POINT”
“[he] cherry picks sentences and takes them out of context to make it appear as if the very person arguing against [him] his proving him right.”
(Credit to user TooAlpha on reddit.)
Watch out for this.
That said, let’s go back through some of his articles and talk about some of the problems he brings up.
First one:
“Someone Bought Reddit Bots to Censor My Article On NEO, But It’s Not Working”
Mother of god! Someone MUST have bought bots to censor his article! It couldn’t have been down votes from people who are sick of seeing
his biased blog being pimped on reddit!
Actually, I might be able to offer another reason for down votes that don’t involve bots or people hating on his blog. See, the way the Reddit upvote/downvote system works is a heavily guarded secret. No one outside of Reddit is 100% certain of exactly how it works, but there have been a few guesses about how Reddit might guard against bots messing with the upvote system. One theory is this: Say Andrew submitted something and Bob upvotes it. From there on out, there’s a cool down period where Bobs upvotes for Andrews posts don’t count as much and actually become worth less and less, eventually becoming downvotes.
This way, Andrew can’t buy a bunch of Robot Bob accounts and perpetually upvote all his own content.
This is relevant, because SoVB appears to have a pretty clear history of posting his blog under different alts and promoting his own content. It’s not a terribly far stretch of the imagination to assume he’s simply upvoting his own content under these same alts, accidentally leading to him downvoting himself.
Of course, when all of these alts were pointed out on reddit, he had this to say:
This is a fascinating claim. Asides from the curious question of what “5 ish” means, all you have to do is see that every thing he posts refers to himself in the single, first person perspective:
There’s no “We, us, or our” in any other posts he has made, articles he’s written, or tweets he’s….tweeted.
Which do you think is more likely? A group of people all writing for the same blog, always writing in the same style, referring to themselves in the singular,
first person, and completely forgoing any writing credit to write under the same blog?
Or is it just one guy with a bunch of Alts attempting to promote his own posts?
For a guy who perpetually complains about shills, bots, and fake accounts, he seems to have no problem doing the same thing himself. In fact, if you look back through all the accounts that submitted his blog to reddit (around ten or so) on various subs, you’ll see a few patterns.
1: They all submit this blog to various subreddits
2: They all use the same writing style and pacing.
3: They All hate Neo.
4: They all love qtum.
I guess we could keep going, but I’ll just leave this here:
https://www.reddit.com/domain/storeofvalue.github.io/
Note the ridiculous numbers of alts who all fall under the same pattern and submission history.
What a coincidence.
Keep in mind, this is solely about his Reddit posts. That’s to say nothing about twitter, Facebook, or any other number of social media platforms where he promotes his blog.
Moving on to his next post:
“NEO Is A Multi-Billion Dollar Disaster”
Let’s start right off the bat: The Neo network has had issues. SoVB doesn’t like it, I don’t like it, and neither (Presumably) does anyone who’s invested in Neo. Especially the Neo team. The various problems Neo has had regarding long blocktimes has been an issue, and I should know: I’ve been there for every single one.
But we should also make something clear, that is all that they have been; Long block times.
I personally couldn’t find a single instance where anyone using the network on these occasions has lost funds or has been negatively affected by the long blocktimes in any way whatsoever.
In fact, every single time it’s happened, the Neo team has responded to the issue being addressed in the discord immediately, without fail, and given a reason for the issue.
SoVB acts like a fainting couch doomsayer, acting as if these long block times have been proof of a dying blockchain, about to shut down at any gvien moment, leaving everyone out in the cold.
Aside from this being flat out untrue (The independent developer team City of Zion can change the consensus nodes if required), I guess we’ve all forgotten that both Bitcoin and Ethereum have had their hiccups
regarding long blocktimes, heavy fees, or even hacks where the blockchain had to fork to a totally new blockchain.
Two things to understand:
1: It’s unlikely the Neo team has been thinking “Hey, we’ve built an 8 billion dollar blockchain! Let’s ignore the problems and not try to fix anything!”
2: dBFT is a new consensus type. While other chains have essentially copy and pasted other peoples work, Neo is in a category of its own. Anyone investing in a new system should be aware of the risks and be prepared for a bumpy ride. Welcome to Crypto. What it boils down to is whether or not you think the Neo team is prepared to face these challenges head on, fix them, and make a better blockchain.
My current belief is yes.
All that said, there’s a few things wrong with this article posted by SoVB.
First things first, he conflates those running ICOs on Neo, the Neon wallet with Neo, and City of Zion with Neo itself. In a couple of these ICOs, the developers of their particular tokens didn’t do the contract correctly or communicate with the investors correctly. Somehow SoVB manages to blame the Neo platform and its team for these problems. I guess we can start blaming Vitalik for everything that goes wrong on Ethereum now.
Later on, he submits a screenshot of a Developer (Nakasatoshi) talking about how hard it is to code on Neo:
While I can’t speak to this for certain (I’m not a programmer) I can offer some counterpoints a non-programmer might be interested in:
1: I’ve never seen anyone say developing on any blockchain is easy.
2: Perhaps the guy developing his app on ethereum isn’t the best source to take that information from
3: /u/Chokeman ‘s entire submission history involves a few interesting things: Submitting/supporting SoVBs articles, shitting on Neo, and talking about how amazing Qtum is.
Hmmmmm…..
Don’t let the Truth get in the way of a good FUD
In a few articles and tweets, SoVB boldly claims that Neo is a security under US law, somehow because gas is sort of like a dividend. He even says that
it’s more like a security because the gas has to be manually claimed.(wat)
He goes even further in saying that it’s likely in the process of being deslisted from Bittrex any day now.
Of course, that was months ago and neo still trades on Bittrex.
This claim, quite frankly, is stupid. I don’t have to register chickens as a security because they produce Eggs. A dividend from owning a stock (A security) in a company is given out from the profits a company makes (Usually in fiat), from outside sources when they (The company) decides that the profits are better off given to shareholders than reinvesting in the company itself. Usually it’s done every few months and can change depending on profitability.
Literally zero of these attributes apply to gas.
Another interesting claim is that all interest in neo is almost entirely American, and uses a screenshot of trade volume on bittrex as “proof.”
Actually, thats true to this day, as long as you ignore the top 3 Neo exchanges by volume. Coinegg, which is UK based, Binance which is Hong Kong based, and Upbit, which is Korean based. Ignore all of those and boom, it’s all american.
Why so Butthurt tho?
Going through SoVBs old posts, it doesn’t take long to figure out where the source of the salt comes from. If you go back to his older posts in July of last year, Neo was Rainbows and kittens! It’s the greatest thing since sliced bread!
Aside from the few points he gets entirely wrong, he basically swoons for everything Neo.
But…what happened?
Curiously enough, the date of the article is listed as August 2nd, and yet mentions that Neo had hit $40 recently, something that didn’t happen until August 10th or so. (According to https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/neo/)
I personally think he sold much earlier than that, jumped over to Qtum, and went back and updated the price afterwards to make it seem like he didn’t miss Neos meteoric rise in August. If he did, that would lead some to one hell of a bitter vendetta.
Conclusion
I personally think it’s pretty clear that this guy can’t be trusted.
He cherry picks his arguments to make himself seem more credible, appears to use multiple accounts to shill his own blog and agree with himself, never actually issues corrections or updates to his posts when they’re pretty clearly flat out wrong, and (with the exception of once) fails to disclose he has a heavy financial bias towards Neo not succeeding.
Ignore him.
As sort of a post script, this person has really put me off digging closer into Qtum. It’s unfair to blame an entire blockchain on the stupid blog posts of one guy, but for a person who’s so clearly invested in Qtum, the dude writes about 5 articles attempting to bash Neo for every 1 article he writes talking up Qtum.
Edited on 3/5/18 to clear up grammar, punctuation, ect.
