Gold fever of 2010s: Insider’s impressions from *Coin project.
Introduction
The story began in October 2016. I decided to diversify my investment portfolio with some virtual coins. I checked one of the ICOs which was starting those days. It looked pretty attractive but I needed to buy some other coins in order to buy for them the new one. This scheme looked suspicious for me and I declined.
A month later I was checking projects on Upwork. Sometimes there could be something interesting. And I found offer for windows/Linux sysadmin job with “huge perspective”. I run small IT business and have several Linux DevOps/System engineers. I decided to try working for “huge perspectives”.
During Skype interview very cute guy whose name was Sean described me that he invented new monetary system(!) which manages data integrity through several independent servers and I must run one of them.
The job did not look complex — MySQL database and 100-line script which must answer http requests. All this could be maintained by implementing simple backup & monitoring solutions. Also the system must satisfy strict security requirements.
Sean offered payment — 1% of all his new coins divided by 60 months. So every months salary was about 200000 coins. We did not even know the initial price of these coins. But taking into account the quantity of units (2²⁴) and absence of possibility to emit new ones, the small research comes to the market price of at least $0,1 and, in case of luck, even more.
Maintaining not complex server for $20k monthly is really good perspective…
I decided that God remembered about my desire to invest something in coins and gives me 100 times more — possibility to enter coin project on the earliest possible stage. Actually i was third or fourth participant after Sean.
I’ve become passioned with the idea…
The Gold Fever
Rather quickly we found admins for all servers and the system started to work as was intended. Actually it is distributed database for unit authentication. We called it Redundant Array of Independent Detection Agents. The main task of RAIDA — to check authenticity of coins.
It has nothing common with blockchain at all!
We needed client software to authenticate units — in January we already had Android version. A bit later I wrote client in C# for Windows. It was not really complex since API is very simple but some functions took time to implement — those which respond for coins self fixing.
In march we decided to check the system in trial commercial use. Sean put the price at $.01 and we released test press-release for Russian media (since I am Russian it was not hard for me). The result was unpredictable: we’ve got line of people who wanted to try the new product. Mostly they were cryptocurrencies investors who thought that we are introducing new product and it is time to buy it at initial low price.
The amount of sold coins was not very big. Current ICOs raise millions in minutes. And we took only several dozen thousand. Since it was not ICO but only preICO test we decided thats it is OK.
This small success has given us assurance that we are on right way. BUT some of us started to think about our project as about something messianic. We started to think about ourselves as about “new century in virtual currencies era”. We started to tell people about RAIDA in comparison with blockchain that it is like jet against propeller aircraft…
Sobering
But market waited from us something. If you’ve said “A” say “B”. Where is liquidity? Where is true decentralisation and scalability of operations? Where is clear description of splitting — the variant of emission which comes in form of doubling all coins when the one will evaluate $2. Where are exchanges?
We realised that all these questions must be answered in months even weeks. And since May we are watching cryptocurrencies BOOM you all know about. This requires from us high speed of presenting to market all that it wants.
We had all answers for market questions but we did not implement them yet. We have plan or RAIDA scaling to 800 and more nodes so it will be in hierarchical structure like DNS, we have plans on issuing cryptotoken and getting to cryptocurrency exchanges. We have solution on making crowdfunding ICO… And we have scientific research which shows the simplicity of our coins circulating mechanisms in comparison with cryptocurrencies…
Looks like we have a big gold nugget but can not to divide it for sale.
In autumn we will be witnesses of many ICOs. The idea of ICOs probably will be compromised by some unclean projects and there is a question whether to go with our crypto token ICO or to choose some another way of funding.
The fever has over. Time to work. We found nugget in the river and now have to raise it over high bank to be able to show to people…
No pains no gains
Somebody could say: “aah it is so simple to invent new money and to sell it. It is 100% value added thing.” Or even: “you sell air!”
I have to say that project of this kind is very hard to execute. There are a lot of details you have to achieve with quality and in time in order to be successful.
There is no place for self-delusion at all. You have to work and work and work. And even if you worked hard it is not guaranteed that you will get successful. Even on the wave of everybody’s interest to the domain of your work.