I normally don’t call out people publicly as that usually doesn’t bring positive things to one's self, but when a huge public blowback happens on Twitter, it’s worth taking a closer look at the situation to gain a few insights.
Here’s Ashe Oro’s tweet:
You can see the full tweet here:
https://twitter.com/Ashe_Oro/status/1183119812169322496
- Ashe_Oro
The reason I decided to write this actually has less to do with Ashe Oro’s assumption:
“‘Store of Value’ my ass. You knew it wasn't a SOV and was almost guaranteed a scam.”
And more to do with this next sentence:
“I won't call anyone out, but u know who u are.”
The reaction to his tweet was pretty substantial from a wide variety of people. See part of it here (entire tweetstorm was too large and this is only a portion of the replies):
To Ashe Oro’s credit, he has since apologized publicly and has tweeted about his intention to set up an interview with the SOV founders, so it’s clear that he now sees his error in making assumptions publicly without doing research. Everyone has a right to their own opinion, but when you make accusations without doing any research, well, it just makes you look a bit silly.
What I find to be the most ridiculous aspect of Ashe Oro’s tweet is his threat to “call out” the SOV supporters, as if he were the self-appointed Sheriff of EOS. This bit is truly laughable, and reveals his privilege and bloated ego. I’m very active in the EOS community and I rarely even see Ashe Oro interacting on Telegram. For him to assume that he’s the Sheriff of EOS is absurd and not grounded in reality.
However, to Ashe’s credit, I, too had my doubts about SOV, so I appreciate him spilling his guts on a public forum like Twitter. I can appreciate people who are authentic, even if they end up revealing their entitled selves. It creates great fodder for thought, articles and of course, memes. Imagine if everyone were just fake and hid their true selves? It would be boring AF.
Now, it’s anyone’s guess whether SOV will be a successful project or an unsuccessful one. I have no clue and cannot see the future. Nothing I do or say should ever be considered investment advice.
The thing about deflationary projects is that most people on the planet have never experienced them. All we know and have experienced is inflationary currencies. I don’t know of many other deflationary projects in existence besides Bomb, https://bombtoken.com/ which runs on Ethereum and currently has 3005 wallets and is worth about $1. Here’s Bomb on Etherscan: https://etherscan.io/token/0x1C95b093d6C236d3EF7c796fE33f9CC6b8606714
As you can see, SOV has more than double the wallets in just over a few months: https://bloks.io/tokens/SOV-eos-sovmintofeos This is probably due to two things: the free SOV airgrab and the tipping of memes in Telegram.
I wasn’t really too interested in the SOV project until I discovered these things:
There will never be any fundraising or ICO.
There are no dividends.
The SOV dev team nulled the SOV contract keys, which means the contract cannot be altered by anyone except if 15 of 21 EOS Block Producers vote to do so. The private keys to the contract can’t be hacked, stolen, lost or mishandled by the dev team because they don’t have the private keys anymore. They gave them up.
The SOV community is decentralized, which means that the SOV founding team does not direct marketing in a centralized manner. Anyone is free to start a group, launch a project or do any outreach without asking permission from anyone.
The token supply starts out at 1 billion and is burned down to 21 million over time and at regular intervals.
The SOV token contract had two outside audits done to ensure that the code was good. One audit was done by Infinite X Labs: https://infinitexlabs.com/blockchain-development/ and I can’t remember who did the other one.
Most people in Telegram are using SOV to tip for memes. Even people who hate SOV are using SOV to tip with. They are probably using their free airgrab for this.
When I discovered these aspects of SOV, I began to feel more interested in it and less skeptical. I still have a healthy skepticism about its long-term viability though, mainly because most people seem to lack long-term thinking abilities. For all my haters out there, I was not paid to write about SOV. I did it voluntarily. Once I found out about the SOV airgrab, I knew others could benefit from a How-To guide to get theirs as well.
It was only after I had done all this voluntarily that I received a gifted amount of SOV. And I had no idea I would be gifted SOV for my actions. I didn’t know about Colin’s gifted SOV at that time. This is how most merit systems operate. A lot of what I received has ended up being given to people who make memes in Telegram.
The thing I am most skeptical about is the business-minded people in EOS having an appreciation for a really decentralized project like SOV.
Look at the other EOS tokens, they are all being run by a team and also run the risk of their tokens becoming defunct, much like the PATR token did. Failed EOS project Patreos folded, and took their token contract along with them: https://steemit.com/blockchain/@patreos/patreos-token-patr-now-defunct
This is one of the worst aspects of EOSIO, and the more I learn about how token contracts work, the less I like tokens that are under the control of a particular team in EOS. Teams are made up of a few people and as we have seen, people make mistakes, people are vulnerable to new regulations that can easily bankrupt them. Remember, 9 out of 10 startups fail, and all the token projects on EOS can be considered startups. It’s almost like the lessons that Bitcoin taught us are currently being ignored on the EOS mainnet. SOV seems to be, so far, the exception to that.
If anything, the SOV project should be viewed as a disruptive force, and more token projects should follow their lead in nulling their token contract keys. I can see why a team might want to keep control of the keys if the tokenomics aren’t fine tuned, but seriously, I think all pure currency token contract permissions should be given over to eosio so that token holders are not screwed. There are some situations that would require different solutions, but for a decentralized currency project, nulling keys makes a a lot of sense.
TLDR: No one is the Sheriff of EOS. The lessons of Bitcoin should be seriously revisited in EOSIO.