Invest In The Sailors Not The Boat; Invest In The Workers Not The Company

Refugees have often successfully captained makeshift floatation devices across seas from a force of will and a desire to reach the other side. The definition of bootstrapping. And it’s not just the captain that brings a boat to its destination port, it’s the entire crew and even the passengers, also known as customers. Bitcoin was born of a committed bootstrapped community. Ethereum was a community born of a much nicer $16,000,000 boat—but still a very passionate, committed, community mostly consisting of people who are in it for the long game, many of whom are less driven by avarice or endless Lambos but also have a shared vision of changing the world—even making the world a better place: fairer, more accessible, more affordable, safer, and more secure.

I’d Do it For Free

If you can find an project that has both a vision that you can understand that has a goal that you think can be attained with hard work and funding and you can tell that the entire team, from the inventors to the owners to the entrepreneurs to the developers, marketers, and investors, are true believers, the sort of people who are likely to want to use what’s being made as they are willing to produce or invest in it (while this is aiming maybe too high, but the kind of project you would either pay to use to work for, for free) then maybe you should throw some BTC their way.

All investments are risky. If you can’t afford to lose it risky. Some investments are riskier than others and I think it has to do with community. How invested in a community is an investment? How much skin does an investment have in the game, financially as well as with regards to personal and professional reputation not only of the investment but also of all the principals behind the project?

Perception is Reality

ICOs are scary. They’re toxic. More about investor impatience and the over-promising and under-delivering by Token project leaders than actual fraudsters and con men, it doesn’t really matter. As Lee Atwater said, “perception is reality.” Everyone’s so scared about the risk associated with the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) that they tried calling them Token sales but not even that worked.

Every ICO White Paper I’ve ever seen has explicitly screamed Caveat Emptor—let the buyer beware—so nobody’s to blame for investing in high-risk, high-return, financial instruments like an ICO except the investor. As the proverb sagely states, ”fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

Too Good to be True . . .

If it’s too good—or even too ambitious—to be true, then it’ll probably, at best, not hit the numbers and diverge from the project roadmap; or, at worst, it failed nobly or you were just the mark in a very elaborate, expensive, and potentially criminal long con.

“A long con is a scam that unfolds over several days or weeks and involves a team of swindlers, as well as props, sets, extras, costumes, and scripted lines.” —Wikipedia

It Takes a Village

DAO PlayMarket 2.0 has a pretty interesting business model for its project platform. On the first view, it’s an alternate store to Google Play where you can buy or download mobile Android apps for your smartphone or tablet.

Look deeper and you’ll see that there’s a lot more going on. There’s an entire STO factory in there, where you can launch a token sale, raise money on an Android app project, price the coin for investment and sale. You can also enter into a smart contract with PlayMarket to what the owner and investors can earn from an app and then have that contract expire into becoming part of an index-fund where all investors profit from the profits from all the apps, resulting in both increased Token values as well as automatic and transparent distribution of dividends (a rising tide lifts all ships). And since the profit of one app going to just a few people transitions to the profit from all apps going to all PlayMarket stakeholders,

“investors can participate directly in the success of their app investments by promoting apps,” according to Cointelegraph, adding, “through app ratings and social media channels, for example, users/investors can help grow the PlayMarket and, in turn, their own financial success.”

ROI

According to NewsBTC, “the DAO PlayMarket 2.0 platform will host its own built-in crypto-exchange called PEX with the capability to exchange the platform tokens to other cryptocurrencies.”

However, even though investors in PlayMarket, be it through selling apps on the platform or investing in an app or the entire platform, are welcome to use the built-in decentralised PlayMarket Exchange (PEX) to sell their PlayMarket Tokens for fiat, Bitcoin, or other coins, HODLing the native token buys you into the PlayMarket community. Membership has its privileges. As I mentioned before, holding onto—and buying more with fiat or another crypto via the PEX—the native token entitles you to benefit from the profit-sharing that’s built into the DAO. Selling is always possible but HODLing will offer you and all the other investors—members of the PM community—the maximum return on investment (ROI).

Boaters Not Boat

Like I have been saying, invest in the boaters, not the boat, in the employees, not the company. One of the biggest mistakes people make when it comes to losing their shirt is that they gamble with their money. The Casino doesn’t want you to succeed. Neither does the dealer. Even though you might spend your time in Vegas and consider yourself a high-roller, the House—not you—always wins. If you can find a community—someplace that appreciate you and truly values your contribution—then invest in that. Investing in your community is investing in yourself.

A Committed Community

CCN gets it right when they added, “ICOs conducted within a dedicated community of users can help to lower the risk posed by the increase in ICO fakes and scams.”

Originally published on Newconomy