Several days ago I made a post about Aeron (ARN) and it was focused on the aviation industry, the technology, team, roadmap, business model and the problems alleged problems it solve. I did feel like the coin can be a very profitable pump & dump (because we are going through the dot-com bubble 2.0) and I started digging into the community. Mainly I focus on reddit as it's easy, diverse and a good vivisection of the overall community. Apart from what I could find on the internet, I also use the knowledge and experience of some of my AFK friends who are experienced in the aviation industry. There are all students but Aeron very unwisely claims to go at "flight schools and general aviation, which is a large industry in itself". So I did find the right people. You can read the entire article here

"ARN's a great idea, but whats the purpose of the tokens? You going to use them to do anything besides sell them to the next schmuck who hasn't realized they're not used for anything?" - A question asked on reddit

Let's not talk about how often you see these kind of questions on subreddits for ETH, NEO, EOS, BAT, MCO, BTS, STEEM, Dash, PIVX, NEM etc. Let's look at some responses.

maybeee...

Everyone in this group is going to have to learn to fly our planes when we can afford one :)

Think of it as company stock.

All my quotes are going to be unedited authentic responses I dug out of the internet. There are 3 things that give a cryptocurrency its value. 1)Utility 2)Usability 3)Scalability Most ICO projects don't even use their own token.(https://themerkle.com/90-of-all-ico-tokens-still-lack-use-cases-months-after-the-crowdsale/) FortunatelyARN token isn't like a stock despite the inaccurate claims made on reddit by some hype-mongers. EOS and VESTS (Front end name: STEEM Power) are like a stock. STEEM is like a company that exclusively serve its stock holders. That's why you get free STEEM when you sign up for STEEM. According to the whitepaper;

Aeron token can be utilized for
the following purposes, creating revenue streams for Aeron and offering
additional benefits to the token holders:
1)Subscription fee / Transaction based fee for log entries
2)Commission on paid services (in fiat or ARN tokens)
3)Commission on intermediation and client introductions
4)Currency (mean of payment) for buying aviation services
5)Unlock access to flight schools, offers from pilots and aviation companies
ARN cannot go far with high fees. If they want to get adopted, they need to go very cheap. You don't even need ARN token for all of your payments. So there is very little incentive to HODL large amounts which would cause high token velocity. Think about Ripple. The banks don't want to face much volatility. When they use the services, they simply buy just enough XRP to pay the ultra low fees. The only reason BNB had massive gains is because the exchange volume grew over 50 times in 5 months and the BNB token offered 50% discount on all trading fees making Binance trading fees 5 times lower than most of the competition. Is ARN doing something that huge?

According to the whitepaper (page 28) 30% of the funds will go to Marketing, 10% will go for Technology Infrastructure and 40% for R&D. For comparison Monaco (MCO)spent ZERO on marketing.

Page 25 of the whitepaper is filled with bogus numbers with no sources. Their growth projections have no logic explaining them and the whitepaper claims that a pilot logbook costs $30. I hadn't even heard of logbooks that cost double digits. So I searched the internet. Most of the logbooks were on $7-$12 range and some cost less than $3 which looked more like the ones my student friends are using. Only the highest end logbooks cost more than $30

The reddit page is full of hype calling for $100 per token which means a 2 Billion Dollar marketcap based on the totla supply of 20,000,000 ARN.

This token can reach easy 100$ price each this year.
the team is working silent, I think is not a scam, we ll probably see a big price explosion after FEB when they will Lobbying with Aviation Authorities,( you can check it on the roadmap) I'm allin guys. I've also heard by insiders on Telegram that the Aviation Authorities of the patnership are very huge.

I made a post on Bittconnect few months ago and what I'm seeing here is a more mild and lighter version of the exact same scenario.

Aeron has an innovative solution based on blockchain technology.
It will enable an online system relying on Aeron database, built on Ethereum
blockchain to track aircraft and pilot log records.

That's from the page 20 of the whitepaper which compares Aeron with its competition. Compared to the Logging applications with cloud database, the only advantage Aeron has is that records can't be forged. Why can't you just use something like http://factom.org/ Yes there is already a blockchain project that is over 3 years old that gets the job done even better. Let's do some reading.

Factom is a solution for any industry where a decision is made that can be questioned later resulting in a lawsuit or regulatory action. Factom embeds the evidence to support decisions in the immutable bedrock of blockchain. Factom provides the proof to support decisions: Why did you deny that claim? Why was this payment made? Can you prove you met the requirement to "Know Your Customer"? Did you miss a step before you foreclosed on that family's house? The list goes on and on.

I have an even better and cooler idea but first, allow me to bring your attention to a removed reddit post. It was written by an Aviation veteran who was flying before he could drive. I smelled a terrible and stupid plan and his posts confirmed my thoughts. Fortunately not all posts were removed.

Sorry, lots of words, and I'm not a writer. I was trying to make the point that in a lot of cases, your pilots, especially the copilot, may have very low hours, and that's legal and this app doesn't change that. I think a 400 hour copilot on a 747 is far too low, and I would think most people would too, and regardless of whether or not that pilot fabricated hours in his logbook, the airline still considered 400 hours to be acceptable. It would be great if the public cared enough to say no to that policy but nobody really cares. Well, except Aeron bagholders. If you want this to work, you're going to have to get the public outraged about pilots with too little experience, and then show that they are lying about it too. And then get regulators to rewrite the regulations from the 1960's, which nobody is really complaining about, in order to clarify them. And then come up with a way for the system to record data which is truly generated in a private setting. And then get someone to pay for that data. Cardano and EOS are smaller projects than that!

https://www.reddit.com/r/AeronAero/comments/7pbkk1/the_aeron_concept_will_not_work_from_a_crypto_fan/

I can't make sense of the last sentence properly. He's probably trying to mean that ADA or EOS aren't going to make people outraged about some small issue and make the regulators change regulations. If youdidn't read my previous post I mentioned that 0.00051565479% of all flights end up in an accident which may or may not cause human deaths. Most of the death tolls come from 1-2 terrible accidents out of tens of millions of flights.

I must also mention that 2017 was the safest year in the history of commercial aviation. I will also remind you that there is only so much forging you do on the flying hours and I'll also leave you with a question: How likely is it to face an accident with a taxi driver who has been driving full time for 5 years compared to one who has been driving for 10 years and another who has been driving for over 20 years???

Don't worry. This isn't even the pets.com yet. We are not in a bubble yet.

I work with high net worth individuals who own business jets. Generally they do want pilots who are held to the highest standards. However most of the most experienced corporate pilots don't keep a log book any more. I stopped counting after 7000+ hours and that was a long time ago. This is is fairly common. Airline pilots track their hours more carefully because they get "printouts" they can keep from their companies because the company has to track time to ensure that they don't exceed the monthly and annual limits, however this is already being done by their internal systems and a new product that adds blockchain immutability isn't likely to be adopted for the reasons I stated in my original post (ie pilots and operators won't want immutability). The fear of a permanent error in the records will cause any professional pilot to say, "no way in hell am I going to use this." Back to your point, billionaire aircraft owners and corporations most often hire pilots they like, ones who make them feel comfortable based on personality, and much less emphasis is put on flight hours during the interview. Once hired, billionaires and corporations don't do much in the way of checking up on their pilots except for annual recurrent training (usually 4-7 days long). Moreover as it pertains to the use case of this system, there is no sense in the aviation community that pilots who lie about their hours are causing a safety issue. In 27 years of hearing pilots and aviation managers talk about everything having to do with aviation, I have never once heard a discussion having to do with lives being lost due to professional pilots having inaccurate log books.

I have to emphasize that the focus of Aeron is in flight schools and general aviation which has far lower standards when it comes to everything. The planes are not even that well maintained in most flight-schools. You need to go to a top level flight school of a developed country or you are going to be left with old planes that may even worth less than a limousine. The difference between commercial airlines and flight schools is like the difference between multi-million dollar supercars and the stuff you find in a driving school. Ask some friends who has been involved in aviation (better if its from a developing country)

Maybe they aren't con artists or scammers, just extremely naive and didn't do much market research or homework? I can't defend that, just saying maybe they just don't know what they are doing but that doesn't necessarily make them scammers. IF that's the case, then the perhaps scam doesn't start until they realize that the idea is unworkable and then start selling BEFORE telling you it's unworkable.

Whoever this person on internet is, I think he has figured it out. Most terrible business plans come out of things like ignorance and day dreams coupled with a desire to impact the world and be important. During the hours I spend researching this coin it went up more than 20% while the whole market was red. A veteran Technical Analyst has predicted MASSIVE gains for this project and I can see why. His name is @haejin and he has over 85% accuracy when it comes to calls and he makes it a point to not look at fundamentals and keep the focus on analyzing sentiment through Elliot Waves and Chart Patterns.

I found a massive asymmetry in knowledge, information and ideas when it comes to people involved with the aviation industry and the general crypto investors. When they think about blockchain causing disruption in the aviation industry they see trillions of dollars and sophisticated technology and they forget to dig into a project. Aeron is inventing a grand total of nothing. Yes nothing! Absolutely Nothing!!! It's a simple migration into blockchain.

This is where the Smart Media Tokens come in

__At its peak performance Ethereum can handle roughly about 0.1% of the Tx volume of STEEM. Anything that goes into STEEM stays in STEEM and therefore immutable. So why not create something like a LinkedIn for Aviation. STEEM genuinely works like a stock of a company. Owning STEEM means owning a part of the bandwidth. You can make free transactions as long as you don't exceed the bandwidth. That solves the entire problem about fees.

All the information about flight schools, pilots and other general aviation related stuff can be put on the blockchain. It'd be like a wiki for all things aviation related. If individuals decide to, they can put all their flight logs into the blockchain. The choice is all theirs. This would be much more of a community project and less of a business. But it will be valuable. Promoting yourself on the blockchain will be some great free marketing. Anybody can cross reference the data you've put on blockchain and the data you already have. This won't stop forging records (which has not been proven to be anything catastrophic) but how many people do you see lying on LinkedIn. The social aspect can incentivize good honest behavior although it won't stop forging. There can also be real communication and discussion about things like weather conditions and technical aspect which would give context and humanity to the records.

Instead of random data points, pilots will be able to make sort of a journal with all the most important information of their careers for everybody to see. Nobody is going to make a project like Aeron a mandatory use. So why not just make it an opt in platform. Not everything has to be made into a business and Aviation is an industry growing safer everyday. So why the hell not make a community to share experiences.__

Instead of going after a business plan that wouldn't work and doesn't add any real value to the world, let's see if we can merge wiki and LinkedIn with a focus on aviation whne SMTs come out. As the first person to suggest this idea, I like to name this project AeroSTEEM!!!

I also published about another idea called KidSTEEM some time ago which would also use SMTs. You can read it here.

You can surely make money off of the backs of the ignorant feelings driven naive "investors" and I truly believe that Aeron will grow several times bigger before it crash. Bad businesses with unbacked hype always swim in euphoria before they crash. It can be a fun ride as long as you know when to get off.

Happy Investing :-)