Say No to FOMO. EOS ICO: A Call to Rationality

If you've followed my Facebook or Twitter feeds or my Steemit blog, you know I've been re-sharing posts related to EOS because I think it has the potential to be one of the greatest blockchains yet created. I know that's quite a claim, but how many projects in the cryptocurrency space are being developed by someone with a proven record of success stretching back for multiple years? Dan created ProtoShares, BitShares 1.0, BitShares 2.0, and Steem. I think he's a genius, and his technical accomplishments speak for themselves.

EOS is going to be huge.

Now let's talk about the ICO. The EOS initial coin offering seems to me to be the perfect antidote for the FOMO fever we've been seeing lately. There are people throwing value at any and every ICO possible in hopes of hitting the next big thing. In many cases, they are using pure profits in the process. For example, if you bought ETH at, say, $10, and it's trading for 20 to 40 times that, spreading that ETH around is a no-brainer.

I do think, however, the space is becoming irrational. I remember seeing someone send 100 ETH (over $30k at the time) to a random address someone posted in a Slack channel. That's enough money to buy a really nice car. Who sends that amount of money somewhere without verifying things first?

That's incredibly irrational.

Greed and FOMO, The Fear of Missing Out, are driving a lot of this craziness. ICO's selling out in minutes if not seconds. Whales buying up most of the coins before anyone else can get in. This is the landscape we find ourselves in.

EOS is different. This ICO is a year long (including an initial 5 day starting period). Not only that, we don't know what the price will be per EOS until each ICO period is over.

There's already over $10M going for 200M tokens in this first round (edit: see the update below as not all of this is for the first ICO window). We're at $0.05 per EOS which sounds great, but we're just getting started.

I saw Dan post this in the Telegram:

Please, be careful here. Ask yourself what price you're willing to pay for EOS. Wait a few days into this 5 day period to know if you'll get anywhere near the price you're looking for.

The same advice applies for every one-day ICO period from then on for the rest of the year-long ICO period. If, for example, we come out of this ICO period with a price of $10 each, do you think it's rational that people will continue to invest $20,000,000 into the ICO every single day for almost a year? If not, then $10 will not be the best price throughout the year. The price will have to go down. If it does, that means you can get a better price later just by being patient. $10 is just a random number example. The price could end up lower or higher.

"The stock market has a very efficient way of transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient." – Warren Buffett.

It also means, some people are going to be pissed for overpaying for EOS early on. I can see it now already. There will be massive cries of SCAM! and This isn't fair!

The reality is, many people aren't spending the time to learn how this unique ICO actually functions. This is the ultimate buyer beware situation. If FOMO drives your decision processes, then you're not thinking rationally.

Please, use some math to bring back some rationality. Keep an eye on this address:

https://etherscan.io/address/0xd0a6e6c54dbc68db5db3a091b171a77407ff7ccf

Do some simple math during the 5-day period using the numbers there:

<ETH USD value> / 200,000,000 = Price per EOS during this period

So that would be:

11,155,994 / 200,000,000 = $0.05577997

Just while typing this post out, we're already up to $11M. So now we're at $0.0558 per EOS. It'll only go higher.

You can do this same process each day during the ICO. Just change 200,000,000 to 2,000,000 and use the right address for that period. Figure out what the price will be per EOS and decide if that's the price you're willing to pay. Obviously, you'll have more accurate information towards the end of the ICO window, but then again, so will everyone else. I expect to see a lot of last-minute orders which could throw off the math entirely.

We also don't know what will happen once these tokens hit the open market. There's so much we don't know. To make rational decisions, we need reliable information.

Hear me clearly: I'm a huge fan of EOS, and I plan to end the next 300 something days with as much EOS as I can get for a long-term HODL investment. At the same time, I want to be smart about it. I want to be rational.

I hope you do too.

For more on the EOS ICO, please see this excellent post by the official EOS account on Steemit: Logically Consistent Principles for Token Distributions. Be smart. Don't trust information unless it comes from an official source such as https://eos.io or https://steemit.com/@eosio

_{Created with ChainBB to help support that project.}

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Update June 26th, 12pm:

Since I'm in the USA, I haven't seen the interface created at eos.io to work with the ICO contract. Big thanks to @sandwich for providing these screenshots.

Apparently it's possible to contribute to future EOS ICO days now, prior to those windows starting! @dantheman verified that in Telegram:

So what does this mean? It means we have even more information to make rational decisions. We can start evaluating the future price of EOS on future days of the ICO contract right now. This also means there probably won't be a "cheap day" you can get into because the same information is available to everyone.

Fascinating stuff. Of all the things I've been reading about this, I wasn't aware of this one feature allowing contributions now to future ICO windows. What do you think?

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Update June 26th, 11:20pm:

I wrote a script for you! You can use it to view the current, real-time price of EOS per ICO window. Check it out on ChainBB here: Script You Can Use for Finding the Current Price of EOS per ICO Window or on Steemit here.

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Luke Stokes is a father, husband, business owner, programmer, and voluntaryist who wants to help create a world we all want to live in. Visit UnderstandingBlockchainFreedom.com

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