Have We Been Rugged?

My response to a question from Clay Oglesby. About the DeSo blockchain.

First of all, the obligatory "Not financial advice". "Do Your Own Research." "Only invest what you can afford to lose."

Seriously that last one is irritating. Who can "afford" to lose any? This saying stemmed from people mortgaging their house, taking out personal loans, and cashing up their credit cards, all to invest in crypto (actually goes back a lot longer than crypto has been around, but let's focus on crypto). Doing that is not only a massive gamble (crypto is speculating more than investing anyway). It's a high-risk gamble. One with a high probability that you'll lose all your money, home, family, and friendships AND owe someone as well. Just don't.

Before we get stuck into it, here is one final disclaimer. This article is my opinion, and any predictions are based on one thing. My gut instinct, that's it. I am not saying I'm right. I want DeSo to succeed just as much as the next person. (I wouldn't have bought a DeSo NFT for $2300 USD late last year if I didn't want it to now, would I?

You may be wondering why Clay is asking me this question. Well, he didn't, not really. See the screenshots below for context.

So what is a rug pull? Most of us know and have had far too much experience being on the receiving end. Before joining Bitclout (now known as DeSo), I knew it as a scam where project developers had usually collected a bunch of investors' money under pretence and disappeared.

Same in the crypto world, DeFi rug pulls alone topped $2.8 BILLION last year, according to Chainalysis. In addition, rug pulls accounted for 37% of all scam "revenue" in 2021 compared to 1% the year before. Pump and dump schemes are similar types of scams. Pumping up a particular coin by having your pump and dump group all buying around the same time to trigger a buying frenzy, then having the group sell simultaneously, taking profits.

Here on DeSo, it's on a smaller scale when an account sells all their creator coins after many people have "invested" in them, raising their coin price. After they've sold, they leave "investors" holding a couple of dollars worth if they are lucky. Some individuals do this deliberately and set out to pump up their coin, getting people to invest in any way they can. The second, they've had a few people do so; they sell all their holdings and disappear, but not too far. Then, they create a new account and do it again.

Here's a recent scam attempt. This account did over 20,000 transactions within four days, clearly using a bot to mass private message people. To put that into perspective, as I write this, I am shy of 15,000 transactions over 305 days.


Some people have found themselves in certain circumstances and use that to justify their actions. This is a grey area that many people have and will argue over until the cows come home. We all have different moral compasses, and I will not get into it here.

So, have we been rugged?

Technically, we haven't, and yes, we kind of have. The developers are still here with their big bag of crypto. Does it feel like we've been rugged? It does, in my opinion. Why? For starters, the false floor the price of clout/DeSo was kept at gave many people a false sense of security. It was deliberately misleading. Then the floor was taken away when it suited. It suited them to take that false floor away, to get listed on Coinbase. Then, of course, it suited a few other people who, in my opinion, were told about it first. This is how this place operates—jobs for the boys, grants for the boys, warnings for the boys.

Who did it suit? Nader, he is, after all, the decision-maker. He is the one all the fanboys and girls praise as a genius if you take the praise, the worship, and the good. If you position yourself as the face of the project. Then you must take the criticisms and the bad as well. The buck stops with him. It's what good leaders do, and he is not a good leader. I've not shied away from being critical of Nader, core and the platform. Having said that, most criticisms are formed by one's opinions. Everyone can have an opinion; it doesn't mean they are right or wrong until proven either way. The proof isn't someone else's opinion unless it is backed with hard facts and evidence.

Next, we have the bottoming out of the DeSo price. I'm not surprised at all that it's where it is at. I predicted exactly what would happen after the Coinbase listing. It's on-chain somewhere, but there are people here on DeSo that I said it to and have and will back me on it. I said it would peak briefly shortly after listing before resting back at its listing price before it gradually keeps falling until it's below about $20 or worse by early next year, roughly April/May.

There are many factors why this happened. I'll briefly touch on the main ones.

Lack of effective marketing including, but not limited to -

The absolute shambles of a referral system. When it first launched, I groaned because, like many others, I knew that there'd be so many people out there just signing up to claim their $100, and they wouldn't be back. Who can blame them? A hundred bucks is a hundred bucks, right? Then there were the regional issues as well that many faced. There's planning a proper rollout of such a program to include where the majority of your active users come from or rolling out the quickest and easiest program you can. Because deliver, deliver, deliver. Doing it properly will take extra time. That's how doing things properly works.

There are some fantastic people in the community, brilliant, talented people. Good people that do so much and have so much to offer. Why that wasn't tapped into blows my mind, not everyone is great at doing everything. Smart people surround themselves with people who are smarter than them. Especially in areas they may be lacking.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again -


Then there's the issue of the Octane Fund. I'm not going to go into great detail on that. Most of us know. It was handled poorly, with severely ineffective communication. Disappointing that a no-strings-attached grant, for some, ended up having strings attached. Mind-blowing that one of those strings was that there weren't enough DAUs for them to warrant completing the grants. On projects that were being built, still are building. Have used much of their own time, energy and money, giving so much to their projects when they were expecting that second half of grant money. One project, particularly, directed funds from their other businesses. You could say a risky step, but you must admit if you've been told. "Yes, happy to give you this grant, half now, half in February. Of X amount of dollars. No strings attached." (paraphrasing, not an actual quote) All you have to do is follow the plan you've outlined. Your roadmap, whitepaper, whatever it is that you've presented and they've funded based on this presentation, you'd feel confident. Very confident if you are exceeding your targets. That is until months go by with zero communication.

Then there is this particular nugget.


In my opinion, people who say things like, "we were early" and "ahead of our time" as reasons they gave up, stopped improving, and stopped believing in their product as others did. It's just a cop-out. Either they were just lazy, or they weren't making enough money. Probably both. Or it was too hard.

Also, remember when "diamondhands" would still be an account he would use daily and buy NFTs from, "invest" in creator coins (I put invest in quotation marks for a reason. How often has Nader/diamondhands, talked up investing, aping into either an NFT, project or creator coin? Fascinating that the TOS go all out, saying it's not investing etc.).

And oh boy, did the last part of that comment not age well?

This is why it feels like we've been rugged. When you fall victim to a rug, you feel betrayed, lied to, misled, ignored, and not cared about. This is what creators, creator coins and NFTs are. We are collateral damage. They've never pretended to care about the community.

They are going to start caring now? I said I wouldn't hold my breath and I'll believe it when I see it—still waiting.

So all this time, we've heard that DeSo needs builders, gotta get builders. At the expense of the community. I've seen people ask, what good is it to build if no one uses the products?


Huh, we're builders, are we? It's actually possible to do both. Build a community, and build products for that community to test—a shocking concept, I know.
So D,D is a platform for builders, built on a platform for.... builders?
Surely I'm not the only person thinking that?

How long have they been building DAODAO? Instead of fixing even the most basic of issues? DAODAO (seriously, the name is worse than DiamondApp for a name) D,D is not going to be the saviour, the "killer app" in my opinion. Why? Fewer people know what DAOs are than about decentralised social media. People within crypto don't know. Other crypto people don't want to be part of them. And of the people that do, let me ask you this. How busy is your life now? Do you find yourself getting overwhelmed at times with everything going on? If so, do you plan on joining a dozen DAOs? More? I'm already in three, two outside of D'D. One inside. That's already more than enough.

So how are we going to get DAUs up? If they couldn't even get DAUs up over a year on DeSo?

Now look, I fully accept I could be wrong. But I think in 12 months' time, we'll have people asking...

Have we been rugged?

Just for shits and giggles.....


And lastly, we heard again, that it's been postponed.

Originally posted on Zirkels, May 28, 2022, 12:05 pm by JD on DeSo Opinions