Great article, Piotr! I had heard about this Crowd Machine recently, myself, and have been wanting to take a deeper look also. Thanks for the great head start. Just so little time these days. I've gotta run, but will be sure to give this one some more of my attention soon. Take care
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I really think it's worth your time. Crowd Machine is blowing my mind and Im seriously considering trying to build my own small blockchain app once it's ready (mostly for fun).
Hi Piotr,
Yeah, it does look interesting. The real question is have you (or anyone you know) been able to test it in any way whatsoever or is it even available to test out yet? I can't seem to find much on that.
They say in their FAQs:
The Crowd Computer will not be available until Q4 of this year, which is a fairly long way off to be able to really test it fully in the real world.
I see it is a for profit company, but I can't find much info on them. In the TOS I see they are 3 companies: Crowd Machine SEZC, Crowd Machine, Inc., and Metavine, Inc. (collectively "Crowd Machine") and that they fall under the laws of the Cayman Islands; but I can't find any address, tel, etc. not even in the Whois database of the domain name, which hides under Privacy Protect, LLC and was registered originally in 2009. So I wonder why it has taken them so long to get to this ICO stage and still not even have a workable product/service yet. All of this to me is a huge sign of caution in my book.
The main difficulty I have with Crowd Machine is that it looks just like so many other ERC20-based ICOs that have great ideas, but not yet proven and thus a real gamble at this stage. A very large percentage of ICOs have crashed and burned recently when it came time to really make it happen. This makes it seem to be a highly speculative proposition until they can put some real proof behind their claims. Just my thoughts after reading and looking into them for a few hours now.
I've tried to sign up for their beta program but it's closed already. It seem that they had already 5 different beta tests happening so I presume that this project is quite advanced.
At the same time I read someone saying that this software will be fully ready within a year or so. That's still long way to go. Definetly it's worth paying closer attention.
Im so impressed with your investigation. You're GOOOD!
"All of this to me is a huge sign of caution in my book.".
Indeed all your reasons mentioned above are raising some sort of red flag. I never invested in any ICO and I do not intent to. My goal is to bring programmers/developers attention to their product (not investors).
Thank you again for such an excellent comment. You're absolutely one of the most valuable blogger I've ever met in my life so far.
Thanks, Piotr. A few beta tests and not planning to be fully ready until a year or so is an even greater red flag to me. In a way these sorts of flags in Crowd Machine are some of the things that cause the critics, regulators, authorities, SEC etc. to move towards more stringent regulations and thus, unfortunately their lack of honest open transparency makes it more difficult for others. Especially if they are a for-profit company (of companies), they should show more professional open transparency and explain things such as why they have 3 companies in far more detail, as well as where they are and how they can be reached. That should be paramount in my view. That's one difference between what is now termed "White Paper" and what was always considered a good business plan. With all the many similarities to the DotCom bubble/crash, one would think businesses would learn from all the mistakes of the past. Instead they make the same mistakes even worse.
I've found very fresh public interview with Crowd Machine CEO. Perhaps you will find this video usefull:
Good video! They certainly have lots of really good ideas.
Listening to some of those, I still have difficulty with why they are a for-profit company. I think like Jed McCaleb, co-founder of Stellar, sometimes mentions, as to why he broke away and forked off of Ripple. He speaks of imagining how the internet would be, if it was created and launched by one for-profit corporate entity. It would never have developed into what it is; still largely free and uncensored as it is today. I think this same reasoning is at the core issue of so many problems that steemit itself has as being a for-profit company as well.