From: Nikolai Tsekov
I keep feeling that trying to sound official when it comes to our business instead of switching to more informal language is becoming more or less a barrier to understanding our ICO. I mean… it’s a personal thing for us. And anyone that pays his precious ETH or BTC is clearly becoming personally involved in our project. Well let’s make it personal.
First of all - our project is not like other ICOs (as if you haven’t heard that before, but please bear with me) It’s done for profit, but profit is not the sole purpose - as we want to create a thriving business, and since people are paying for the whole lot of projects, we do feel that they deserve their fair share (despite what regulation would say on the matter, there will always be countries where it’s legal).
It is not about incorporating a new company (preferably offshore), then escrowing the funds as if that actually guarantees anything, then spending a substantial amount of bitcoins for marketing because someone that doesn’t even use his name told us that this proves we are not running a false campaign. That’s the proof? My personal authority, my company and the company of my teammates, all with 15+ years of history and all of us standing with our names and reputation behind the project are not guarantee we are running a legit ICO, but a payment to anonymous profile in Youtube and/or Twitter that would promote whatever he’s paid to do, or to someone that has built a name by being paid to promote stuff, proves we are dedicated non-scammers? How so? How is that even building anyone’s authority?
Let me tell you what would we do if we were going to rob people. We will prepare a good amount of money, then use all those greedy persons that are ready to promote anything if they are paid well to promote the tokens, then sell a lot of the said tokens, and then forget about all those good people that paid with their own funds. We could even get someone famous that could play sorry for being misled later to say a good word for us, or even add them to the team. We can then make it look like we sold $20 million worth of the thing at a pre-sale, after all - most of the time this data is not backed up with transparent funds movement. And voilà - we have a huge ICO hat has “only” left $10 million in tokens for the sorry late non-investors, a.k.a you. Now that’s a good false campaign. Throw some “revolutionizing” in the name and you are all set. Well, may be include some news about being targeted by hackers! There is bound to be free articles about it, or you at least get a reason to put another press release in circulation!
We could do it. Lately most ICOs are just about that.
Instead we are running an ICO and pay for the marketing personally, because later we will get our time paid, and we are investing all the funds, because later the more of the amount we raise we invest, the more profit could be made. Cryptum scales with the amount sold, it won’t pay more or less. Quite the opposite, the board games business will pay more if there are fewer subscribers needing their games and profits, as the shares will be bigger, considering they don’t come from the funds. Whatever the ICO raises, it is going to be invested. Which is why we don’t want to pay to random websites and profiles, some of which have less visits than our newly registered and poorly advertised non-professional website, just to list our tokens. That’s just their greed - they assume they would actually do something for us other than a headcount of the sites we are listed, and we have to pay them. 90% of these will not lead to a single visit to the website. Everyone knows Cryptocompare, Coinschedule, ICO Alert, ICO Tracker and Smith + Crown. I mean everyone that ever looked into ICOs more seriously.
These are our two major investments: a sustainable board games publishing line with up to 40% of the profits paid to token owners, and a mining farm with 2years of shared profits starting at 50%
And it is also why we don’t get a share for us, we don’t allocate to investors (why would we… I mean they could get their tokens now), or for marketing. At least we didn’t allocate the 120+ BTC we’ve been asked for listing and promotions so far. That’s like $400 000+ for some form of advertisement that would clearly lead to less than what the top websites would offer with a simple listing. Yet it is often regarded a a proof of legitimacy for ICO projects. Mostly by the same people that want a share of the same pie.
We’ve been contacted by over 20 individuals, most of them hidden behind nicknames (or false names, else I’m sure there are many Chinese people called John and even more Russians called Nick). I don’t even count the latest emails and messages, I ignore them. Then come the websites - over 50 of them. We paid to some of them - like $20000 or so. Guess what, for websites trying to assess the legitimacy of companies, NONE of these websites could issue an invoice to us, and only one accepted PayPal payment. Sure, we are in the crypto world, but if they are sniffing after our company, they should start with registering a company of their own! They obviously make a lot of cash (in BTC, ETH or LTC).
And I’m pretty sure that if we call the ICO rush another Gold rush, then the real golddiggers are actually those site owners charging half a Bitcoin for publishing some text they don’t even bother to look at. Or 1 BTC to list an ICO and put some “TOP CHOICE” or whatever on it, and then promote it to their readers as if they actually even read the Whitepaper.
As I’ve been saying - all those promoters are just in for the gold. They don’t care if a project is good or bad. They don’t even bother discovering the market we are entering or the reason we make a multi-project. The reason for that is simple - they don’t really care about all this stuff, they just care to get paid and “do their job” promoting whatever it is that pays them.
And yes, Cryptum is legit. We want to make successful board games company as this business is awesome, and it’s one of the few that allow creativity of such scale while being extremely profitable (for some companies, because they have more funding, so you can see the connection). We want to have the mining farm as we know it will make the said business less dependent on bad luck, hurricanes emptying pockets, bad development decisions (no one is perfect), etc. And we want to make amazing new miners’ coin because we are crypto miners as well and we are tired of shitty coins.
If you want to be part of a real business and risk less than even keeping the funds in your wallet, just buy some CRTM. Here is what you are getting into:
We got bashed (twice) because the project doesn’t need the decentralization features of the blockchain - being a “board games sale” (because that is as far as someone’s reading comprehension allowed them to see), and I agreed - it doesn’t need it. Let me emphasize - Cryptum doesn’t need decentralization at all. In fact it is the epitome of centralization!
We hold all the power. We keep the funds. We decide what to do with them. We are the authority to appeal about issues, and we collect the access claims. Now, I doubt it is justified to call someone a name because he played Captain Obvious, but if anyone thinks decentralization is the only or the most important feature of the Ethereum blockchain, he’s clearly confused about what the technology brings on the table.
We need a blockchain solution. We can’t even do it any other way. Or we could, if there was another way to make pre-ordering non-existent (as of this moment) games in way that enables the people that pre-ordered to be entitled to receive a share of the said games profits, and then shares of the mining project profits, and then even some shiny new coins, all the while being able to trade their tokens so someone else would be entitled to receive the same perks. And maybe even more.
The blockchain enables us to use a proof of ownership system - if you have enough tokens to hit a tier - we would be able to check that. If you have some and claim profits, we would be able to see if you actually have as much and so on. Or maybe we should have promised you to decentralize the board games industry (whatever that means) and put all board games on the blockchain (whatever that means) with this project…
I’m sure we would be able to get some percentage of non-English investments if we allowed translations. But then, what would we do if they start asking questions in their own language? Okay, we are okay with English, Bulgarian and probably some Russian. We’ll probably manage to talk with someone in German (Alexandra is quite good at it), French or Spanish, but what happens if some Indonesian folks decide they have to ask us in Indonesian when will they get their games (in Indonesian)? We would never be able to translate games in anything but few major languages, and printing a translated version requires 1000+ copies being printed, so it will not happen. We are English only project as we can only make English games and communicate with people using English.
As for bounties - we have one very good answer to the only question we released so far, and quite a few people claiming a twitter bounty. Twitter followers are 100 or 1000 times more expensive than Facebook ones. And much more relevant for campaign ranking in our opinion. And we haven’t quite finished with it.
