Can HEX Really Be Better Than Bitcoin?
For those with an eye on the crypto space, especially those that got burned in the 2018 bear market, I’m sure you’re tired of hearing about the next big thing that’s “better than Bitcoin”. With a click-bait title like this, I’m not doing myself any favors. I’ve been involved in the space since 2015, and tried everything from mining to trading to blogging — basically everything besides printing my own altcoin. I’ve been through scams, false hope, delusions of overnight trading success, and more. Believe me when I say at this point I’m about as skeptical as it gets.
Why should this new project, Hex be different than 99.9% of projects out there? I will go through the arguments both for and against Hex, as I find it to be one of the most interesting projects in this space from a purely game-theoretical perspective. At the end of the day, it’s up to you to decide to claim your Hex.
Richard Heart — The Creator
From what I’ve seen, Richard Heart is a wealthy, enigmatic, and charismatic YouTuber and influencer in the cryptocurrency universe who’s had the audacity to speak more rationally and sensibly than most others in this space. He speaks his mind honestly if nothing else. Give him a listen and see for yourself.
He might come off as cocky (which I find entertaining), but I do consider him to be a smart guy based off his track record, intentions, and actions.
After reading some in-depth material and watching nearly all his videos, it’s become clear. Long story short, he got rich of sales and internet marketing, and even richer off Bitcoin. Dude’s no joke.
He’s in the process of writing a 400+ page book about how to achieve success in life, and has a short YouTube series with a similar theme (aside from crypto education videos). His motives now seem to be giving back to the crypto community (and himself) to eventually to help save the world. He’s spent at least 8 months, possibly more, developing Bitcoin Hex. This is a free airdropped token that aims to digitize CDs on Ethereum. Seems pretty unlikely that he would spend all this effort (and be so open about it) with the intent to deceive and harm others.
The effort he’s put into making himself a public figure gives you, yes you, the freedom to make your own judgments about his motives and character. I told you what I think.
How HEX Works
Essentially, Hex is CDs on Ethereum. $571 Billion dollars of value is currently stored in conventional bank-owned CDs in the USA alone. After stores of value and payments, this financial product seems like the next logical low-hanging-fruit to tackle (if done right).
Richard seems quite proud of the many game-theory-based rewards involved in claiming Bitcoin Hex. The website is still slightly outdated, but if you follow the Hex telegram channel you will find that these are the most accurate new bonuses for the claim period and beyond:
All these bonuses are designed to maintain your interest as you devise your own optimal staking period, considering what everybody else will do. It requires you to make some assumptions while allowing many different visualizations of how your stake and bonuses are growing. As Richard would say, the ‘pumpamentals’ can’t really get any better.
By the way, remember that referral bonus? Use mine to claim your Hex when the time comes and you get 10% more! It’s less than 50 days away.
What Can Go Wrong?
If you google Bitcoin Hex, one of the first articles you get is literally called “Why Richard Heart’s Bitcoin Hex is a Scam”. This is off-putting. I’ll aim to go over some of the valid points from the article, and some of the other logical leaps the author makes.
Semi-Truths
…whenever somebody decides to claim their tokens, we see a minting process which benefits the “origin” address
Richard has made no effort to hide this functionality and openly talks about it all the time. The origin address (whoever that may be) gets tokens to help continue supporting the project through marketing. This address can potentially do literally anything else with the newly printed Hex tokens, including dumping them all as soon as they hit any BTC market and running away forever. The outcome of this unlikely scenario would leave the immutable smart contracts governing Hex up and working indefinitely. Hex would continue to exist even if this was some sort of highly elaborate exit scam.
None of these men is among the most reputed and best known developers of either Bitcoin or Ethereum…
Because the best known Bitcoin and Ethereum developers are working on their own important projects, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Does every project need to list Vitalik Buterin as an ‘advisor’ after exchanging a few emails with him these days? The article states other red flags are the lack of social media links, which he heroically googled for us to reveal: nothing particularly misleading or alarming! Not to mention there are absolutely zero primary sources cited on any articles written about him or the project. The lack of fake endorsements and partnerships are also alarming for the author, because certainly 4 smart people can’t form an Ethereum project on their own without the backing of Ernst and Young and Tim Draper. Isn’t the new Ethereum narrative centered around “Open Finance” anyways? I figured that meant open to anyone.
…the price to pay is privacy itself, as participants to the Hex scheme willingly reveal to the public how many bitcoins they own.
Subscribing to Richards email notifications on the HEX website might reveal your personal privacy, if you use your personal email. Claiming coins during the snapshot however will not. The BTC snapshot requires you ti sign a digital signature to prove ownership of your BTC, which is then ingested in to the smart contract to create HEX tokens proportional to the BTC you proved to own (10,000 HEX per BTC). Ideally, giving away your email can leave you a target for hackers. If you care about this, use an anonymous email, and a BTC wallet like Wasabi that’s connected to your Tor network. Or use one of the many other Bitcoin obfuscation methods available. Then your 3 Bitcoin won’t be such an alluring target for these evil and nefarious hackers. If you do have a significant amount of Bitcoin, you’re probably also savvy enough to get around sacrificing your privacy so easily during the claim period.
Questionable Claims from the ‘scam’ article
…whenever somebody decides to claim their tokens, we see a minting process which benefits the “origin” address
The article claims the origin address gets a copy of all coins printed as a “founders reward”. This is misleading. It’s only the claim bonuses and penalties from early un-staking that the origin address gets. An early un-staking penalty is analogous to the penalty a bank will charge you if you pull money our of your CD before the term you specified is over.
What if Bitcoin was an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, didn’t require its own hardware to secure the network, and had its entire supply redistributed…
The author of the article seems to think HEX is really trying to be Bitcoin. This is hard to believe given all the criticism Richard has given to Bitcoin lately in his videos. Hex clearly states it is an ERC20 token designed to be digital and trustless Certificates of Deposit, and be “better than Bitcoin” in terms of potential gains, game theory, adoption, and features.
Bitcoin Hex resembles a Ponzi scheme much more than many other cryptocurrency projects
These tokens are free. It’s similar to an airdrop if anything — some examples of airdrops include Crypto Kitties or BTT (one of the most hyped projects as of recently). If we are calling all these things Ponzi’s just because they started at 0 value and then ended up having value, then every valuable idea in all of humanity is a Ponzi scheme. In reality, I bet the buyer of this rare 1st edition Charizard Pokemon card is simply happy to have it in his collection, not scheming to sell it to the next greater fool. Ideas start off with no value and must compete. Maybe we should all be mad at Ty Warner for making Beanie Babies.
We can speculate on why the origin address gets a copy of all the claim bonus rewards, but Richard has stated himself that the project needs a funding mechanism for marketing. He’s mentioned that if any of these projects (which have enormous pre-mines or founder’s rewards) used even a fraction of their money on proper marketing, they would be valued immensely higher. Pretty solid point. The guy is already rich, but he (or the anonymous “Origin Address”) will still need money to support the project. Unfortunately, Richard cannot make promises of future work to avoid the Howey Test and risk becoming an unregistered security by US law. An “Exit Scam” from Richard Heart (as the article claims) seems unlikely for a guy who’s been retired (exited) for years and has a passion for longevity research. For a guy who wrote a book on the benefits of altruism and techniques for self-improvement, it seems pretty unlikely that he’s going to cash out the origin address and spend the remainder of his years locked in his castle sitting on his pile of digitally printed gold. To me there is a difference between unproductive cynicism vs harsh realism. The scam article author and Richard portray that duality. Again, you make your own judgement here.
Summary: Digital CDs with potential for huge ROI
Age-old wisdom tells us “if something is too good to be true, it probably is”.
That said, HEX never claimed to make anyone an overnight crypto millionaire. If I told you 9 years ago that buying 10,000 Bitcoin for $1,000 USD and not touching it for 10 years will make you 50 million dollars in 2019, that would have sounded like a ponzi scheme too. That logic would have kept you poor. It’s also not necessarily easy to have done this, which is why many did not. Some of those people seem hell-bent on justifying that to themselves by spending their time finding reasons why Bitcoin will never work.
We live in a world of paradoxes. Adage says never trust something that is too good to be true, but Elon Musk/Peter Theil/Naval Ravikant/[insert influental person] says taking risks is the number one key to success. Caring what other people think of you is good for forming bonds and a strong social circle, but can also limit your potential as a human by keeping you stuck in a sub-par tribe. Food that is terrible for you tastes the best. At the end of the day we have to question the limitations of the game we are playing, while being bound by some harsh realities and boundaries of those same systems.
Richard is not trying to scam people out of their money; he’s been rich and retired since 2003. Listen to him yourself if you don’t believe me. He’s in it for the power and influence.
If you’re still reading, thank you! If you enjoyed this article and found it useful, share it. And remember, we are in it for the technology ;)
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