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"This points out a fundamental problem with programmable financial assets: there are so many degrees of freedom that it's difficult to compare asset prices and perform arbitrage. In fact, I would not be surprised if the developers purposefully made their contracts complex to discourage such comparisons. Additional complexity also makes it difficult for the investors to figure out what exactly they are buying. Why should someone who wants to exit a crowd-funding vehicle follow a weird software engineering pattern that is tantamount to buying a timelocked asset? What exactly happens to the reward tokens of The DAO through splits? Why is this stuff so needlessly complicated?"

This sounds all too much like Paycoin. Paycoin was a competitor to Bitcoin, but it was much more complicated. There was a claimed guarantee that the price of Paycoin would not fall below $20. (The current price of Paycoin is $0.01212923.) There was a connection to a Bitcoin mining operation, GAW miners. There was BanxShares, which was some kind of derivative based on Paycoin and backed by a porno site.[1] There were ZenCloud and PayBase. There was a Paycoin Foundation. There was supposedly a reserve in US dollars backing Paycoin.[2] There was a "Hybrid Flex Blockchain" to provide faster confirmations.

The result was a disaster.[3]

There's a long history of complicated Ponzi-like things. Sergei Mavrodi did it twice, once in the 1990s with "MMM" in Russia, [4], and again, after doing jail time, as Bitcoin-based "MMM Global" in the 2010s.[5] MMM was a combination lending network, pyramid scheme with a downline, and Ponzi. It collapsed both times, of course.

Warren Buffett on overly complex finance: [6]

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=813191.0 [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20150214110136/https://paycoin.co... [3] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/death-paycoin-employee-... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMM_%28Ponzi_scheme_company%29 [5] http://www.fin24.com/Money/Investments/alleged-sa-ponzi-sche... [6] http://www.buffettsecrets.com/understanding-the-company.htm

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