Pi Network's mainnet just launched, and I see a rug pull
Pi Network's mainnet just launched today, and to me this looks like an absolute rug pull, headed toward zero, a terrible investment. I'm writing this because I'm tired of seeing people get ripped off on things that are obviously horrible, and I hope at least one person can see through this deception. So many of you have been asking me: what about Pi? It just launched. Well, I see some huge problems with it right now.
First, the market cap. According to the CoinMarketCap page they obviously paid to submit, it's $5.5 billion, but the fully diluted valuation is $91 billion. For context, that is higher than Solana right now. In my view, you are almost guaranteed to lose money on this. If I had any of these coins, I would dump them immediately, because my honest price prediction is that this is going toward zero. I wouldn't be surprised to see it down at $0.10, or even close to $0.01, over the next few months.
The real question is this: is the technology truly valuable, or is this just another pump-and-dump crypto mafia ripoff coin, which in my experience 99.99% of crypto turns out to be? From what I see, this absolutely is the latter.
Mining crypto on your phone is a stupid concept
The Pi Network has finally launched the Pi blockchain. If you go to their website at minepi.com, which is linked on the CoinMarketCap page, it says this is the first digital currency you can mine on your phone. Let's back up for a minute. This sounds good, doesn't it? Oh, you can mine it on your phone. But let's think it through a little more. You're just going to have people all over the world mining it. Proof-of-work mining, and mining on a phone, is, in my opinion, a stupid concept. It's ridiculous. I see no value in it. It's a great narrative to trick people into thinking something real is happening, but proof-of-work mining is massively wasteful. Your phone is already a big enough distraction. You've already got enough stuff to do on it. And really, you're all just going to be mining this on your phone, and then how is that going to work out? Is there going to be any integrity in it? What about people who get networks of thousands of phones together and rip the network off?
The site says it won't drain your battery. To me, that's obviously a lie, and I'm sure there's some technical truth behind the claim, but I don't see that this is fundamentally useful technology. Why would anybody who's not already involved open this app and start trying to get crypto on their phone? I've heard from people who actually used this before the blockchain launched, and they put in tons of energy, time, and effort trying to mine Pi on their phone and they earned nothing. To me, you're just suckers for getting tricked into downloading something like this. And the only relief, once you realize you're a sucker, is to stop playing that game. I used to go to the casino and gamble, and the solution there was the same: stop going to the casino and cash out.
The blockchain itself looks slow and weak
If you look at the blockchain now that it's launched, this is maximum hype, and there's a block roughly every five seconds. That's slow. It's one bad thing after another that I see here. Right now you have only a few transactions, maybe 20 or 30, and blocks about five seconds apart. If you don't know anything about crypto, you have nothing to compare that to. But there is the Internet Computer that does thousands of transactions a second, and it's powering entire social networks like my OpenChat, fully on-chain. The governance for ICP is also fully on-chain, which means there's a real point to holding the token: you can hold it and go in and vote on the things that actually upgrade the network.
When you compare that to Pi Network, I don't see any reason you would hold the token, even if you did waste your time, download the app, try to mine it on your phone, and actually get something. And it doesn't even look like there are that many blocks you can get right now. Imagine there were a bunch of people mining it on their phones; there still aren't very many blocks, just one every five seconds. That's super slow compared to the Internet Computer Protocol, which sends a transaction in half a second. It's slow compared to Solana. At this point it's ridiculous to expect people to use technology inferior to Solana. Solana sucks in my opinion, but at least the transactions land in half a second. So why would anyone in their right mind, which most people in crypto are not, settle for five-second blocks on Pi Network?
I know Bitcoin's blocks are slower, but Bitcoin already has Wall Street, and it already has a whole lot of money and people behind it pushing it. To me, the only way to have a real alternative to Bitcoin is to build something vastly technologically superior. This is not that.
Inflated communities and a tiny team
The site says, ask our community of over 60 million engaged humans. I don't see any proof that there are 60 million engaged humans. And if it's something you can just run and mine on your phone, it's easy to build. They say, don't worry if you're new to blockchain or Web3 development, it simplifies the process for you. But you can't really build anything directly on the blockchain. As with all these other blockchains, you have to build almost everything on regular Web2 infrastructure and then connect the blockchain in. That's useless to me. And this has already been around with Pi Network for five years.
If you look at the "who we are" section, after five years there are two people: one guy is the head of technology, and the other is the head of product, who appears to have a PhD in anthropological sciences. So maybe one actual engineer on this project? This looks like something that was pretty easy to create, and in my view they're just stealing from you. There are only 35 core team members globally for a project with a market cap as big as Solana's fully diluted valuation. I believe you're going to get dumped on badly. I've gone back and watched my old videos, and I'm almost always right. Almost always.
The social media looks grossly inflated with bots
Their social media appears to be grossly inflated with bots: 3.5 million members, 3.8 million followers, and only one account following. These cryptos use a playbook where they do all the same things to manipulate numbers and cheat and lie to you, and this looks like they've gone harder than most with bots. You can see it because with real organic content there tends to be significant diversity in how many comments and posts each thing gets. But look at these two posts: 5,000 comments, 6,000 retweets, 25,000 likes; then 5,000 comments again within a few hundred, 4,000 retweets, 26,000 likes. Do you see it? That's bots or ads, but more than likely bots. They're just faking and committing fraud.
If you go into the actual comments, it looks like they've paid a bunch of people to hype this up, but a lot of the comments are pretty negative. Things like: "You're sleeping last few years, clowns." "Your maintenance is not working." Then still, "Pi pioneers are all winners." "Pi coin launched today, not one word about it from the network leaders, what am I missing here?" "Definitely five years of disciplined mining should be worth a few words from you guys." "Well, that went well, what a waste of all those years mining." You should be reading this stuff before you buy anything.
People have repeatedly told me, in my Twitch chat, in my OpenChat, and in my YouTube comments, that this is the actual experience: years of trying to mine Pi, and nothing in return. You can see how fake this is when you compare what people are actually saying in the comments versus what the project claims. This is how so many of you get lied to, because many researching wouldn't even look at the X account to begin with. And if you did, all you'd see is a lot of activity, and you'd think, oh, that's legit, great, the website looks fine, I see transactions. But a lot of you wouldn't do more than glance at a price chart.
My bottom line on Pi
So, in my belief, 99.9% of the time the price for this will be much lower than it is today. This is an extremely dangerous crypto. Under no circumstances would I buy it. It's an absolute dumpster fire. Unlike anyone who's hyping this up, I'm not getting paid to say any of this. I'm telling you because I care about you and I don't want you to get stolen from. If you want to think more carefully about where your money goes before chasing the next launch, I share a lot more of how I look at this in my Money playlist.