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As Christmas draws near many people take stock of their year, and for most people in crypto it’s been brutal.
Projects made progress and hit milestones but valuations all across the board have been savaged. Startups have shuttered shop or been abandoned by struggling development teams with little to no funding. Social media is littered with the inactive accounts of “the rekt”. Google trends for Buy Bitcoin is meh.
Still, it is said that Christmas is a time for miracles.
As you reach for the eggnog it’s worth remembering that with patience and something the Spanish call cohones we might just make it. Others have, right?
All the people I’ve interviewed this year have one thing in common — they all work tremendously hard. Today’s interviewee is no exception.
A hyena is not exactly the most admired of creatures in the animal kingdom yet Mocho chose it for his avatar. They share some positive traits. A hyena is tireless, tenacious, and a survivor. So is Mocho.
Micro-cap coins are Mocho’s favorite investments and he has written on the subject and revealed some of his strategies. Over the years he has built up a 127K following and is known to most of the altcoin community on twitter.
Mocho responds to DM’s as fast or faster than any of the others I’ve talked to this year. The people he works with who I’ve spoken to, like the guys over at Human Action, have had only positive things to say about him and how he’s helped and been supportive. I’ve heard similar sentiment echoed in Pirate Chain’s community.
Mocho’s tweets often include bizarre sentences and jarring spelling mistakes. Ignoring the existence of tools available to create coherent sentences in any language is mysterious and hard to explain, but the results are always entertaining to read. Mocho is a self-styled psychedelic crypto hyena trading machine. With sunglasses.
DMme
One year ago this enigmatic cryptotwitter celebrity began his own project. As it so happens it concerns a subject near and dear to him, private messaging.
DMme ($DMME) is launching its privacy-focused messaging app in January 2020, as was recently confirmed by Mocho in discord. Originally started as a masternode privacy coin, DMme swapped to an ERC20 token and combined that move with a significant coin burn. The move to Ethereum benefits security since small PoW coins make easy prey for malicious miners. The implications for privacy, however, need clarification.
The coding of the app has been outsourced to a professional software design company. Nik Patel (cointradernik) considered this a shrewd move in his recent coin report since Mocho and the small team at DMme are not developers. Instead the team can concentrate on their strengths — namely marketing
Nik’s report also notices that DMme displayed a surprisingly stable price for a micro-cap over the last 12 months. The report points out the small amount of holding addresses (153 when written, now 155). I mention this only because it would have been very easy to manipulate this number. To DMme’s credit it wasn’t.
Since I last checked on the project some months ago DMme released its public beta of the messaging app, revamped its website, released a new promo vid, and been listed on several more exchanges. The team have met the roadmap targets and DMme is gearing up for its commercial product launch in January.
The DMme ERC20 token will be used for subscriptions, in-app purchases and probably has some other use cases we will find out about shortly.
Closed-source is not a popular term in blockchain circles. Security audits will improve confidence in projects that wish to protect their code. I asked Mocho about this and a great many other things in the most exhaustive interview I have ever conducted.
Given his experience I wanted to know his thoughts on the current market situation, and hoped with other questions to truly get a better understanding of this unique character in the crypto space. The one and only CryptoMocho.
Note: Mocho asked if I could correct the spelling and grammar of his replies. Since English is not his first language I obliged, as I always do for those whom English is not a native tongue. I do regret readers cannot experience the true magnificence of what shall come to be known as Mocho English, but in the interests of coherency it is probably for the best. Hopefully I have preserved enough of Mocho’s unique style so that his true voice is still heard.
The Fireside Chat
Part 1: Mocho
Hi Mocho, Let’s begin by looking at this past year in the crypto markets. Bitcoin price is up since January but it’s been brutal for alts. What are your thoughts about 2019, and will 2020 look like?
IMO 1st quarter 2020 will be good for alts, but then we need to be really careful with them because BTC will start to move faster and faster until May. This will be caused by the halving , but then we will see a late supper. Bitcoin could explode together with alts, or not.
Just hold that bag and sell on the way up.
You have survived in the crypto space for years where so many have been REKT and dropped out. How long have you been in the crypto scene and what’s your secret for lasting this long?
Mocho is in crypto from late 2014. Mining Bitcoin I found a place with almost free electricity so I was mining with my partners some good BTC when it was at the 200 to 400 range with S7 ASICs (this miming was in 2015/2016 ).
Then I moved to GPU rigs when Ethereum came out. We mined this for about 1 year when the price range was like $5 to $12.
So basically I survived, making money in any way and having an edge with low cost bitcoin, baking my trades and my alts positions. I know some trade stuff but feel I must buy and forget. So I accumulate an alt for a long time then wait until it explodes to take profit, and can then go on to the next.
Your twitter profile reads “Crypto is the Answer”. To what?
I was just talking about what crypto did and does for me. Crypto shows me the way to go. You don’t need too much to make money, only some crypto bags and a nice bull market. Then you need to be wise and take profit, send it to the bank and start all over again
127K followers. How have you grown such a massive following? What percentage of them would you guess are real accounts and not bots?
127k is a big number and maybe it seems too big. But when the bull market came in 2017 I was getting like 500 to 1k followers a day. The flow of new guys was just awesome. Today I don’t know if they are dead but I’ve never paid for followers, it’s just not good. Maybe some are bots, I really don’t know sir.
Please describe yourself and what you do.
I’m 100% a speculator in all of what I do. I just try to see what something can be worth in the future, and compare to the actual price. If there is a gap up I will invest. I’m only interested in gains — all what i do is based on this principle core idea.
Mining is about profit, investing is about profit, sex is about profit, so profit is king. I love passive income because it’s free work profit.
What else can you tell the readers about Mocho? For example what languages do you speak? What part of the world do you come from? Something about you — the person (or people) behind the sunglasses.
Mocho is s basic and simple looking-for-profit guy. Where i come from? (nice try FBI) but currently I’m living in Europe. I speak Spanish cholo style, Italian, some Portuguese, and Mocho English.
You have an unusual style of writing. Is it art?
I just do what comes natural to me, and this is Mocho’s writing style, sir.
Of all the creatures in the animal kingdom, why the hyena?
Wolves are overvalued lions and just too cocky. I, HYENA, is a scavenger which perfectly personalizes what a low-cap shitcoiner does.
Can you be trusted?
Don’t trust. Verify.
Part 2: DMme
Let’s talk DMME. Why did you start it?
DMme is an idea that we want to develop as a regular chat app business for a time. But with the bull market and all the busy stuff in life we postponed it.
Why did we start it? Because there is a nice gap in the privacy chat apps market. This gap will be filled with all the DMme app ecosystem: from private chat app to encrypted mail in the same app and may other privacy
features.
What are the use cases for the DMME token and why would someone invest?
DMME is an ERC20 token. DMME will be integrated in the chat app as a p2p payment method between users, and also is a dividend collector token. DMME holders will get ETH as dividends from the app’s profit. DMME will be used for payments in DMME’s ecosystem of services like the subscriptions.
How to convince investors DMME isn’t purely a money grab?
I don’t need to convince them of anything. They need to research and see what the project is doing and what it’s vision.
DMme is a low-cap coin with a working product now in beta testing.
The official release will be in January on the Google Playstore.
Marketing and promotion are two of your strengths. How will you use them to grow DMME’s user base in a world full of messaging apps?
DMme app marketing will start in all the social media and google ads as soon as we have the green light of the devs that we will deliver on time.
We will focus on growing our user base from the regular Joe’s on the Internet.
So I mean everyone will be able to use DMme app for free at first. This will give us good feedback for the path to grow.
We’re gonna promote/market the DMme app separately from the DMME tokens we want non-crypto clients as well.
The code is closed source, at least for now. Do you plan on code reviews or open-sourcing in future? How do you address people’s concerns, and is it anything to be concerned about?
DMme is real business so it’s not gonna be open source. We will own all the rights to our product and we‘re not planning on licensing deals.
Tell us about the app’s privacy features. Will any technical documentation accompany the official release of the application?
Technical documentation will be released when all is audited and ready to go.
Core DMme app privacy feature are:
- DMme servers do not store any user data at any point. All the user’s data is on their phone
- DMme app is not attached to your phone number, so only a username/ mail can be used as a profile, and a password that is the same as a private key.
- DMme app has the same principles as a GUI/CLI crypto wallet encrypted locally on the device
- Lost private key cant be restored and the account is gone forever. There is no recovery mails
Why did you do a token burn and move to ERC20?
Because it will be way easy to integrate to the chat app. Also we will integrate many other tokens on the Ethereum network. Plus investors will get ETH as dividend and not DMME. It gives them a nice incentive to hold DMME. There will be no inflation.
The ERC20 tokens sit on Ethereum’s transparent public ledger. Will you be using privacy tools in the Ethereum ecosystem (e.g. mixers) to better protect the privacy of your customers you pay subscription in DMME?
No, there will be no problem using ETH tokens because all the chat app is private.
Do you intend to remain on Ethereum for the foreseeable future?
We think Ethereum is a nice platform for our purpose but if there is a necessity we can migrate to any other ecosystem the community want.
What can you tell us about the company making the app?
The development agency belongs to an Italian friend of mine. That’s all I can tell you for now.
Please talk to us about the rest of the team and the DMme community
DMme team twitter accounts:
bioLogik4
CryptoJAV
CryptoGremlins
mujicajm
Scar6_9
cryptomocho
The community member are some of the smartest guys in cryptoland. The community is still small in number, but are real and genuine people.
There was no ICO. How has DMME been funded and how will it be funded in future? How sustainable is the path you have chosen?
DMme has $1M in cash for the next 3 years of development. Self-funded by Cryptojav and Mocho. We put in our money so that’s the reason why we hold a big part of the supply. It’s like our skim in the game.
What’s on the roadmap after the release?
- January 15th 2020: Official Android DMME CHAT APP Launch
- April: iOS release
- May / June: Release P2P crypto payment supporting ETH and many ETH tokens
- July: Encrypted mail service DMME mail service offering a cloud storage service with the potential of sending big and heavy files on the mail service
Looking back on all your years in crypto, what has been your happiest memory? What has been your greatest disappointment?
Greatest disappointment: THE MORONS DEV THAT SCAM PEOPLE
Happiest memory: When I made many many x’s in a coin. Sir, profit is what drives me. For example 66x in a coin called $BUZZ. It was a PoS coin. I got 1 bitcoin’s worth at 1 sat and in the bull market it went to 70 sat plus all my stakes. That was a killing I made, like 30 btc only from that coin alone (I sold all the way up but also the rewards helped to get more profit).
What will you be doing on Christmas Day? (this reply was left in the original Mocho English)
heating with heynas family italina style and the tequila is ready for the night
Thank you Mocho, I hope you have a Merry Christmas and prosperous New Year. Before we finish is there a final message you’d like to share with our readers?
Yes! All the guys out there please never all in and visit mocho discord to have real fun — no pay group, no shilling stuff, only pure gems and food talk.
Conclusion
One million dollars for three more years of development in a project which has hit its roadmap milestones on time and has an imminent commercial product release which will be marketed to the general public. Not a bad elevator pitch.
Mocho is always looking for gaps in markets and believes he has identified one with DMme. Not another Binance IEO headed up by dozens of MIT grads for whom crypto is shiny and new, rather DMme is an entrepreneurial startup led by one of the scene’s most aggressive and successful speculators.
Sir, profit is what drives me.
Only a month before product release DMme languishes with a market cap of scarcely over $100K, equivalent to only 1/10th of the development fund. Most other projects in the space would kill to have funding equivalent to 10x their current market cap, but it is (or at least was) unheard of.
The technical merits of the project remain to be seen with the publication of proper documentation which will accompany a code audit. Till then Mocho is making all the right noises: from dividends paid in ETH to irrecoverable lost keys and data which remains on the user’s phone and not in a shady data silo.
“Tireless” and “tenacious” was how I described a hyena. Mocho cut the crap and went with “scavenger”. The result is much the same and we both agreed on survivor. Mocho has seen many projects born, and witnessed many die. Now he will prove if DMme can survive and thrive as well he has since 2014.
Forget the eggnog this Christmas. It’s tequila time.
Thanks
Thanks to Mocho for taking time to answer so many questions
Thanks to Johnny Gonzo for the original art
