It’s not a scam, just a little bump in road. Now is the time to load up!
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Where there is money involved, there will always be bad actors. One can argue that the immutability of blockchain ledger and decentralization of control allows for better tracking vs paper money but alas, that’s a whole other conversation 
I can safely say, it takes far less time for me to sell my crypto and transfer to my bank account than it does any traditional stock or investment. Most exchanges allow 5 figure level withdrawals every week by email money transfers now!
I bought at 60k, 42k, 37k and went in hard at 25k now…rien ne va plus! 
I‘m not sure what people mean when they say “it’s a scam” - what is a scam? Blockchain technology? Blockchain networks? Bitcoin? Stablecoins? Altcoins? Memecoins?
Yeah ok, memecoins are a scam, altcoins are primarily entrepreneurial projects that aim to build blockchain based networks with “in-network currencies/economies” (akin to EA Sports or 2K with their in-game currencies) — some of those are scams as well though. Stablecoins are experiments in digital currency, many interesting players there that are not scammers at all, and bitcoin is as much (or as little of) a scam as gold, diamonds or the US dollar are.
What IS a scam, is the pump’n’dump media coverage and broker activities that try to leverage people’s greed to get them to invest into something they don’t understand — that part def sucks.
And of course cryptos are as of yet much more susceptible to market manipulation than mainstream investment vehicles, though those are def not immune to market manipulation at all. And a half decent thing about blockchain based value networks is that you can at least see the movements of manipulation clearly and in real time (which can be more difficult to track for mainstream assets such as real estate, derivatives, spread bets etc)
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So that’s where they all went!
With ALL investments, don’t forget to buy low and sell high… obviously
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That’s what my dad said to me when I told him I wanted to study business… “what’s there to study?! Buy low sell high, done.” 
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I wish I had more $ to buy right now. It would’ve been nice to grab a bunch of AFRM yesterday afternoon. Currently, I’m sitting on a bunch of KPLT, waiting for it to moon.
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Had a longer conversation with a good friend who’s been at it for quite a while…he felt bitcoin could hit 20k in this dip which he saw as the floor at which to go in aggressively…personally I feel it’s already a great buy, but then to me it’s a great buy at 35k as well
I don’t have much exposure in other projects, MATIC, Tezos, ATOM and a few more of that tier & type. I wonder about Polygon, was bullish on it for a while and had a good run but my optimism hasn’t really been rewarded since.
“Scam” may not be the correct word, but many people consider the deflationary structure of most blockchain-based currencies to closely reflect pyramid schemes. The intentional scarcity favors early adoption with extreme negative consequences for late adopters; this tends to be reinforced by how proof-of-work/stake is determined during mining/transactions, and who benefits from gatekeeping those transactions. I think people also conflate the term “scam” with the technology itself, when really what they are talking about is extremely poor security around protecting assets in the blockchain, and the consequences for users resulting from instability in how they are maintained or leveraged. The valuation of crypto is currently wildly decoupled from any real function they perform: it’s quite an incredible amount of speculation around a technology that looks in many ways to be a solution (and not even a particularly good one at that) in search of a problem.
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Cryptocurrency isn’t a computing or information technology, it’s a social technology. The creators and early adopters extract money from those last through the door by expressing enthusiasm and spruiking their gains. That’s it.
You might disdain the pump’n’dump Discords, the paid Youtube shills, and the Twitter spammers, but without them none of these ‘investments’ are worth anything. If you participate, any profit you make is on the back on their efforts, and it comes from the savings of people just slightly stupider or less lucky than yourself.
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You’re describing most of stock market activity, diamonds, the market for gold, and even most fiat currencies.
Social accord and expected value — not actual returns or earnings — are the driving forces of market movement for all of these. Don’t believe me? Consider that until a few days ago, eg Shopify traded for 480x the price to sales… is that value-based pricing in your book?
The dynamics you describe are the function of a marginalist / neo-liberal idea of value, which unfortunately is the dominant take on value creation and appreciation in our economic world today.
But I do agree with you that blockchain tech is primarily a social technology/innovation, though I’m not automatically equating it to a ponzi scheme as you do here.
Projects such as bitcoin challenge primarily gold as a store of value, and it has clear advantages over gold in that function. It is as much or as little a ponzi scheme as gold is or the US dollar, your call here.
Projects such as Ethereum, Solana, Tezos etc are actual functional technologies that enable use cases for millions of people. Clustering something like Dogecoin (which is a ponzi scheme) with these projects is plain and simple not fair nor accurate.
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I agree, with the exception of fiat currency, the strength of which is based on the credibility of the issuing government and the economic capacity of the country.
Shares go through phases of acting like cryptocurrency - as they have for the last few years - but usually return, after a mania cycle, to reflecting the underlying profitability of the relevant business. The recent crypto mania, and the tech stock mania that drove up the price of Shopify and hundreds of other useless tech companies, are part of the same financial-social event. It’s all stupid.
The fact that something is a technology with a use case does not mean that it’s a good technology with a use case that isn’t already better met elsewhere. For example, a lot of US crypto fans enthuse about transferring money between individuals really quickly. The truth is, this is already possible in most of the world, including for poverty-line Kenyan farmers using brick-phones. This idiosyncratic technological backwardness of the USA gets mistaken for a use case.
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All these coins and the related projects are somehow intransparent. I have not seen any good explanations for a broader public except you are a developer, then you know what is going on.
If mid-size to big companies are going to adopt this kind of technology on a large scale and the effects can be seen and feel for anyone in their daily lives like it was with the first smartphones, then this technology has matured … but at the moment i just see an interesting and new gambling asset with a 100k+ people talking and writing about it on YT, blogs and elsewhere as if there is no tomorrow… and this makes it suspicious to me. I mean the expression “to the moon” becomes to me synonymous with stupidity and extremely unrealistic expectations about value-development on any coins out there.
anyway, if any real company is going to implement it seriously with a measurable effect, I’d rather invest in the company than in the coin and it’s offspring incarnations
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Yes we do! (see edits while you were responding)
Re fiat, I hear you on that, though if you look at the US government’s debt to earnings ratio, it becomes clear that actually the US government gives little confidence nor justification to back the us dollar…if the US gov were a publicly traded company, it would be in deep trouble.
To my mind, it’s the fact that the dollar is the currency which oil is pegged against / priced and traded in, that holds up its value. You can see that also in China’s and Russia’s recent efforts to get OPEC countries to price and trade their oil supplies in Yuan.
I should add, I’m not a fan of that marginalist view AT ALL. I’ve formulated and taught an alternative value theory when I was working in academia, because the marginalist view is ultimately destructive to the planet, but mainstream alternatives (mainly marxist/materialist views) are just as limiting in their own ways.
Truth is, value is not subjective it’s contextual, but the system is not run through that narrative atm. What I like about blockchain tech, especially proof of stake protocols, is that that validation process (is it or is it not?) is decentralised and to some extend democratised rather than centrally controlled.
I know that many projects that claim to be decentralised are in fact not (eg ETH is accused of that), which is a shame and is just the techno-financial nexus, that capitalist appropriation machine attempting to appropriate a new social tech.
I’m still bullish on it because it seems like the best way out of the status quo, not sure if we will or should land there in the end though.
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This is part of the problem. You’re not missing anything. People who claim to be tech experts bamboozle everyone into thinking there’s amazing technology behind crypto and you just don’t understand it.
There isn’t. Ask actual God-tier computer scientists like Grady Booch or Kelsey HIghtower and they will say: the technology is crap. It is nothing new or special at all . It’s a series of append-only databases. It wouldn’t have been innovative 20 years ago. If creating a cryptocurrency was such an amazing technological achievement, why would we have thousands of them appearing at the same time?
Agreed! And let’s not sugar coat it, there is DEFINITELY an industry built around crypto projects that attempts to lure people into pump n dump schemes.
An interesting crypto project coming out of Berlin is the startup Rekursiv. They are building a protocol that enables companies to create in-company share option economies based on crypto. The idea is that companies commit a part of their future earnings into the network (just as with a regular ESOB / virtual share scheme) which then lends value to the coins held.
I like this sort of project because it tries to employ blockchain tech to enable and empower self organisation and fairer distribution of value created across those parties in a system that create it. This one in particular is interesting because it attempts to peg its network’s value against real world economic activity.
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Yeah, ultimately the US debt level will cause a crisis for the US dollar, but it’s totally unpredictable when. There is still so much dollar-denominated debt in place around the world that demand for $US is pretty unsinkable in the medium term. There’s also the fact the US - much as I hate to admit it - just has enormous natural advantages because it produces a bit of everything, including energy, so no matter who you are $US are useful.
I admire the elegance of bitcoin as an idea, but I don’t think it can ever work as a currency because it’s deflationary. Basically any country that adopts it will find itself in recession because no one wants to spend a currency that constantly increases in value. Fiat currencies are an ugly thing, but I don’t see any way around that dynamic.
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there is one thing on all these stuff I’d like: I’m using the brave-browser and getting a reward in terms of a coin (BAT) … that said i’m getting paid for surfing the internet and leaving traces of my behavior for further analytics - if i like … Google doesn’t
but i have to admit it could be the case that I’m too old (45+) to understand the technology and the social impact … i guess it would make a difference if I am just 15 years old and growing up with this kind of movement
I basically grew up with the first home-computers during the eighties, moving into the just emerging web during the nineties with excitement and already dropped out during the development of the big social networks in the early years of 2000+, first like myspace and then facebook. I was 25+ back in the days when this happened. In other words I’ve lost the trace over 20 years ago - i really don’t know if i missed something
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