I stand by that 99% of all crypto projects are scams, frauds, and/or designed to fail.
Most founders don't even believe the project will work. They're just in it to make easy money because tokens aren't considered as securities. They can do insider trading, mint as many as they want, lie, etc.
I'm working in a Cryptocurrency startup, and all my colleagues are investing heavily into the domain, both mentally and monetarily. I cannot shake off the feeling that this is all a scam. It's so shady, from the way there are new coins and tokens every week, and how investors are throwing money into this program. I don't think my company's product deserves the sort of money it's been getting, and it feels like a bubble that will burst, sooner if not later. Some part of the tech is interesting, the essence of the blockchain, for example, but the main application seems to be just suspicious. What do others in the domain think? I'm not leaving yet because I'm not in a place to change jobs yet again, but I will, eventually, but I feel like this domain is very fishy.
Honestly, that doesn't allay my concerns at all. It all reeks of a pump-and-dump scheme. (I'm not saying that Handshake is trying to execute this scheme, but that they remind me of other projects which have done so.)
The pattern for these projects is pretty predictable: Promise amazing things from a technical project associated with a cryptocurrency token. Premine a bunch of those tokens and give them to insiders, then airdrop the token to create a market. The insiders sell off their tokens, and the project is forgotten.
I'm under the assumption (and hoping) this is just another gag project that was made in light of DeFi crypto projects getting funded without anything backing them.
They always seem to popup whenever crypto becomes sexy again. This one is just a little bit more deadpan than others.
“Maybe it’s a scam, but so is [central banking / the stock market / every other startup / etc.]”
You’re trying to gaslight the OP to believe that what they’re feeling is normal, but it’s not. In startups with real products and real users and actual growth, the mood is not “we’re just dumping tokens.”
I'm in 'they're all scams' camp. All crypto coin backers have their pet crypto that's 'totally not a scam and it's going to the moon' apparently, and they're all different.
I worked for one in DeFi on the Cardano ecosystem and I can say it is definitely a scam. But due to some paperwork I signed I can't (for now) tell who or which startup this is. They have been pulling all kinds of dirty marketing tricks while spending no time developing any actual product. I just look at the crowd that support this project and I am so so teribly disappointed and pitiful for them.
What? This is like every shit coin. Tons of them tank to near zero and deflate. Anyone who thinks these coins are legitimate are fooling themselves. They are built with one core requirement, do just enough to differentiate from other coins, pump it, get out.
The average person can't understand 99% of the specs of these coins, it's all speculation. The whole thing is a ponzi scheme.
1- Silly idea adjuncted with the blockchain label
2- No immediate answer to the question "How this is going to make money ?"
3- A white paper without substance, just a piece of marketing paper convincing you about the scheme with lots of use case diagrams etc
4- Ratio of advisors and other fuzzy titles / technical people at 10+
I think reading a whitepaper only gives you, at best, half the picture. However, because crypto tokens are fundamentally financial products, a whitepaper says little about whether a particular project using said technology is a scam. The long list of scammy ICOs and rug pulls is plenty of evidence of that. Ironically, while blockchain technology decentralizes the bookkeeping of digital assets, you often have to trust the intentions of a very small group of unaccountable individuals to not get taken advantage of by insider trading, front running, wash trading, rug pulls, and various other financial scams.
"Anti-fraud" is especially funny considering how fraudulent the whole cryptocurrency space is.
But anyway, to quote Nicholas Weaver (https://youtu.be/xCHab0dNnj4?t=1667), "[the people proposing those projects] are never actually even able to even articulate what the hard problems are, like what data, what formats, what honesty, who's adding the data, what enforcement — shoving garbage into an append-only ledger doesn't solve your problems!"
This is unfortunately how people get into the habit of thinking all crypto and blockchain is a scam - because a huge numbers of scams and silly ideas are indeed running in the space...
That’s the problem with all the idiotic blockchain projects around at the moment. I was only ninety percent sure it was a joke until about halfway through when the performance chart confirmed it but it is only slightly more ridiculous than several “legitimate” projects.
It's not that the tech itself is a scam per se (although there are plenty of cryptocurrencies that were started with the express purpose of being a ponzi scheme or a pre-mined vehicle for a pump and dump).
It's just that widely available, totally unregulated financial instruments will always be primarily used to run ponzi schemes, pump and dumps and meaningless speculation (meaningless in that speculators are largely just speculating based on what other speculators might do).
I still do not understand why yee guys got involved in Stellar which was a clearly a rehash of the earlier Ripple scam up to and including same system, interface and people working on it.
CEO - Serial Blockchain Entrepreneur. In this for the long haul!
CTO - "Crypto expert" == Business guy who understands blockchain superficially
CFO - This guy is real, of course.
Working code! = Fork
Whitepaper = Buzzword language that just says their going to tokenize something. 'LegitCoin will tokenize the derivatives market for solar!'
Create positive pump articles and videos for us for free tokens!
My non-technical brother in law asks me every other day to look into one of these turds for him, and I have to deflate his bubble.
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