The Wild West Of Cryptocurrency Otherwise Known As ICOs

aftabkhan10 (68)in #cryptocurrency • 6 years ago

What's up guys, today we're going to be talking about the Wild West of cryptocurrency otherwise known as ICOs.

If you are not familiar with what an ICO is, it stands for Initial Coin Offering. Basically, this is an event where a company takes in money before they release their tokens to the public and then once they do have the tokens they distribute them to the people that purchased to be part of the ICO their tokens relative to how much they bought. So basically it's a way that people can buy into tokens before they are publicly available.

Now the reason this is attractive to people is that the rate they are trade at publicly might be a lot higher than the rate they were able to buy in beforehand, while your upside might be big.

Some drawbacks to ICOs

First off it's obviously way riskier. It's not anything proven at all the coin doesn't even exist yet, so you are hoping they're going to come through and be able to actually launch their project correctly and there are also a ton of people trying to use this a way to scam people out of money. So you're definitely taking on some risks when you're trying to get involved in ICOs, but if you pick good ones that are actually trying to do useful things, it's very unlikely that you could get scammed and it's also quite likely you're going to end up making money.

The question is: How do you figure out which ones are which?

That's where things start to get a little bit of a gray area.

Let me show you some of the success stories so you can understand why people get involved in these to begin with.

Source: https://icostats.com

This site shows the change in a coin's value from it's ICO to where it is today. And you can see how big some of these guys have gone off.

NXT with over a million percent increase in value.
IOTA with over 400 hundred thousand percent increase in value.
NEO and Etherium with huge gains as well.

I mean some of these things have made people extremely rich and that aspect of trying to get involved in upcoming projects is very attractive to new investors.

But let's also be realistic, these are the top ICOs out of hundreds or thousands of ICOs that have gone down and there are more and more coming out every day. The majority of these things are completely worthless, total and utter garbage that they're trying to get you to invest in and then a lot of them a large chunk of these ICOs actually end up being just straight-up scams.

That list includes:

LoopX
Benebit
Confido
BitconnectX

No one knew that it was going to be a scam.

Another major problem that seems to happen a bunch is people impersonating other people to try and get them to send money and because the investment amounts can be quite large, there's a lot of incentive for scammers to try and impersonate people and get them to send money.

As you can see this account asking people to send some money and I'll send you some back.

And then there were this and this is also happening through emails. Basically, these guys are out everywhere trying to scam people for any dollar they can possibly get.

Some people try to be someone else using their names and pictures to scam people or use a similar email to scam people. Make sure that you're talking to the person that you actually think you are and also when it comes to any notable, always double check that you're actually following the right account.
Also if someone says that if you send them a Bitcoin, they'll send you back two Bitcoins. It might be time to tell them about some promising investment opportunities in the Nigerian print industry.

Another ICO names Seele has investors scammed out of $2 Million in Etherium.
The especially brutal part about these scams is that you don't know if it was an inside job or not.

To me personally, if they were on the list of approved admins which has to be done by another admin, looking pretty suspicious they are on if this was an inside job or not but I personally would not invest in anything something like this.

Well, I am not a financial advisor and nor I am persuading someone or giving any legal advice. So please invest responsibly and always do your research before taking any step.

Thanks

The Wild West Of Cryptocurrency Otherwise Known As ICOs

Some drawbacks to ICOs

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