But I Might Save You Money
Fellow Steemian and friend @engineeringsteem was showing me a funny video takedown of some Youtube crypto “experts” yesterday, put together by new-to-steem-but-not-Youtube @dougpolkcrypto, and I got pulled into watching a few more of his hilarious takedowns of some of the biggest bitconnect shills online.
If I start doing non-ironic pictures like this, I recommend the UNFOLLOW and MUTE buttons.
I had no idea how bad the Youtube space was getting with countless teens and young twenty somethings shilling cryptocurrency with reckless abandon! 2017 really seems to be the year that a great deal of opportunists caught on to cryptocurrency. Most of my Youtube viewing is focused on projects and people in this space, not how to make YOU RICH in 2018!. And while I’ve been a bit vocal to friends and readers here about how many opportunities there are in cryptocurrency (now and for the next few years), I hope I have never come across as one who thinks, speaks, or acts this way.
So, it was time for a gut check. I did get paid in 2017 to write and vlog about some tokens. I was careful to always mention when I was being compensated for them, and careful also to avoid mentioning price movements or any sort of guarantees. But, I also want to ensure that any online work I do is as transparent as possible. I will never write about a project I don't trust.
2017's Shilling Revisited
For better transparency, these are the tokens I wrote about in 2017 and was compensated for:
PTOY-Patientory. I sold the last of my PTOY tokens in late November as my impression of the company was that it was spending more time attending conferences than developing a solid product. I earned PTOY in their bounty program, which I joined after buying into the pre sale. Patientory had a fairly radical change in team members in the late summer. Their CEO, Chrissa McFarlane, knows the space she is in well but I have my doubts that "blockchain" is the answer. I hope I'm wrong and wish them the best. US medicine certainly needs innovation and massive improvement.
WandX. I haven’t sold any WandX and think this company has a very good future ahead. The CEO, Abhi, is an Ironman Triathlete and their team is incredibly smart. I earned WandX after a member of the team reached out to me to write some articles about it on steemit. WandX has had a working beta for a few months now and their market cap is under $10 million.
Vezt. I joined the Vezt bounty program as a super advocate because I had worked with their marketing director, Michael, when he was at Patientory. I trust him. Vezt has a team that seems very comfortable in the music industry and has been hustling hard to get big names to sell some song royalties on their platform. I don’t love the big living hip hop lifestyle, and Vezt seems to be using this to help promote their platform. On the other hand, bringing royalties to retail investors is a good use of the blockchain, and gives more options to us. I intend to sell some of my Vezt (it is being released over 5 quarters, so I have an auto hodl built in).
I was also paid to write for FOAM, which will ICO this spring. I will get FOAM tokens then and intend them to be a long term hold as well. FOAM also has a great team and they have taken a very careful approach to entering the ICO markets.
Rejected Offers
I turned down one request by a project which seemed scammy to me. I don't take offers from anonymous people on the internet. I turned down another project as I didn’t feel like their token model made sense: they were adding complexity to a system that didn’t need it, and simply jumping on the ICO bandwagon. If you're an investor in this space, you really need to know when a token is doing this sort of thing.
Forward
While I do intend to hold most of the above tokens, life changes can create the need for short term liquidity, and I will sell some if I need to pay bills. If anything I “promote” ever was revealed to be evil or a scam, I will write on here when I have some degree of certainty, but I dislike the overuse of the word “scam”.
The pervasive nature of these hype machines only further underscores the need for my soon to be released eBook. More details to follow...but it won't tell you how to make 1000%!
-Jeff