When I was choosing the topic for my second blog I had some difficulties choosing what to write about. I would like it to had some connection to cryptocurrencies, but at the same time I did not want it to be too boring or too technical. Then I realized that although I have some experience, I do not have enough knowledge to give some deep, wise trading advices how to get rich overnight, or to give you deep technical advices and analysis anyway. So, I decided to spend a few words on a topic I come across very often. It is about scams.
Scams come in many different ways and shapes. One of the recent ones I see very often is that on some coin Tweeter channel appears add for free ETH giveaways, which looks just like the team itself would post it. You just have to send them 0.5 ETH and they promise to send you back 5 ETH. When you think about it, it's a total nonsense. Ask yourself, why would any team want to you to send them 0.5 or any other specific amount of ETH, just so they would later send you back 10-times greater amount? This is utter nonsense, but still some people fall for it. It would be easy to call them stupid, but that would also be unfair. I think that maybe naive or too optimistic would be better word. But still, why are they naive?
One of the reasons is obviously lack of knowledge. Yes, teams do have giveaways from time to time. But they would NEVER ask you to send them some amount fist, so that they would later send larger amount back to you.
As I wrote in a post before, great page to gain some knowledge for free (they do not want a subscription of any sort) is page DNotesEDU https://dnotesedu.com/. As sometimes it is hard to trust random articles and pages on the internet and filter out the information, this is trustworthy site with useful and reliable information. So, educate yourself. As you will gain more knowledge, you will become harder to fool and furthermore, you will do better investment decisions and in the long term (probably, hopefully) earn more money.
Second reason why people fall for scams like one described in the beginning is general situation in the crypto world. So many promises had been made (any so many broken), that people have problems to distinguish true news from the fake ones. And good coins from the bad.
We have been hearing a lot about crypto regulations lately and people seems to fear it like the vampire would fear the garlic. But ask yourself. Will regulations really be that bad? And who has to fear them the most?
In my opinion regulations are not necessarily all that bad. They will bring some order and law to wild west world of cryptocurrencies. And it is about time to separate good coins/projects from the bad.
In the past I made some bad investment when I invested in the coin because it looked promising, had real world usage etc. But still, at some point often team did a little pump and dump, made some high flying promises or just promised to make some great announcement, which never came, and later on they disappeared. Probably with nice sum of money. So, you still think that regulations would be all that bad?
And to answer second question, who fears regulation the most? Investors? I do not think, because they will at some point protect the investors. So, if not investors, who would be hurt the most by regulations? If you said that people who now manipulate the market and teams which just want to make some big money in a shortest possible amount of time, with the least effort possible you were correct. So, they are the ones who should fear the regulations the most and usually do spread a lot of FUD about it.
Let’s admit it, we are all looking for a coin which would rise ten, one hundred or a thousand times. But if we are to be realistic, that kind of coin is very hard to find. Now there are about 1.500 different coins out there. So how to choose and not fall for scam coins? Again, the best advice would be to gain enough knowledge so you will be able to do some quality research by yourself. And what else is really important here, do not only research the coin, but the team behind the coin and the history of the team.
I personally think that big players like Bitcoin, Ripple and Ethereum are here to stay. But I also invest in some of the smaller coins, which I think have a good potential for growth. Unfortunately, I have a limited amount of time to do research, so it is hard to make recommendation sometimes, but still I found one which I dare to recommend. It is DNotes coin https://dnotescoin.com/. It has great and trustworthy team, good whitepaper an great vison. Of course, it does still not guarantee success, as it also depends on many outside factors as it is market acceptance and investors. But good team behind the coins really means a world. You know that, if in the past you have ever invested in the coin and then the team behind it suddenly disappeared.
Other than bad coins with greedy teams behind them and “free ETH” giveaways, there are still many different scams out there. Some of them would be fake crypto exchange pages or fake wallet pages. So always be really careful that you type the page address correctly, or even better, save page or the exchange or online wallet, so you will eliminate the chance of mistyping it and navigate to the wrong page. Also, always be very careful that page you are visiting is marked as safe by your web browser. It should be written “safe” or you will have green mark near URL or something like that, if the address is correct and the page you are visiting is safe. One more thing...when available ALWAYS use two-factor authentication.
Of course, some general advices also apply here: choose strong password, do not use the same password for all exchanges and online wallets, be careful what you download, use hardware wallet etc. Remember that you any your knowledge and ability to identify scams are your first line of defense against them.
If you have some other experience with scam or any advice which you would like to share, please do leave a comment below.
P.S. and sorry if my grammar is not really perfect, but English is not my native language, still I'm trying to do my best :)