There are basically two kinds of people in the crypto world today: scammers and their marks. Not a scammer? Well, then, you’re a mark.
If you haven’t already fallen for one of the multitude of crypto scams out there, here’s a quick guide to identifying a scammer. If you hear somebody saying any of the following things, run – don’t walk – in the other direction.
Buy Bitcoin (or any other crypto) and hold (or hodl) it. The only reason crypto has a market value beyond its use for criminal transactions is for speculation. And how do scammers make money speculating on something that is inherently worthless? Convince other people to buy it and not sell it – until sometime after the scammer sells their own stake, of course.
Let us hold your crypto and we’ll pay you X% interest, or borrow crypto from us and we’ll charge you some percent smaller than X. All on-the-level lending institutions charge more interest on their loans than they pay in interest on deposit accounts, because that’s the way they make money. If someone reverses this equation, that’s a sure sign of a Ponzi scheme.
Stablecoins are safe, because their value is tied to the value of an underlying asset. That is, of course, until it isn’t – but by then the scammers have pocketed your money.
If you’d invested $1,000 in Bitcoin at the beginning, you’d have $2.6 billion (or some other large number) today. Let’s say you were the lucky guy who invested that $1K in Bitcoin, and now you had $2.6 billion in Bitcoin, and you decided to cash out and sell it all for USD. How do you think that would go? How much cash would you really end up with? Guess what: nowhere near $2.6 billion, that’s for sure.
Are there more examples? You bet. From the scammers’ perspective, crypto has two wonderful characteristics. The first: it’s dead simple to come up with a new scam.
You can probably guess the second: there’s a sucker born every minute.
Jason Bloomberg neither owns, nor plans to own, any cryptocurrency or other cryptotoken, either long or short.