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Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches

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11–20 of 150 posts

Re: Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches

#11
post #2

I wonder if this will end with people going to prison for securities fraud?

I don't think so. All the information is out there in the public domain; in fact, most cryptocurrencies are entirely open source so it couldn't be any more transparent than that. Everyone should be aware of the risk and the reward potential. If ICOs are a fraud, then surely our entire financial system is a fraud because there is much less transparency there.

Right now a lot of people are making the mistake of investing in an ICO that they don't understand. Like with any kind of investing; it's their responsibility to do their research. What will happen at the end of this is what happens normally in the financial world; smart people who understand each currency are going to make money at the expense of wealthy but poorly informed people who are randomly pouring their money all over the place trying to make a quick buck.

Moreover, a lot of the money that goes into these ICOs ends up funding open source projects that are either directly or indirectly related to the cryptocurrency itself (and this helps the entire industry as a side-effect).

Sure, there might be some black market money involved but I think that at least much of that money will be put to good use. It's the government's job to track people who are using the platform for illegal means.

If somebody buys chemicals to make illegal drugs, it doesn't make sense to arrest the chemists for manufacturing the chemicals. The chemicals can be used for good and bad; if you sum everything up and the net result is a positive change for society, then overall it is a good thing.

Re: Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches

#14
post #12

So cryptocurrency is the new Gold Rush. As the story goes, the only people who reliably made money during the original gold rush was the people who sold the spades. What are the "spades" here?

Mining rigs

The people buying the ICO coins don't have mining rigs?

Re: Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches

#16

So cryptocurrency is the new Gold Rush. As the story goes, the only people who reliably made money during the original gold rush was the people who sold the spades. What are the "spades" here?

> What are the "spades" here?

At least quite many companies seem to be offering this kind of "ICO service" products - essentially they setup the ICO tools etc for you, help with converting the collected funds to dollars, etc.

Re: Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches

#17

So cryptocurrency is the new Gold Rush. As the story goes, the only people who reliably made money during the original gold rush was the people who sold the spades. What are the "spades" here?

ICO tokens. You describe an idea, provide no technical way forward, publish a token, and if you're lucky people start speculating on that token and you get crazy amounts of funding. Then just live on that money for a couple months before announcing that the project has failed, the tokens crash, if you feel nice you can buy them back at that point.

I.e. the spades are the ICO scams.

Re: Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches

#19
post #2

I wonder if this will end with people going to prison for securities fraud?

I don't think so. All the information is out there in the public domain; in fact, most cryptocurrencies are entirely open source so it couldn't be any more transparent than that. Everyone should be aware of the risk and the reward potential. If ICOs are a fraud, then surely our entire financial system is a fraud because there is much less transparency there. Right now a lot of people are making the mistake of investi…

> Right now a lot of people are making the mistake of investing in an ICO that they don't understand enough. Like with any kind of investing; it's their responsibility to do their research.

That's not how it works. Many kinds of securities can only be sold to accredited investors for just this reason; you may not like that law, but it is the law.

Re: Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches

#20
Above all, I feel sorry for the small guy.

Sure, ICOers are raising money for their dreams. And the "whales" "investing" in those ICOs are mostly lucky tech-ish folks who behave irrationally (like investing-1/4th-of-Whatsapp-in-a-service-with-a-few-hundred-users-irrationally). Whales will not suffer much in the end and ICOers will drive their Ferraris. It's those who believed in "invest in cryptocurrencies" hype in mainstream media who will loose the most.

After all, if we treat the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem as a blackbox, dollars come from those humble folks to ICOers. Just with an extra twist of BTC on their way.

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