Dont you think that many of the cryptocoins and tokens are a scam in one way or the other? In the end most of the coins are floated to the market with some pre-mining, an ICO, and then brought to exchanges. In this process, those who pre-mined, and/or sold the coins in ICO collect money they can cash out, and I'm pretty sure many of them cashed out in one or the other way after which they don't care to much anymore what happens with the coin/token value. Some may use the money collected to actually launch some kind of service, but I don't think many of the coin/token launchers actually do that.
I've written another comment to this post in which I affirm an statement Steem/Steemit requires a pyramid. This statement is 100% true.; see comment here.
I totally agree with you, crypto market is not regulated and from what i witness for years i think it is highly manipulated by several entities.
There is a lot of scam in one way or aother, market manipulation, biased ecosystem, false informations, insider trading...
It is very difficult to proove these occult activity because in unregulated market data are not accessible and verified by anyone.
This is exactly why i don't trust bitconnect and i strongly think it is a scam, no accessible data and a probable biased ecosytem because of the daily average high interest.
I don't know Bitconnect to be honest and when indeed the daily interest is set high, one shall be careful, since in the end anything with high revenues, have also the risks attached it'll never happen. That said, the service that we are using to make this conversation happen may also be a scam, a well disguised scam, but the enormous amount of Steem in the hands of the founders and the enormous amount of SP in the hands of a few, is something to be very careful about. BUT, that said, as long as we can profit from these services and coins in one way or the other, we can own the coins and tokens and use the services :) I suspects many many many more scams coming to life next years. The upcoming BTC fork's are scams as well, copy/paste an entire blockchain without creating a genesis block themself; Stealing value from BTC! But for those who own BTC, they will have the opportunity to use the scam, and profit from it. My advise: Sell the clones ASAP before these values will go south.
I think without a truly decentralized governance system we will be not be safe against powerful entity able to manipulate coins.
BTC fork and Hard Fork are clearly the consequence of the human factor and lack of decentralized governance coded into BTC.
This could destroy Bitcoin as we know it and be replaced by another coin with a more decentralized ecosystem simply because conflict are "coded" in human nature and BTC code will evolve slower than other coins, too big to fall so less risk taken and too many people to convince each tim we want to integrate a changement.
Dash for example has a decentralized voting system by masternode, it is not perfect because of Dash initial coin distribution and the fact that whales own the most of voting power, but it is better than nothing.
I know Decred (DCR) is working on DX governance aswell.
I think it will become a hot subject soon, these coins might outperform the other in such context.
Decentralised can only work when power is distributed more or less even over many many individuals, that I realise. What I also realise that likely no coin has this, since it are humans who launch the coins and most of the people who do that, want something more for themselves then others. DCR, I own a little bit of for trading, but it is something I like to look further into for investment.