🐀 CryptoScams: Not the same as cryptos being a scam ✨
I remember how I started my crypto journey. It was a HYIP page called “treedoges,” or something like that. I “invested” eight bucks there, with some projections of one or two grand by reinvesting… guess what? I lost everything.
The good news? It was only eight dollars, but it taught me a valuable lesson—not all that glitters is gold. Sounds pretty cliché, but that’s how you learn best. It gave me insight into how Ponzi schemes work, even though I had already heard about them.
About 7 years later, the experience still strikes me, just from another perspective. I could have easily concluded that cryptos are nothing but scams, but that would be an unfair, biased, flawed, and fallacious conclusion. If getting scammed because someone outsmarted me to get richer at my expense means I should consider money, gold, silver, stocks, and many other assets as scams, then that would sound crazy, wouldn’t it?
Without getting too specific with evidence and sources, I think many readers of these paragraphs have been in a position where someone categorizes crypto (from Bitcoin onward) as a “scam”. Of course, I can totally understand why: fake videos of celebrities like Elon Musk doubling any crypto amount you send to him, smart contracts being used for greedy purposes, pump-and-dump schemes, fake ICOs, fake airdrops, fake exchanges… you name it…
Nevertheless, that still doesn’t justify labeling crypto itself as a scam. Underneath those platforms, schemes, and pyramids, there are people—humans with no morals or ethics—who deliberately use cryptos as tools to commit their crimes. Based on that, cryptos are not the scam per se; they are the medium scammers use to scam (sorry for the redundancies).
For centuries, money has also been used as a medium to scam people, launder money, or even worse: collect taxe… (wait, no, I’m not crossing that line… yet 😉🐍). And yet, money is not remotely considered a fraud (in simplistic terms, I’m not getting into anti-establishment views of money being a scam by the feds, blah blah blah). But what I think about a lot is the damage these unethical activities have done to crypto adoption. It’s our duty to clean that up.
Even though my crypto hype has decreased a lot, I still trust and believe in the power of cryptocurrencies, especially the blockchain technology that can go beyond financial usage (which I’ll cover in another article). Blockchain can actually provide freedom and liberty to us as individuals to fight against any yokes you can think of. Guys, please, let’s keep it real. Use your power on this platform and other media to make up for the bad behavior of people we might not even know. Let’s keep the faith and advance as a techy society.
Meanwhile, have a nice beginning of 2025 🙂 See you around!
DISCLAIMER: Originally publish in my account of Publish0x