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Comment by aws_ls | Hacker News Reader

Mixed feelings on this one. Most of them are likely to be scams as its so easy to do. But there are also things like the Brave browser[1] with its BAT(Basic Attention Token)[2], which am very excited about. With the Ad revenue on Internet falling all around, with Ad-blockers increasing. Brave, with BAT, provides a new way for publishers to get paid. Interestingly it also has the potential to disrupt Google's Adsense model. So there is an interesting element of incumbent (Google) and disruptor (brave) in there.

[1] https://brave.com/

[2] https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq/#meaning

edit: typo

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The vast majority of cryptocurrency advertising is aimed directly at taking advantage of investors who probably don't know how to do proper diligence on such an early and untested technology.

I would put this squarely in the same vein as ads that might encourage you to 'buy our gemstone, it's going to be the new diamond'. Or 'our baseball cards are first edition and guaranteed to go up in value', etc.

I always thought the "guaranteed to go up in value" claim was silly. If it's guaranteed to go up in value, why would they want to sell it to me?

Money today is worth more than money tomorrow. If you have idle capital and I have something valuable, I can cash in sooner and you can get a valuable resource. So there is a legitimate reason for me to sell you something that is guaranteed to go up in value assuming that I want money now more than you do.

That's not an endorsement of any asset in the crypto space, and I would never remotely suggest that any token today is guaranteed to go up in value.

>Money today is worth more than money tomorrow.

This is not true for deflationary currency...like Bitcoin.

Even if the claim were true, then you could still make more money using someone else's capital.

It's the basis of the financial industry: You can make X using your own money, but you can make X+n using other people's money too.

> I always thought the "guaranteed to go up in value" claim was silly.

So would 99.9% of people who see that ad. Everyone knows that if it sounds too good to be true, then it likely is. Especially in a paid advertisement. Modern consumers are more than well atuned to not trust every ad they hear.

If they don't see the glaring risk in cryptocurrencies, as it is constantly mentioned as being in the media nearly every time it's mentioned, or if they didn't spend a minute Googling them to see the countless headlines about it's volatility before gambling on it then I really wonder whether their money would be going to a place of value elsewhere anyway.

Otherwise plenty of people know the risk and are still willing to bet on it because it is possible to gain quite a bit from the growth. I know many people who have successfully. And many who are in it for the long term because they fully believe in the technology. And there's nothing wrong with that.

I haven't actually seen "guaranteed to go up in value" pitches but I believe the ones that do work on certain people take a more subtle form.

It's a bit like how poorly written spam makes professional-looking phishing look more convincing to the average person.

The most effective scams are the ones that fool people who think they couldn't have been fooled. Heck, you see it all the time with car advertisements, etc.

You would think that 'great artists' would hold on to all of their paintings and not sell them, same with car manufacturers that produce 'limited editions'. Who knows whether the next 'Beatles' is out there, holding back all their recordings until 2050 so they appreciate in value.

Only if something has buyers does it have value, this is true with finance scams as well as real world over0valued items.

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