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Comment by anoraca | Hacker News Reader

My guide to Ethereum: don't get involved in shady, unregulated industries unless you're aware of the possible consequences are are willing to accept them gracefully

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"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What's your point? It is high risk/high reward industry. There are loads of possible consequences. You might get insanely rich as some have gotten, or you might lose all your assets and sanity. Also jailtime is possibility, however that is still very rare in the space.

That folks should be skeptical and perform due diligence? Many similar things have been said about the recent rise in amateur options trading on the normal stock market. It's fine if the person knows and accepts the potential consequences, which amateurs visiting a link aggregator/forum should be explicitly warned against.

What are the consequences that you’re talking about?

Rampant swings in price, fueled by exchanges getting hacked/falling apart, weird ICOs, or the sketchiness of tether.

There were no ICOs in the last 2 years. The community moved on from that. Decentralized non custodial exchange usage is growing, like https://loopring.org/ that’s based on zero knowledge proofs cryptography and allows 2000 trades per second, and the people who built it can’t steal your money even if they wanted to.

There are also decentralized options to protect you from volatility https://opyn.co/ or https://www.hegic.co/

There are many alternatives to Tether, for example USDc or a decentralized stable coin like DAI.

There are still ICO's, they are just rebranded usually to something else like IEOs or STOs.

No ICOs? None at all? Since mid 2018?

Having trouble believing that, especially as I can see evidence of hundreds of the damn things after a simple search - https://ico.tokens-economy.com/statistics/country.html?count...

Sure, many of those won't be using ethereum, but they still happened. And that's before you dive into the IEOs and STOs, which appear to be more of the same.

Loopring is interesting, thanks for passing that along.

Even with the options on ethereum, Tether alternatives, etc. involvement with cryptocurrencies has high risk for someone who doesn't have a strong understanding of how it all works at a technical level, which is what the parent comment stated.

Mostly losing money, I'd suspect

It's specifically trading and speculating in cryptocurrencies that's incredibly risky. There's a playbook of scams people used to pull with stocks were made illegal, but are suddenly viable again in the crypto space. There's also the risk of loss because of lax security on your part or the part of your wallet.

Ever heard of the DAO? [1]

Seriously, crypto is one of the shadiest things you can get into. Avoid it, and any exchanges, like the plague. It's interesting tech, but nothing more than that. Hugely speculative and not worth wasting hard earned money over.

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/understanding-dao-hack-journalists

I would differentiate here between crypto (yes, there's a lot of scams and shady projects out there) and blockchain. Where the latter is getting bigger and bigger. Not just for crypto and financial services.

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