Hi. I'm a Crypto Noob. I have a confession to make: I hate all you smart Crypto people. Well, not hate exactly, I just don't appreciate the degree of difficulty in navigating the terrain as someone new in Cryptocurrency investment. Not to say I ever expected it to be easy, or magical, or instantly gratifying. I'm not technologically savvy enough to mine, or even know how a contract is written, but let me explain:
I entered the Crypto market on July 1st, 2016. I have a friend who trades. As a matter of fact, it's his main source of income and work. Obviously this was around 10 days after the DAO hack. My thinking was, "the Ethereum thing sounds like it has its act together. Even though that hack happened, it was essentially on a program that runs on the platform, so I can understand that happening." As I began learning about things like nodes, contracts, wallets, blocks, mining, etc. the idea of a Soft Fork of the Ethereum Network popped up. Then I started hearing it wouldn't work, so a Hard Fork was required. Obviously I had to learn what those were too. Then the Bitcoin reward halving was fast approaching. That came and went with hardly a whimper, and things were humming along. The Hard Fork happened and the world remained intact. Around this time I learned about Steem and steemit. Then Sunday, two weeks ago, while watching a chat go on in an exchange (which I'll come back to shortly), I see about ETC (Ethereum Classic). I see that there's "free money" to be had from pre-fork ETH. Then that Tuesday, all hell breaks loose. ETH starts dropping, other coins are dead in action, and general chaos ensues while people milk ETC for whatever it may or may not be worth. Rumors spread of Coinbase becoming insolvent over the weekend. Then today, 8/2/16, just a mere month after I purchased my first Bitcoin via Coinbase: Bitfinex is hacked and tens of millions of dollars worth of BTC gets stolen.
Do you think that's a bit excessive for a first month? On top of general trade trends. A hack. A Hard Fork. A mining reward halving. An Alt Coin from a Hard Fork. An Exchange possibly going under. Another Exchange hacked. And oh, I forgot to mention BTC losing around $200 value within a matter of 3 days. On top of this, you have chats on exchanges where people are FUDing the place up. Hyping coins they're invested in. Telling people to sell off all their coins (so the price drops, coin can be purchased lower, and then shorted). And of course crazy nerd justice like resurrecting what's supposed to be the dead chain on the Ethereum network and undermining the Hard Fork that was meant to fix a major issue, but instead because of bad planning left a new headache.
After all of this, I'm supposed to tell friends and family they should invest in these networks and Cryptocurrencies? I'd be a mad man to do so. I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm not the dumbest either. I've managed to wrap my head around this Cryptocurrency thing in the course of a month. I'm not smart or dedicated enough to dig into coding, but for those that are, I have one piece of advice: Don't let the ideal of code and perfect logic cloud your human thinking when it comes to handling Cryptos. There's regular people out there that could benefit from the work you put in, but that will never happen if you undermine the entire system you helped create, by fighting the "morality" fight. Decisions will get made. Don't make ill decisions that can jeopardize not only a whole network, but also people's investments. More importantly, don't jeopardize the trust that regular people, like myself, put in you to make this world run better. I know you can do it. Just don't get in your own way of progress.