Yes the title of this article is right! If you are faint-hearted, if money is your only reason to live, if you easily believe in everything, but moreover, if you see yourself in one of the categories listed in this article, then stay away from the blockchain!
The blockchain world is an authentic jungle with many different species. All of them can be lethal and deadly at some degree. Even if you are a (true) expert of the field, these animals can cause big troubles to you too. So how can we recognize these beasts and avoid them for the sake of our investments and crypto projects?
There are several types of venomous actors in the crypto ecosystem. Let’s have a look at them together!
The Improvised
Obviously the most hilarious kind! Be doomed the day when the news hit this species, causing a point of no return. From day to night, millions of people who didn’t even know the word “investment”, rushed to get their share of fast cryptowealth, buying bitcoins and starting to bet on any possible blockchain compulsively!
Some of them get pissed off soon, some others get pissed off immediately, venting their frustration on their Facebook timeline. Here the Improvised cry against the evil Coinbase, guilty of not processing their request to open an “improvised” account, right on the spot without any basic AML check. What kind of financial company is so unprofessional to implement KYC procedures and to demand some time to assess the validity of customer’s documents…?
“WTF??? Ripple is skyrocketing and I’ve lost already 60%!!!”. The disgust that these creatures spark is soon replaced by pure commiseration toward who thinks that it is possible to lose what you don’t hold yet.
The Improvised have roughly the same life-span of butterflies; they see birth every cyclical spike and die with ever cyclical general dump, selling off all their assets at incredible discounts worth of the best supermarkets! After all, it’s thanks to them if horrible people like me get richer without any effort.
The (Fake) Expert
The Expert is simply the most lethal species in the cryptoplanet! If you bump into one of them, run! Well, since you can’t run in the digital world, block this monster and leave any Facebook group conversation where this deadly animal is involved.
The major issue is that the Expert has high concealing skills, like it concerns to every good predator.
At the beginning the Expert will appear as a wise guy that evangelize the blockchain as a gift of God, but also tries to warn you against its dangers. Under this apparent common sense, you are keen on giving the Expert your unconditional trust.
Now that the Expert has your trust, he/she will share any news coming from the cryptosphere. Therefore you venture into an incredible journey across the politics of South Korea, China, USA, Belize, Senegal, and many other places that probably you had never heard of before. The mantra “invest only what you can afford to lose” is soon turned into “we must create a report of all the ICOs that are below 1.00 USD and buy hard on the good ones! There’s a lot of money to make this year!”.
The Expert then starts a scheme where he/she is just the very first victim. The scheme is: Daily Trading!!! Whooo!!!
“IOTA below 2.00 USD is a low, buy it!”
“See NEO, pull-back of 50%, is a strong buy!”
“I will sell my Cardano now at the hype, and reinvest everything on Dentacoin, as they are still under 1 Bln market cap!”
“This ICO will have a ROI of minimum 2,300%!”
Everything sounds awesome! Maybe you can even double your wealth in just one day! And this could be actually possible if: you have years of experience as trader on your back and more important, if you have 8/10 hours a day to do proper research, analyze the news, discard the shitty ones (so over 90% of the total news) and collect/process the valuable data. The problem is the Expert and his disciples ignore the fact that they have also a day job to think of. For this very reason, one day you hear from them uttering sentences like: “How could I miss this? Something is weird, this new Bitcoin fork was supposed to spike and stabilize at 800 USD, how come that now is 0.817 USD???”
“Trump said that he buys all of his new wigs in cryptocurrencies, I should add this to my investment signals!”
The confusion lurks in the mind of the Expert, without the poor thing being aware. This makes our hero unprepared for the judgment day. The Earth is shaken by the South Korean government, which fancies the idea to regulate the cryptocurrency market. In a second, the Journalists (other deadly species that will discuss about later on) translate this into a “total ban”. Markets drop like a sabotaged parachutist. Now the disciples seek hope in the Expert. Their trust is tragically betrayed with the Expert who is the first to sell off his/her cryptoassets “waiting for more clarity from the regulators, and then I have to pay my children’s school!”
Everybody sells (for a passive balance of course!). All those Excel reports classifying each ICO, all the tips from Ian Balina, all those hit spikes of NEO, all the white papers read through will be lost in time, like tears in rain… Time to sell…
As you can see the death of the Expert is very similar to the same fate of the Improvised. Scientists begin to believe that these two might be simply different breeds of the same species.
The Housewife
The cryptoland is relatively new and there is plenty of room for species that are not native, like the Housewives for example, who usually migrate from the online casinos world.
“I loaded 50,000 EUR on this fucking slot and I’ve never received anything! Your casino is trigged! If you don’t give me a bonus I will leave right now! And give my money to someone else!”
Who work in igaming knows this message way too well. Imagine this potential of stupidity applied to a cryptocurrencies exchange! The result is more destructive than you can imagine!
This animal is mainly diurnal, acting when her husband and children are not at home. Occasionally, she might hire the cat and the dog as advisors beside her laptop. The reflex of a feline might be useful to grab the spike of the moment!
The Housewife is very religious in her routine. Husband’s card in one hand, while the other is digiting Coinbase.com and there we go. With an entry of just 10,000 EUR, the Housewife is ready to fulfill her dreams of becoming an independent woman without working and to spend the rest of her days buying clothes she will never wear and camping at a roulette table in Montecarlo.
From the start, Ethereum and Cardano give her orgasms more intense that those ones provided by the plumber, but in the long run they will become ineffective to satisfy her appetite. Everything looks too easy. Soon, the Housewife will look for stronger emotions… And one day, she discovers YoBit.net, a sort of cryptoghetto, where you can find the worst currencies and tokens of the entire cryptouniverse! Those coins are literally coming from developers’ asses. For this reason, they can spike up even 600% in one day before the audience discovers their true nature and decides to flush them off.
Yobit becomes immediately the house of all the Housewives in the world. It’s just a flock of the Korean breed that caused the anxiety of the South Korean government over possible addiction to cryptocurrency trading! And they are somehow right! Because for a Housewife, trading = gambling and gambling = losing. They are genetically designed to lose money, so they won’t miss this opportunity!
The Housewife behavior soon becomes compulsive buying everything that blinks in green a +100% or more! Useless to say that all those anonymous currencies that are no more than a sequence of 3-5 letters crash in a matter of days if not hours.
The weakest individuals soon migrate back to Casinoland, while the luckiest realize that their NEO stack went up by 6 times and take the new wealth to repeat the process happily in the worst exchanges of Caracas…
The Skeptical
This kind is particularly hideous. Indeed, they live by eating other’s disgraces. You lost 10,000 EUR in the wrong coin? They will be happy, so they can utter their favorite quote: “I told you…. Hihi”. Unfortunately, this is the only way the skeptical can feel smart, lacking of any remarkable intellectual skill.
Naively, the Skeptical compares Bitcoin to the Tulip Bubble occurred in the 17th century, ignoring totally how a bitcoin is made and ignoring that a Bitcoin costs a lot of money to be made (mined). After all, this is food packed by the Journalists, who are happy to feed this species, living almost in symbiosis.
The Skeptical will do everything to dissuade people from investing, but not for any altruistic purpose. All the way round! The Skeptical simply would crave to invest, but lacks totally of courage, or competence or both, to cross the line of financial security.
Often, the Skeptical will try to cover his/her lack of any financial skill, by suggesting other random profit opportunities, most of the times in Real Estate, an evergreen that will never die! Houses will be worth always more and more… Like in 2008! Indeed, this becomes especially hilarious when a Skeptical emerges from the social media vegetation and comments a crypto post by suggesting to buy a house in an area where the real estate bubble is just about to burst!
The obvious predator of all the above individuals, the Skeptical will die instantly of envy the unlikely day you will become millionaire thanks to your Ethereum tokens. And watching the expression on the Skeptical’s face will be something that no investment could ever pay off!
The Journalist
This powerful species is closely related to rats. Indeed, you can find them literally in every field. The peculiar feature of this species is that their Alpha members always make sure to assign their peeps to a field they know nothing about.
Are you an expert in medicine and wellbeing, but don’t give a shit about politics? You will follow the next elections in France!
Are you a tech savvy, but never been interested in sport? The next football season is waiting for you!
Now choosing who is going to write blockchain articles is supposed to be so easy, given that nobody knows anything about this sector yet. But the Alphas are not stupid. They never fall for the obvious. They think in the long term. This is why they chose a particular kind of Journalist. The perfect candidate must be ignorant in: computers, politics, finance, trading, Asian culture, European Union, compliance, anti-money laundering, terrorism, fiat currencies, North Korea and more importantly, never seen or handled a single coin.
The ideal candidate is a fan of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Marie Le Pen, Brexit, and believes in Illuminati, the Underworld, the Upperworld, the Boogieman, the Reptilians, that humans never been on the moon and that Bitcoin is the official currency of ISIS.
Finding such profile looked impossible. Solving the Greek debt crisis appeared a piece of cake in comparison. But the Alphas of the mainstream press didn’t give up until the brainwave came! The ideal candidate was just hiding in the mass lurking in the British province. Among those very individuals who voted for Brexit! Beings that eat fear, anger and beacon for breakfast are the perfect fit to write something no one has a damn clue about! The person of the street who writes about North Korea crisis, markets, FBI, Kremlin, Ponzi schemes and similar shit in just one article! The newspaper directors got goose bumps watching their deepest dreams becoming true!
In no time the people of the street broke all the records of journalisms regarding shit produced per day. The Alphas had never seen so much shit of the purest quality spit so fast!
After a warm-up of non-sense comparisons like mixing Bitcoins with Dutch Tulips (already devoured by the Skeptical), the Journalist gives the best as translator!
The South Korean authorities consider some possible restrictions on cryptocurrency trading and punctually the Journalist translates: “South Korean government ready to an all ban on cryptocurrencies! This could be the end of Bitcoin!”
The European Union says that cryptocurrency trading could be a mean for terrorists to launder money and fund their activities, so some regulation might be needed, then the Journalist translates: “The EU is going for a crackdown on cryptocurrencies. Soon all digital assets might be illegal in the EU!”
But the masterpiece is when the Journalist antennas capture a signal of an alleged ban of cryptocurrencies in Russia: “The Russian government is going to make cryptocurrencies illegal with harsh fines and years behind bars for trading!” ignoring that the Russian Bitcoin ban bill has been discussed since 2015 and dropped off completely. By then Russia fully embraced the blockchain technology!
But everything is fine to produce FEAR, the very matter that Journalists sell. This is why this species organized so that each individual writes what they don’t know anything about. If you write something you know nothing about you are the first one to be scared, thus the quantity and quality of fear produced will be higher, so the audience, will be more satisfied and keen to buy your newspaper membership. Do you call this madness? I call this genius!
The Nerd
The animal with the highest potential is the Nerd. No one knows the blockchain better than these magical beings and all its possible applications. The problem is that Nerds tend to focus on laughable aspects of these possible applications. Why wasting time in praising the revolutionary proof-of-stake of Cardano when the code of Pandacoin is a mess?
The Nerds spend entire nights in analyzing every shitcoin project out there, until they will find the perfect code, the one beautifully written, without any flaw, any double function or any comment that makes sense to humans. Unfortunately for the Nerds, the search is still ongoing and this species will probably die without investing a single cent. Never seen more wasted talent than this….
However, the chosen one of these people eventually created Ethereum...
The Student
0.1% of these animals is destined to play a starring role in the future blockchain industry. 10% of them will still become rich with cryptocurrency speculation or working for some successful ICO.
The rest, well, they have variable fates. Who get freaked out by and becomes an easy prey of the Journalist or the Skeptical, who is brought to the knees by the Expert, usually the Student sits at the bottom of the food blockchain.
The strongest individuals instead become aware of the real potential of the blockchain and eventually become Solidity developers or Anonymous activists, hoping to change the world for the better, dreaming to be the chosen one! It’s just this dream that leads the puppy to meet the Libertarians, an ambiguous category. If the Student is lucky, will meet a Jedi and join Anonymous or some other activist group. It’s a fun life protesting, hacking, lobbying, insulting “the system”, living in communities where to organize weekly wild nights with alcohol, acoustic music and some healthy weed bough with Potcoin, which never hurts.
The unlucky ones instead meet the wrong Libertarians who, most of the times, are Sith lords in disguise that will seduce the younglings to the Dark Side of the blockchain, ending up to waste their cryptowealth (and their young lives) in the dark web market.
The Braveheart
The only kind of individuals that have my full respect are the Bravehearts! They took the gold rush of the 21st century seriously! For them it’s all or nothing! This is how they end up selling everything to invest their entire persona on Bitcoin and the other crypto blue chips.
Their undisputed king is Didi Taihuttu. He and his family sold all of their assets to buy Bitcoin. At the moment, they live in a roulette waiting for the day when Bitcoin will become the most valuable good in the world. And if the predictions of John McAfee will come true, all of us will have to knee before Didi!
Beside the admiration for this character, it’s good to remind the basic golden rule of investment: diversify. It doesn’t matter how much you believe in something. Everything can happen to any kind of investment, even to the real estate. So please, don’t try this at home!
Golden Rules
Good investments always reward you in the long run. Be patient, stay strong during the storms that periodically the Journalists will spark.
Don’t listen to the Skeptical; they are just jealous of you.
Do your proper research but don’t become a Nerd.
Don’t rush and improvise your investments. Richard Branson reminds us that business opportunities are like buses; there is always another one coming.
Most of all, remember that the most valuable asset is you. Don’t sacrifice all of your current wealth for buying cryptocurrency. Anything can happen to the markets and to you as well. If you are run over by a car or any other unfortunate event occurs to you, you would die with the regret of not having lived your life at fullest. So don’t lose your balance, make sure to always have room for your current happiness in your investment portfolio.