To me it looks like an ordinary pump and dump scheme. The main problem with pump and dump, and there's a lot of problems, but the main one is you are essentially hoping for a group of honorable thieves.

Everyone in the pump and dump knows it's a scam and will do their best to screw over the other members whether it is maliciously or due to their own greed.

I won't be able to find the link, but m there is a thread that tells the story of some large pump and dump groups from times passed. The person wrote it like some kind of nerdy crypto wolf of wall street novel and it really gives you insight into the problem with them.

That's a great question,  but unfortunately the answer is NO.

There were a few legit websites before (Icorating, Icodrops..) that were posting good ICOs, but nowadays these websites are full of worthless projects that don't deserve to waste your time on.

Long story short,  ICO is the past, IEO is the future.

IEO has some great advantages that ICO never had. Investors know from the beginning on which exchange their tokens will be listed and this will eliminate the frustration accumulated after ICO when tokens were not listed on any exchange.

You are only partially right. If you're referring to Bitcoin for instance,  yes, with patience you might see the price reaching new ATH and it doesn't worth to sell in loss.

But if you hold some sh*t coins sometimes is better to accept the loss and to sell before the price goes to near zero.

To be first in a new industry is a huge advantage. Just imagine how hard would be now for someone to create a new social media platform and to compete with Facebook.

However, Bitcoin never suffered an over 50% attack,  which happened to a lot of other coins.

Trump will never ban Bitcoin. If he could do it, Btc would have been already banned till now.

However, hypothetically speaking,  if US would ban Btc, I think temporary we might see a price drop to ~4-5k again.

Half of the cryptocurrencies are just using someone else's code base and is almost exactly the same as another coin. Bitcoin and Litecoin for example, all they changed was the block time. People also create forks and create a new coin that follows another direction but the truth is, they are all the same. People are just creating Bitcoin forks and then calling it Bitcoin X and just uses it to earn money but they make it sound like they are trying to change the world (errmm, no). Any developer can change a few lines of the existing Bitcoin code and then create their own coin, its as easy as that.

Ultimately, I think Cryptocurrency will fail in the end, maybe a few good cryptocurrencies will survive but I believe 95% of them will just go to zero.

This is not happening only to bew projects. Look at Ripple,  it has a great book cover, but it's fully centralized and not even a crypto.

Also, XRP is not "cheap". When you look at Cryptocurrencies, you need to look at market cap. XRP has a market cap of about 13 billion now and even though the price for one XRP is less than $1, the supply is very high so it isn't considered cheap right now.

If you pick up carefully the projects I'm sure you'll find projects that could worth millions. Just try to take care of some key points:

- Whitepaper
- Social media activity
- Team's previous experience
- Milestones already finished
- References on other important crypto websites

Here you have a few reasons why we need Bitcoin:

- we want and need an alternative to centralized banks
- Bitcoin is a very secure payment option is you keep safe your private key
- all tou need to pay with Btc is Internet

To me BAT is nothing more than pure speculation. It's true it has a nice story behind, but basically it offers nothing more than what Btc can offer as a payment method. When hype will decrease for BAT, people will liquidate their BAT tokens and price will decrease drastically imo.

The worst case scenario,  Libra will have no effect for Btc, the best case scenario, Libra will help Btc to increase its price as crypto popularity will raise.

Libra will definitely not be a competitor for Btc as it's just a stable coin and its price will not change over time.

If I were at the beginning of my journey in crypto, there are ad networks that payout satoshi for impressions and clicks on their ads. Research those, they work just as Adsense, only faster, cheaper and less volume in general.

It is not that easy to determine if a project will become a scam or not. There are a lot of key indicators to be taken into account: Whitepaper, team experience, milestones, social media activity etc.

However,  it's hard to predict if the project will develop as per Whitepaper or if it will just vanish when the soft/hard cap is reached.

As a lesson for what happened you should buy a hardware wallet (Ledger Nano S, Trezor etc) to be sure this will no longer happen in the future.

Keeping your private key on your Desktop is not a safe option at all.

In my country there were 3 new Bitcoin ATM introduced within last month. This makes me think it's quite profitable.

Good thing for ATM is that they get commissions no matter what the price is and for both buy and sell operations.

Learning to trade would be the best advise if your want smaller returns ie Compounding interest
As others have said, one could buy and hold for couple years...not looking at their portfolio everyday.

But learning to trade was quite fun and enjoyable, So that would be my opinion.

IEO is definitely the future of new projects fundraising.  RIP ICO.

One of the biggest advantages is the prediction of the exchange where the projects will be listed as soon as IEO is finished.

Buying back tokens might resolve the dumping problem only temporary, as it depends on what happens to the bought tokens.

If thwy will be released through bounty/airdrop programs, they will be sold again at very  cheap prices.

Libra is a joke and I hope the government won't let them use it on their spying platform. BTC will always be king and Facebook is both too late to the crypto party and too insincere in what the true purpose of what Libra really is.

As if Facebook really just wants to get their users interested in crypto. I get the feeling someone wants to make bank off their bloated userbase generating it for them and the users will get satoshi-like scraps to play around with, like giving kids pennies.