I don't know if Tether is a scam or not, but I have been interested in it, since it seems like a good place to move your money when things are crashing.  I'm just not good enough of a trader or recognize the signals of a crash ... I hope it does go to Etherium.  And if every tether is truly backed by $1, then it seems like it may be the safest cyrpto ever. 

But as others have mentions, selling coins for a dollar and buying them back for a dollar, while reportedly tying up a dollar in cash for each tether, doesn't seem like a profitable business model.  How do they make money?  Transfer fees?

 In my head, I've divided the coin market into two catagories, coins that are trying to be currency, and coins with a purpose.  Bitcoin, IMO, has such a lead in the currency catagory, I don't see anything competing, at least not for a long time.  As for coins trying to become platforms and perform functions, I think etherium has a big lead, but I could see a competing coin closing the gap there or even overtaking it based on technology.

A quick check on the Internet shows that Dropbox ( the company) was valued at 10 Billion dollars in 2014.  $250 million for a startup competing in that space doesn't seem totally out of line, to me.

There are a lot of people here saying that if you don't convert your capital gains to fiat, then you are not liable for taxes on your gains ...  I'm sorry, but that is not true.  Yes, It is easy to hide your gains with Cryptos, but technically, you are required to pay taxes on your trades (or string them together as like kind exchanges), whether you cash out dollars or not.  

Think of it like this.  If I bought a vacant property for $5000 during the real estate crash, then 10 years later traded it for a boat worth $100,000, the IRS would certainly see that as a $95,000 capital gain, even if I never saw any cash from the deal.

Edit:  Again, I'm talking about US law, from my experience as an investor ... I'm not a tax advisor or accountant.

I wouldn't panic just yet.  I checked out there website, and they take Credit Card, so that's usually not the sign of a scammer.  Just because it says "order complete" isn't a bad sign, either, it could just mean that you paid for it and they shipped it.  Have you tried their "track order" link?

https://bostonbtcminers.us/track-an-order/

My strategy is to hold them until I retire or they drop out of the top 100 for market cap.

I've been trading stocks for 20 years, and you can draw to many parallels with cyrptos, it's amazing.   One of the first similarites I noticed is that like stocks, Cryptos tend to move in unison.   If Bitcoin is up, 80-90% of alts will be up.  If Bitcoin is down, 80-90% of alts will be down ... The only point of diversifying seems to be protection incase one altcoin gets very bad news, like a hack or something.

If you want to hold various coins in one place, on a desktop wallet, Exodus Eden Wallet has the most options I've seen, and they have a roadmap to add quite a few more.  Of course, it may not include everything you want to hold.  FWIW, holding coins on an exchange is risky and not recommended.  I'd want them in a wallet I control.

I've read about a couple of situations where a person vastly overpaid miner/transaction fees (i.e., reversed the miner fee and the transaction amount, or something similar) and the miner gave the funds back.  But that is of course a different situation.  There, the payment went to a wallet that was known to be under someone's control ... here, it looks like the payment went to a "dead" wallet.

I'm highly interested in this one.  I'm kind of unimpressed with Storj as a farmer.  I can't wait to see what they produce as a product and what they offer farmers.  

The blockchain explorer shows there has never been any activity at that address, other than your transaction.  Hate to say it, but I think you sent it to a dead address and there is no way to recover it.

https://etherscan.io/address/0x3f13171bedaf7a2b6e69fc12e08ff0429d8b059b

I just registered, as well.  Best of luck to you and this project.

Zero Hedge is pretty unreliable source.  They tend to go for clickbait drama and hyperbole instead of accurate reporting.  I'd want to see it from another source.

yeah ... The new blood in the ICO world is kind of bringing this onto themselves by advertising, centralizing, incorporating, fund raising, making a big specticle of the thing.  Bitcoin and bunch of others launched because they were "under the radar" and secretive and grew organically from nothing ... Then were too distributed and decentralized to stop by the time regualtors noticed.

Some coins require you to pay the transfer fee in BTC ... Counterparty coins, I beleive they are called.  It's a pretty clever scam that guy is running. 

After Bitcoin, my three biggest alt coin holdings are Litecoin, Dash, and Etherium.  They seem fairly safe and stable (by crypto standards, anyway)

Yes, technically, you are supposed to record the value at the time of sale.  How much did you buy the Lisk for, How much did you sell it for.  The difference is your profit/loss. 

Same for the Bitcoin.  How much did you buy it for, how much did you sell it for.  Again, that is your profit/loss.  It doesn't matter if the bitcoin gains or loses value before or after the time of sale.  It only matters how much you made at the sale.

First off, I'm not an accountant or Tax advisor ... secondly, I'm assuming this a question of US law.

That said, here is my understanding.  If you have profits off the sale, you may owe income tax in the form of capital gains.  It doesn't matter if you cash out to USD or not.  You can keep good records of this and pay that capital gains tax every year you have profits.

But, there is a thing called "like kind exchange" where if you sell something, and buy something very similar, you don't owe taxes for that year.  If you sell a stock (any stock), and but other stock (any stock), or if you sell an investment property and buy another property, those may qualify as like kind exchanges.  I assume selling cryptos would follow the same rules.

However, you do you need to keep track now of your original buy, your exchange, then your sell.  You can theoretically string multiple buys and sells together into an perpetual chain of like kind exchanges.  But, you need to keep track of everything, because you'll eventually owe capital gains taxes on the entire chain.  And there are many IRS rules on how to handle a like kind change that people should talk to qualified accountants and tax advisors about.  You can get in trouble with the IRS if you handle the process improperly.

What do you make of this?  Looking at a 7 day chart of NEO, it has moved above it's sept. 1st "pre-crash" price -- when China announced "ICO ban".  Why?  I thought this was like the 'etherium of China', a platform for launching ICOs?

I hold quite a few ... Probably too many, but I mostly invest in BTC, LTC, Dash and Etheium.  I kept the BCH.  Then a made a small investment in a some new comers, OMG, Qtum ... A few other etherium tokens.  I also mine Verium and share some drive space for Storj ... About 15 altogether.  I'd also want to add Monero and Ripple.

It's all pretty manageable, since except for the Verium, all my coin can be held in Exodus's Eden wallet.  It's kind of a prerequisite for me because I like to see everything in one view and not mess around with a bunch of different wallets.