This is good one for the newbies. You can add more Pros and Cons of PoW and PoS to make it more effective.

Investing in ICO consists of very high risk. You will need to perform due diligence before putting your hard earned money.

If you still want to go ahead then I would suggest to find the upcoming ICOs using icoalert.com or any such sites. Visit the website of the prospective ICO, check their team members, read their whitepapers, check their roadmap, etc.

After finding all these details, you might get some idea about the potential of the project. If you really believe in any project, then go ahead and invest in that ICO.

Once you get started, you will get more experience of it. So, if you really want to do it then start jumping as soon as possible.

For merit, you need to write the best informative posts. Just copy pasting articles or providing small replies won't help. You need to write detailed responses and hope that it will be noticed by someone who has Merits to give and find your post merit-worthy 

Not exactly. They provide you the address to store your coins but you don't have private keys of those wallets. So technically, they provide the wallet but you don't have full control over it. It's the exchange who has control over your wallet.
So, don't use them as wallets if you want to have full control of your wallet.

You can participate by making payment as per the requirement of ICO. Most of the ICOs accept ETH or BTC. You will need to send it from the wallet for which you have the private keys. Don't transfer it from the exchanges like bittrex, poloniex, etc. You won't receive the coins after your purchase.

Thanks for sharing such an informative post. It will really be helpful to newbies to understand ICO and Airdrop.

Though, I feel that the title could be little misleading as ICO and Airdrops aren't opposing entities. Both have their own significance and offerings.

There should be no harm to try out airdrop if they are giving it out completely for free. If in exchange, they are asking for something then you need to contemplate on it and decide whether you are ready to give what they are asking for. If it's just your email id then I would suggest to go for it. But if they are asking for more personal information or make some payments then it should ring an alarm in your mind.

Do you have any specific fraud experienced in any airdrop? If so, then kindly share detail so that other members can also know about it.

Investment in cryptos is already high-risk affair compared to traditional ways. And ICO adds some more to it.
Most of the ICOs out there are selling on their dreams and plans. Many of them haven't achieved a basic prototyping or working model. They show the roadmap and based upon that people invest in it. It is highly likely that many of those ICOs won't ever take off after product launch. In those cases the price of the token would surely take deep dive making you loose your investment.

As the risk is higher, the rewards could also be higher in some cases. You get the tokens for cheap and if the product really takes off then you could have returns in multifold of your investment.

So, it is suggested you do due diligence to research about the project before investing in ICO. You can research about the team, track record of the company, their product detail and their progress till now.

Invest wisely 

When I began posting on forum, even I had a same feeling that Merit is unfair to newbies but then as I became more active, I changed my opinion. If there is no merit system then some people would spam the sh*t out of forum to rise up the rank ladder. We surely don't need the spams for petty gains of others. Merit does provide check on such spam so I guess, it is fair for this forum.

Even I have seen many negative reviews of yobit online and people suggesting not to use it on telegram too. It would be good to use other exchanges.

These are really great advises for the newbies. I would like to add another one in the list.
- Always use 2FA for authentication on any exchange site you are holding your coins.

Also, as suggested by others, it is desirable to transfer your coins to your private wallet instead of exchanges if you are not trading frequently.

Hey nguyenbaokhanh,
Most of the new projects offering bounty explicitly mentions that you should not use ETH address of coinbase. To receive new coins, you should not use the ETH address for which you do not have private keys.

You can collect the coins only if you have full access of the wallet using private key. Coinbase doesn't provide the private key of your ETH wallet so you won't be able to collect your bounty coins on that.

You can create ETH wallet on sites such as MyEtherWallet or Metamask and use that address for bounty tokens.

Thanks for initiating the thread. This should help many newbies to keep an eye on scams.

As per today's article on cointelegraph, below ICOs are also listed as scams
- Plexcoin
- Benebit
- Opair and Ebitz
- REcoin and DRC
- PonziCoin

Reference link: https://cointelegraph dot com/news/dont-believe-the-hype-the-five-largest-ico-exit-scams-expert-take

Be safe guys. Don't put your money without doing sufficient research about the coin you are betting on.

In a layman's term: it's all about Supply & Demand my friend.

The supply of Bitcoins is finite while more and more people want to hold a pie of it. So the demand is increasing in leaps & bounds, increasing the price of Bitcoin. If the demand will decrease then price will go down.

If you ask about intrinsic value, then there is no such value of Bitcoin. It's the trust of people which gives value to it and demand increases the value.

Woah! This is something new. Thanks for the heads up and spreading awareness.

Using 2FA is kind of must if you are holding coins on any exchanges. It can secure your funds otherwise anyone can fall prey to such novel scams.

That's right. It's not necessary that Hard Fork is required for Airdrop. Many upcoming projects are offering the Airdrop during their ICO.

When Hard Fork occurs the coin holders receive the same amount (or sometimes more/less) of new tokens as Airdrop but HF is surely not the only condition for that.

That's right. It's not meant to stay stable at one price. It will keep jumping up and down. As you stated, not only BTC, fiat currencies too keep going up and down. Whole point is to leverage the benefits of the moves!

No. It's not possible that price of BTC will be stable. And why do you want the stable price?

As the crypto world has picked popularity, number of scammers has increased day by day. Gullible newbies are their easy target and they have fooled many. It's highly advisable that before making any investment or paying anyone, due diligence is done for research about the project or person you are dealing with.
It's tough to track the scamsters once you have been duped so better to be cautious in the beginning.

Free Bitcoin is a myth my friend! 

You need to invest to earn bitcoin. The investment could be money or your time. Either earn money and then buy bitcoin or work for people/projects which will pay in bitcoin.