The blooming of blockchain in recent years has contributed to the prosperity of the cryptocurrency market. Investing crypto token is both of high profit and high risk. To better prepare you for investing cryptocurrency, we list 3 sorts of the scams that are commonly seen.

Spam Messages
Scammers have invented countless ways of phishing. When you open your phone, spam messages flood in. When you open your email address, the trash bin in your email box is always full.
These messages usually give you a website link or try to persuade you to write them back. The websites are usually cryptocurrency related services like virtual wallets, exchanges and others. Sometimes they even claim that something is wrong with your existing wallets and accounts and ask you to reset passwords or more. Whatever, the victims are always led to a phishing website that require them with more detailed personal information. And the scammers could use these information to stole tokens from the victims.
You may laugh about these old-fashioned scams but you cannot ignore the fact that still more and
more victims is losing money due to these traps.
What’s more, make sure you are 100% sure that you are using the correct website address before entering user account and password because scammers are really good at imitating original websites that the phishing websites may even look more official than the real ones.

Cryptojacking
This is a tricky one. It invaded your computer so quietly that you may not even realise its existence.
Cryptojacking usually happens in two ways. One is the mining code is sent to the victim’s computer through emails so when the victim clicks the link the worm is planted into his computer and starts to run mining programs quietly. The other is the codes are written into a website so when the victim view the website it infects his computer.
Most of the cryptojacking codings don’t cost you your money directly, only slows down your computer. But some malicious malware could steal your web accounts and credentials and finally cost you more lost. One example is a malware named FacexWorm, a malicious Chrome extension. It was first uncovered by Kaspersky Labs in 2017, at first it was only an ordinary cryptojacking extension that exploit your computer to mine cryptocoins without notifying you. However in 2018, Trend Micro found that it has evolved and can steal accounts and credentials of FacexWorm’s websites of interest. It also redirects would-be victims to cryptocurrency scams, injects malicious mining codes on the webpage, redirects to the attacker’s referral link for cryptocurrency-related referral programs, and hijacks transactions in trading platforms and web wallets by replacing the recipient address with the attacker’s.

Fake ICO
ICO scam is one of the most commonly seen crypto scam.
To explain this in a simple way, first we will talk more about ICO. ICO, which is the abbreviation for Initial Coin Offering, is the most trending way for a crypto project to raise funding in their initial stage. The founder develop a new type of crypto token and sell these token to fund the development of their project, which, most of the time, is a platform. Then they will promote their project online and ask for crowdfunding. At this stage, because the project has not been carried on, the token is only a symbol but with no actual value. ICO promoters promise the value of their token beforehand and if the investors believe in what they promise, they will pay for the token. The token that buyers paid for can be viewed as proofs of shares of profits after the project is successfully launched.
Then the problem comes. If the project is not successful, the investors will turn out to pay for nothing. Or it may turn out that the teams claimed that they plan to do a great blockchain project and even prepared a fancy white book in advance, but in fact they have no intention to do anything in practice or the plan does not even exist.
There have been a lot of such scams happened in the past few years. After successfully raising a huge amount of money, the sponsors vanished with the money of the investors. If we look back into the history of ICO, PinCoin scammed $660 million USD from 32,000 people, believed to be the largest ICO scam ever by the time of this writing. Also, there are also other astonishing scams, for example, AriseBank is said that raised $600 million USD and turned out to be a total scam and OneCoin, rumoured to have stolen over $300 million USD globally before collapse.

HashCoin (HSC), the token of Hashworld ecosystem, was released in early 2018. Hashworld aims to educate blockchain knowledge through games. The core members of Hashworld are from Tsinghua University, one of the top universities in China. They build up a virtual parallel world, and allow the users to play interesting games to obtain digital assets, purchase lands and put their own slogan. It is said the game has attracted more than 1 million users in just 3 months. It maintains good partnership with OKEX and Huobi and would probably been listed on these exchanges soon.

We believe blockchain is truly a promising technology and worth investment. However, we would like to point out the truth that eventually, it is only technology underlies all fancy appearances that determines the future of a crypto project. It is important to look deep into the project before you throw your hard-earned money into it.

Also see my post on Steemit👇
https://steemit.com/blockchain/@lara7/oops-you-got-screwed-by-crypto-scams

Agreed Twitter is a good source but sometimes its hard to select good ones from bad ones

Wow! This is new I never thought about using Linkedin for bitcoin research!

True but I feel like there are too many spam messages on facebook and twitter so I prefer forums better

Agreed! I tried so many platforms but I still prefer Bitcointalk, Steemit and Youtube! There are less ads and more useful information than others!

Wow thank you! And you're definitely right Youtube is trending as well! Just for me I feel like it takes more time to watch videos than read a post

Biggest and Oldest as well LOL

Agreed! Bitcointalk is truly useful

Right! I feel like on Rabbit they only talk for entertainment cannot get any useful information from it

Forums

bitcointalk.org is believed to be the largest and oldest cryptocurrency forum worldwide. It is very influential and popular among crypto enthusiasts. It is said that Satoshi Nakamoto, known as the founder of Bitcoin, first established this forum in 2009. According to the datas provided by the forum itself, it has over 2 million registered users by now, with over 40 million posts released in 1 million topics and nearly 5 billion page views.
The forum has many branches such as Bitcoin, Economy, Alternate cryptocurrencies and others. It also has a branch called Local where the forum can be viewed in over 20 different languages.
Although there has been millions of new forums online since 2009, no forum is as successful as bitcointalk so far.

Reddit

reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/ is a channel on reddit where people discuss everything about cryptocurrencies. You can find news, discussions and analysis in r/CryptoCurrency. The channel has attracted nearly 700 thousand subscribers with thousands of users online all the time.
You can post your opinions about cryptocurrency, or “upvote” and “downvote” other people’s posts. According to user votes, the best posts will rise up to the top and exposed more to all users. This rule makes reddit a very popular platform for crypto enthusiasts to share their views about cryptocurrencies.

Telegram

The reason why Telegram is so popular among people who are interested in cryptocurrencies is that it is an encrypted messaging app. A secret chat in Telegram uses end-to-end encryption meaning that nobody but the sender and the receiver will be able to know the message. Since cryptocurrency is closely related to real assets, security is very important to crypto investors.
Besides, Telegram allows group talk where you can discuss crypto news to or analysis with others that are also really interested in this. In this way, Telegram is able to build small and close relationships among people of same interests. What’s more, Telegram is a chatting tool which means you can get real-time information more promptly than other social media platform.

Twitter/Facebook

As two of the most popular social platforms in the world, Twitter and Facebook are also welcomed by cryptocurrency fans. On these platforms, people share their original ideas, like or retweet other people’s posts all the time. They use like #cryptocurrency, #altcoin or other hashtags to highlight their main ideas, attract other crypto enthusiasts’ attention, or even start their own group talks. These platforms have successfully gathered people of same interests together and form closer relationships with people from all around world.
Also, you can follow your favourite alt coins or cryptocurrencies and see their updated news on your own home page. Most cryptocurrencies have their official accounts and are active on Twitter an Facebook.

Medium/Steemit

These are very popular blogs among crypto enthusiasts. Different from Twitter and Facebook, these platforms don’t have restrictions on the numbers of words you put in one article.
You spend hours to write your blog, add pictures to make it easier to understand, and publish it simply clicking on the publish button. Here, you can express your ideas freely and with millions of users on the Medium and Steemit, many people will have the chance to see your articles. The website is simple and easy to use, and they the recommended articles are based on the articles you have viewed.[img]
Hashworld is the first blockchain game that incorporates virtual economic society. Similar to Monopoly, the game also allows users to play interesting games to obtain digital assets. Users can buy hot land, LSB land. The core members of Hashworld are from Tsinghua University, one of the top universities in China. They build up a virtual parallel world, and allow the users to play interesting games to obtain digital assets, purchase lands and put their own slogan. It has attracted 1.3 million users since its launch. It is now traded on three exchanges, BCEX, Gate.io and KKcoin.

Follow Hashworld on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Medium and Steemit now!

Cryptocurrencies are extremely popular in payment and investment asset in the recent few years. Besides the cryptocurrency pioneers like Bitcoin and Ethereum, newly released alt coins become increasingly popular among investors. However, there are thousands of kinds of cryptocurrencies in the market and it is just so hard to make a choice. This article will introduce to you 5 popular cryptocurrencies that worth to invest in 2018.

1. Cardano
Cardano is a technological platform that is capable of running financial applications currently used every day by individuals, organizations and governments all around the world.
According to Weiss Ratings, probably the most recognized rating agency for cryptocurrencies, Cardano is rated at B considering both its risk-reward rate and technology comprehensively, which wins the highest rate among 93 cryptocurrencies. It should be noted that the technology of Cardano is highly spoken of by the ratings.

2. Stellar Lumens
Stellar platform can realize real-time settlement in 2 to 5 seconds and secure cryptographically transactions. One lumen (XLM) is a unit of digital currency, like a bitcoin. Lumens are the native asset of the Stellar network.
China Center for Information Industry Development (CCID) ratings gave Stellar a quite high score in technology and the Weiss commented that it has good technology and fair adoptions. The market price of Stellar is not expected to be fluctuating extremely in short time but I guess we will need to give it some time to see how it evolves.

3. EOS
EOSIO is software that introduces a blockchain architecture designed to enable vertical and horizontal scaling of decentralized applications. The resulting technology is a blockchain architecture that has the potential to scale to millions of transactions per second, eliminates user fees and allows for quick and easy deployment of decentralized applications.
The Chinese government has ranked EOS as the world’s top cryptocurrency of 2018. Despite the launch of its main-net not going smoothly, the price of EOS is still expected to double by the end of the year. The Weiss Ratings also describe EOS has excellent technology and good fundamentals.

4. NEO
NEO is a non-profit community-based blockchain project that utilizes blockchain technology and digital identity to digitize assets, to automate the management of digital assets using smart contracts, and to realize a "smart economy" with a distributed network.
The public blockchain rating by CCID has given credit to NEO with the highest rate in its application. It is the first cryptocurrency released in China. The market is optimistic in its future and expects to see a higher rise in 2018.

5. IOTA
IOTA is a permissionless distributed ledger for a new economy. It is the first open-source distributed ledger that is being built to power the future of the Internet of Things with feeless micro-transactions and data integrity for machines. IOTA is a revolutionary new, next generation public distributed ledger that utilizes a novel invention, called a “Tangle”, at its core. The Tangle is a new data structure based on a Directed Acyclic Graph. As such it has no Blocks, no Chain and also no Miners.

Although the market price of IOTA is not expected to rise dramatically, the risk of investing IOTA is considered pretty low. It is not outstanding in any particular aspect, but overall it is a steady currency to invest.
Besides these cryptocurrencies that show up early, there are also some new evolving blockchain projects that worth attention. For instance, Elastos, Newton etc. Elastos aims to establish trust on the Internet by building a decentralized Smart Web where devices, individuals, websites and digital assets have trustworthy IDs. It quickly gains wide recognition. Moreover, there are many potential projects in Elastos ecosystem. Just to name one, HashCoin (HSC), the token of Hashworld ecosystem, has been released in early 2018. Hashworld aims to educate blockchain knowledge through games, and it is said the game has attracted more than 1 million users in just 3 months. It maintains good partnership with OKEX and Huobi and would probably been listed on these exchanges soon.

In conclusion, cryptocurrency investment can be highly rewarding but also risky at the same time. You should always think thoroughly before pouring your money into the market.

Original posted on https://medium.com/@laradai/5-cryptocurrencies-that-worth-your-investment-in-2018-79c1bdfb9bf8

Games are now believed to be the best way of introducing blockchain technology to the public. Since the first blockchain based game HunterCoin was first launched, there have been millions of similar games coming into the market. These games have made blockchain more interesting and understandable. Here are 5 blockchain games that seem to gain worldwide recognition.

1. CryptoKitties
CryptoKitties is one of the world’s first games to be built on blockchain technology. You can buy, sell, or trade your CryptoKitty and it was like a traditional collectible. But, unlike traditional collectibles, you can breed two CryptoKitties to create a brand-new, genetically unique offspring. Each cat is one-of-a-kind and 100% owned by you and it cannot be replicated, taken away, or destroyed.
CryptoKitties became the most popular blockchain game in 2017. It is easy to fall in love with these one-of-a-kind kitties. It does not have any fancy functions but it wins the heart of the users with its simplicity and easy to operate. After all, who can say no to these cuties?

2. Spells of Genesis
Spells of Genesis is a mobile game that is a mix of a trading card game (TCG), bringing in deck collection and strategy, along with arcade-style gaming aspects. Players can collect, trade and combine orbs to build the strongest decks, and put them to the test against various opponents while exploring the fantasy realm of Askian.
The game Spells of Genesis is based on blockchain technology. It uses a well-designed game to encourage more users to be involved in blockchain market. The cards are diverse and can be evolved so it is more likely to maintain loyal and persistent game players.

3. Beyond the Void
Beyond the Void is a unique combination of strategy, action and competition in 1 versus 1. It brings the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) genre with its real-time strategy (RTS) origins back together in a space universe in perpetual motion. The users can collect items through commanding the spaceship to win battles. It is more popular to gamers not just crypto-investors. You do not need to pay anything to play the game. The design of the game is beautiful and the game experience is great. It’s more a playable blockchain game than many other games in the market.

4. Gods Unchained
This game has just been launched on July 9, 2018. It is the world’s first blockchain based eSports game.The game offers players true ownership of in-game items, and the ability to trade those items freely on secondary markets means gamers can finally be rewarded for their efforts and spending. 
The team behind Gods Unchained  has had experience in winning users through the game Etherbots, which had more active daily users than the most popular crypto-game Cryptokitties before.

5. Hashworld
Hashworld is the first blockchain game that incorporates virtual economic society. Similar to Monopoly, the game also allows users to play interesting games to obtain digital assets. By linking up to the real world map, they build up a virtual parallel world, and users can purchase lands and put their own slogan. It has attracted 1.3 million users since its launch. HSC, as the token in Hashworld, is already available for trading on various exchanges.

Original post https://medium.com/@laradai/shall-we-play-a-game-5-addictive-blockchain-based-games-e68f4d214fb1

I am now playing a game called Hashworld and it is great because you can get HSC for free just play the game!

I don't think it's accurate to say which one is better but I think if Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency in the market sooner or later the problem of monopoly will destroy the fairness that blockchain tries to build.
I am now playing a game called Hashworld and it is great because you can get HSC for free just play the game!

I am now playing a game called Hashworld and it is great because you can get HSC for free just play the game!