it's hard for me to believe that all these people hyping this coin are not being paid. Cryptocurrencies are supposed to be based on trustlessness, and all this blind trust just seems so ironic.
Every coin....a shitty scam coin or good developed coins have more blind trust than any investment I have ever seen. I don't understand it.
I think the reason for this is that cryptos allow for small investments to turn into big gains, at a great risk of course. Before, if you wanted to play the speculation game, or if you wanted to invest, you needed a fairly big amount of money to start with. Real, hard money.
So like you said, if you happened to have that hard earned money, more likely than not you were not simply going to go ahead and give it to the first guy claiming he has a good investment. You were gonna do your research, and if a company was starting up (the most similar example I can think of) and there was an IPO of sorts, they would do EVERYTHING to prove to you and all potential investors how their company was a good investment. Unless of course it was some kind of ponzi scheme, which normally catered to less informed, less solvent people. Guess who are also less informed and less solvent, and equally greedy? People interested in investing in cryptocurrencies.
Don't get me wrong I'm in love with the whole cryptography based currency concept, but as long as dollars (or euros, or fiat, or gain in the form of an established currency, or whatever you want to call it) remains the moving force behind cryptos, it will be like tainted water, and they will be used and created for the sole purpose of profiting, instead of being used and created for the purpose of further developing the technology, and only then profit from the economic growth that any revolutionary new technology will generate as a byproduct.