As long as IEO gets more and more traction,  I don't understand why any serious project will raise an ICO, except if they want to steal investors' money.

IEO offers a lot of advantages and transparency. Why would anyone risk to buy from ICO after all what happened in last 2 years with these programs?

I think you make a confusion between crypto and blockchain. I would rather say that blockchain is the future,  not crypto in general, because blockchain as technology is just great and many institutions already implemented it.

However,  they can use blockchain without crypto as it happens today.

In financial world anything is about offer and demand. As long as buyers are willing to pay the price requested for Btc it is not and will not be fake money.

Imagine that tomorrow nobody will want to buy American dollars. Would dollar be fake money, too?

Anyone saying it will replace gold or not are predicting as much as you!

So, if you wanna gamble, go with you own prediction, that way you won't blame others for your losses.

Note: Predictions are not the way to go.

Lol, you can be financially free or money free if price goes to zero. Let me grab my magical crystal shard, add some fairy powder from my closet of potions, and roll my 22 sided dice on the crushed bones of a danglegob. That usually tells the future with a great deal of accuracy. Be right back.

From some points of view mining seems better than investing your money via ICO/IEOs.

However, you need to take into account some key factors before comparing these 2 options:
- mining devices cost
- electricity cost
- coins halving, meaning that with time you will receive less coins
- volatility of the price on market

Things are not just black and white. Banks suffer from inflation (they are beneficiary of it, mainly) but crypto suffers from volatility.

Now, each one of you needs to think for yourself: is it better to have an asset that loses value through inflation or an asset more volatile,  where price can grow several times, but it can go to near zero, also?

Technically, you cannot ban Bitcoin world wide, except if you ban the Internet. So, as long as Internet will continue to exist, Btc will exist, also.

Popularity of Btc increased significantly during last years, so governments will be more interested in regulating Btc than banning it to get more money to their budgets.

As long as you learn something from each lesson you shouldn't have any regrets. In crypto there are and there will always be a lot of opportunities. All you need is to keep your eyes opened, do your own research, be patient and you'll find great opportunities to multiply your money.

No matter what, don't you never invest in crypto more than what you can afford to lose.

Lol ... no. Xrp is not even a cryptocurrency. It is fully centralized,  being manipulated by the ones who hold most of the tokens.

Crypto was born specifically to be an alternative for centralized systems and this is exactly what Xrp is not.

Most altcoins are useless and their price will continue to decrease to near zero in the future.

You should think more about what is the real added value of the project when willing to invest in a new coin. Most of the coins are nothing but pump and dump schemes.

Bitcoin will not have a mass adoption in less than 5 years imho. For a mass adoption institutional investors need to be more present on the market and this will take time, as most of them are still reticent about crypto.

Also, for mass adoption people should start to use Bitcoin as a currency, to buy and sell goods and services, not just holding or trading for speculation.

In crypto you need to have a good strategy and a lot of patience,  specially if you hold or trade altcoins.

This strategy should count a few key points:
- establish your own milestones and try to respect them
- when a milestone has been reached, don't be greedy and mark your profit
- don't panic sell
- never invest in crypto more money than you can afford to lose.

It is all about offer and demand. Today everyone wants gold, as having hold offers you the stability of having a non-volatile asset and also the possibility to create your own jewelry if passionate about it.

To become a virtual gold Bitcoin needs a mass adoption. It is limited, secure, it start to have more and more use cases, so there is a good potential to become a virtual gold in the future.

If McAfee would have ever been right, we would have been already millionaires, as he predicted many times Bitcoin will reach 1 million $.

This guy does nothing but taking advantage of his popularity and takes money to promote all kind of sh*t tokens or gives unrealistic predictions to be visualized by naive people hoping to get rich overnight.

I think people just get scared because of the unknown and they aren’t in crypto for the long run, mostly in it for the short term chance of catching a huge price increase.

When crypto will take advantage of mass adoption the volatility and speculation will decrease significantly.

Same happens with airdrops,  too, bot only with bounty programs. But in the end it's all about people's work that needs to be paid. They wanna do Airdrop, they let people complete their airdrop bounty (join Telegram, instagram, add email , etc.), save their wallet and send tokens only when they get on the stock exchange. They are afraid of tokens being exchanged on decentralised exchanges like EtherDelta.

I think, Airdrop tokens should be send immediately after you complete airdrop bounty. Otherwise it makes no sense to me.

Many say that Bitcoin can be considered a virtual gold. However, don't forget about the volatility of Btc and the fact that if tomorrow hype is gone, Btc price goes to zero.

Gold could never reach zero value because there are many currencies being guaranteed by gold and if you have some gold that nobody wants one day you can at least build your own jewelry from it.

Just make this experiment and you might have one surprise about your thoughts concerning this coin. Take the coin value and multiply by the number of circulating coins.

Most top 100 coins would have a market cap larger than the USA if they were ever to reach the amounts people think they will.

Some of airdrops might become small fortunes in the future. I used to spend 10+ hours a day on the internet trying every scammy website about make money online playing games, surfing using weird browsers, letting my computer run weird simulations virtually, downloading and installing programs (probably all viruses) etc. I never really made any money at it. I had a text file with hundreds of accounts on various websites.

One of the things I came across was called Bitcoin. I spent a day trying to research it, but no information on what it was, besides some virtual currency that nobody accepted, nobody except geniuses knew how to store or trade etc. I came across some free Bitcoin faucets. You click a link, claim some free Bitcoin. Tried it, I have no idea if I ever got it to work. Couldn't tell, can't remember. For all I know I have 3 Bitcoin sitting in a ledger nano wallet.