That guy is so wrong. People must understand that they are the ones who give value of "something". No matter if it's cryptocurrency or beer. If I own "some"coin, of course that I will try to help my investment. Maybe we should sit and wait to become Bill Gates in 24hrs?
That's what makes investing in altcoins so interesting - and so different from investing in penny stocks (turf I'm more used to, specifically in the gold-exploration sector.)
If you buy umpty-thousand shares of a penny stock, if you're the typical punter, you watch its trading like a hawk and, more often than not, pump it on forums that bear a strange resemblance to this one.
But beyond that,
there's nothing you can do to grow your speculation.
That's why so many penny investors end up bitching about management when their stocks go nowhere. Beyond the above, that's all they can do.
And the exploration sector is one of the few with an "in" for a would-be outside builder. If you have a talent for rocks, you can get a prospector's license, outfit yourself, send about a season or so whacking around in the bush to learn the ropes, and then try your hand at staking a promising property and shopping it to the hundreds of listed exploration companies. But even then, if you get one of them to sign on the line, you get restricted shares: escrowed until the regulations permit you to sell them.
And that's how things work in the sector with the lowest barrier to entry. Just try something like that with a senior stock, like the Royal Bank of Canada. Investor relations will either point you to the job board or secretly put your name in their crank file and start humouring you.
Altcoins are the only sector where an investor can pitch in directly and help grow his (or her) investment with independent outside work to benefit the coin. The closest parallel is to startup shares, but shares in startups can't be traded for a long time. (Regs, remember?) Those lucky "instant millionaires" who got paid in Facebook stock at its beginning all had nice, unsalable pieces of paper for years. How instant.
Contrariwise, all altcoins are free-trading once they're listed.
In a very real sense, the altcoin world is like the bohemian part of town. The bohemian 'hood was famous for the great talent who lived there - but it was also notorious as the part of town where you'd also find the nutboys and degenerates. And, yes, scammers and con artists.
But that said,
Shadow_Runner has his point too. Devs do have a special responsibility, even if a totally undefined one by the law, so any semi-legitimate dev should be pitching in - especially if the coin was IPOed. In fact, the customary expectation for an IPCO is for the dev to spend it on coin-building bounties and/or quit his job and develop the coin full-time. The ambiguity comes with the newness, fluidity and legal-blank-slate of the territory. It makes for an inexhaustible supply of points to argue about.
