For those of you feeling paranoid (I get it), try looking at it this way - if it is a scam, it would be one of the biggest scams evarr, and very very elegant. It's now some $60 million worth of
BTC and growing fast. Would you miss a chance to be part of that, even as a victim? Think of the epic stories you could tell your grandchildren!
My assessment is that tonych will do better by playing it straight rather than scamming, but then I felt that way about Butterfly Labs and Mt. Gox, so you never know. That's why it's called "risk". Tony had me at DAGs, I confess, which seemed so abstract and impractical back in grad school - NP Completeness theory, Garey and Johnson, my head still hurts!
Of course you can do nothing if you want, or expose whatever your risk/greed sensors tell you is OK. If you get something for nothing then you got something for nothing (that's a good thing). If you lose
your BTC something, then your risk/greed sensors were wrong. Happens all the time. Relax - this isn't coercive - nobody will mind if you opt out.
I will think less of you if you get something for nothing and whine that somebody else got more than you did though. Heh - no matter what one does in life somebody won't like it.
Edit: strikeout and change in response to cryptonit's remarks.
dude if u understand a tiny bit of how bitcoin technology works u would understand there is no risk involved that ur BTC get stolen
all u do is send a tiny transaction or sign a message in both case u dont give away ur private key
the only thing that can happen is that project fails but if enough people are involved because they are shareholder now too chances are high it will develop into something nice
The overt risk is privacy/identity related. See lml's post downthread, and its useful link about "identity collapse":
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address_reuse#Known_attacksSpecifically, the BB team accumulates and publishes proof that whoever owns
BTC account X also owns BB account Y. This is valuable to demonstrate transparency of the BB distribution:
http://transition.byteball.org/It has the side-effect that if someone discovers the real-world identity for one account owner, then they know it for both. There are some tensions involved in making things "transparent", "fair", "private", "untraceable", and so forth.
I'd be twitchy about that exposure if I had a gazillion
BTC in play. Since I have only a modest amount in the game, it's a risk that doesn't particularly bother me - I linked an account when BB went live and have no regrets yet. ymmv.
