What do you guys think? I'm personally sick of this bullshit.
Yeah, there's a lot of crap but there's always room for more gems.
I'm pretty philosophical about it all because the altcoin scene reminds me a lot of the mining-exploration penny stock market. Fact is, only about three of every thousand promising properties will become paying mines - but no-one knows which ones will be the three! That's because the difference between a payer and an also-ran is pretty damn subtle...and exploration geology is tricky, highly inferential and full of guesswork. No wonder there are so many drunks in the field.
Yeah, I know that part of the stock market is shady and even scammy - but the trouble is, there's no other way for new producers to be found. A more "scientific" approach would have passed over most of the great producing mines that have been found in the last twenty-five years. So, it's a choice between scam-tinged chaos with mines, or rational planning with far fewer mines. That's the hard choice we face when the vital data is contained in huge slabs of rock embedded hundreds of feet (or metres) below very hard bedrock.
Case in point: Hemlo Gold. In its time, during the 1980s and 1990s, it was the biggest or second-biggest gold mine in North America. The property was first staked in 1930, but the stakers missed the mine deposit completely. It was staked again in 1979, and optioned by Noranda Explorations, but the project geologists came up with "dry" sample after "dry" sample. Their immediate boss, the district geologist, persisted only because of faith - until Noranda drilled hole #62 which found the deposit in 1981 or so. And the rest was gold-mining history.
But again, that mega-success story is a pretty rare bird in the field. As I noted above, a large majority of properties are "good tries" which end up undeveloped.
Here's an interesting similarity between exploration companies and altcoins: the exploration world has copycat plays too. If one company lands exciting on a property, other explorers scramble to stake and/or buy claims adjoining that lucky holding. The copycat companies are known as "area plays."
Poll
