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The vast majority of top projects are essentially scams and the real projects are not in the rankings. Even promising projects seem to turn into scams once they

The vast majority of top projects are essentially scams and the real projects are not in the rankings. Even promising projects seem to turn into scams once they get into the top 200 or so. It's as if some wealthy investors buy up a lot tokens from top projects and then threaten the founders to crash the price unless they stop development and start wasting time. I've worked in the blockchain industry for several years and I've seen founders who used to constantly make great decisions start making one terrible decisions after another - It feels like they switched from being productive to being counter-productive from one day to the next. It's as if they're getting paid to NOT innovate. I'm 100% sure that there is some manipulation going on but I can't figure out why (though I have some wild theories).

cinntaile 5y ago
Don't go and claim the vast majority of top projects are essentially scams, that's just spreading false information.
- smt88 5y ago
  "Ponzi scheme" is a better way to put it.
- applepple 5y ago
  Name any major project and I can tell you why it's a scam. Bitcoin: Uses the electricity of a country to process 2 transactions per second. Layer 2 solutions such as Lightning Network have some significant drawbacks which make them unpractical and vulnerable to multiple attacks. They've been trying and talking it up for years - No results. Ethereum: Doesn't scale. The entire ecosystem (including all ERC20 tokens) together cannot process more than 30 transactions per second. New ERC20 tokens have to pay the same HUGE (e.g. $20 per transaction) fees as the mainchain; all tokens slow each other down (compete for resources from each other and drive up each other's transaction fees). They said that sharding was essentially ready years ago but now they've basically canceled it (or 'put it on the backburner' as they like to call it) in favor of extremely complex and vulnerable layer-2 ZK-Rollups solutions which are completely unproven (we don't know what will happen when many projects start adopting rollups; expensive on-chain interactions still need to happen). Polkadot: They claim everywhere to have 'Parachains'. The reality is that this feature doesn't exist yet. The way it's designed is extremely complex and the scalability benefits are limited because there can only be a limited number of parachains. Also, one thing which almost all the projects have in common is that they're mostly targeted at developers... Yet as a developer, there is almost always a MASSIVE amount of friction involved in setting up and integrating the blockchains with other systems. For example, Ethereum requires minimum 300GB of disk space to run a node (you need to run a node to do any serious integration testing). Also, the Ethereum node doesn't even provide a basic search feature; you need to use CENTRALIZED third-party services in order to search the blockchain data (that's because the node writes to a file instead of a proper database)... OMG. I could go on and on and on. There is just so much money behind these projects that the entire community will constantly twist the facts and present a severely distorted view of reality. There is no limit to the amount of deception and self-deception when there is money involved.
  - colesantiago 5y ago
    So Stellar, Cardano and XRP are all scams? > Polkadot: They claim everywhere to have 'Parachains'. The reality is that this feature doesn't exist yet. So it's a scam because it doesn't exist yet and it's planned on the roadmap? That's like saying Ethereum 2.0 is a scam because it doesn't exist yet. It's extremely easy to call projects scams when you're not the one doing the work.
    - applepple 5y ago
      >> So Stellar, Cardano and XRP are all scams? When Stellar started, they were all about 'Quorums'; trying to imply that this was the secret sauce which would allow it to scale unlike any other blockchain. I initially thought that quorums were like separate shards but after asking around years ago, I found out that it was not the case; all transactions pass through all nodes; exactly the same as a plain old blockchain. These days they barely even mention the concept of a 'quorum' because it was never anything more than a scammy marketing tool. I don't know too much about Cardano so I won't criticize too much but when I skim-read their whitepaper about 1 year ago, it sounded over-complicated. This is a red flag for me. Also, they are yet to implement smart contracts; so there is a long way ahead. I don't like that they keep bragging about their all-PhD team. In my experience, PhDs aren't good at delivering good developer experiences or limiting the amount of complexity. I wouldn't say that XRP/Ripple is a scam; but only because they don't make it a secret that they are essentially a centralized crytocurrency with multiple nodes for redundancy. But some could argue that they are a scam based on the fact that they don't solve any of the problems that a cryptocurrency is meant to solve (this critique pretty much applies to all top cryptocurrencies BTW; they don't solve any significant economic problem aside from upholding the status quo; the opposite of what they claim to do). >> So it's a scam because it doesn't exist yet and it's planned on the roadmap? It's scammy because they sell it as if it already exists, but it doesn't.
      - mike00632 5y ago
        What's funny is I think that Ripple is the only one of the bunch who had legal action taken against them. https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-338 https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-338 Ripple likening themselves to other cryptocurrencies when they are centralized is scammy in my book. There is a reason that video game currencies or Magic Cards aren't listed on exchanges.

cinntaile 5y ago

Don't go and claim the vast majority of top projects are essentially scams, that's just spreading false information.

smt88 5y ago
"Ponzi scheme" is a better way to put it.
applepple 5y ago
Name any major project and I can tell you why it's a scam. Bitcoin: Uses the electricity of a country to process 2 transactions per second. Layer 2 solutions such as Lightning Network have some significant drawbacks which make them unpractical and vulnerable to multiple attacks. They've been trying and talking it up for years - No results. Ethereum: Doesn't scale. The entire ecosystem (including all ERC20 tokens) together cannot process more than 30 transactions per second. New ERC20 tokens have to pay the same HUGE (e.g. $20 per transaction) fees as the mainchain; all tokens slow each other down (compete for resources from each other and drive up each other's transaction fees). They said that sharding was essentially ready years ago but now they've basically canceled it (or 'put it on the backburner' as they like to call it) in favor of extremely complex and vulnerable layer-2 ZK-Rollups solutions which are completely unproven (we don't know what will happen when many projects start adopting rollups; expensive on-chain interactions still need to happen). Polkadot: They claim everywhere to have 'Parachains'. The reality is that this feature doesn't exist yet. The way it's designed is extremely complex and the scalability benefits are limited because there can only be a limited number of parachains. Also, one thing which almost all the projects have in common is that they're mostly targeted at developers... Yet as a developer, there is almost always a MASSIVE amount of friction involved in setting up and integrating the blockchains with other systems. For example, Ethereum requires minimum 300GB of disk space to run a node (you need to run a node to do any serious integration testing). Also, the Ethereum node doesn't even provide a basic search feature; you need to use CENTRALIZED third-party services in order to search the blockchain data (that's because the node writes to a file instead of a proper database)... OMG. I could go on and on and on. There is just so much money behind these projects that the entire community will constantly twist the facts and present a severely distorted view of reality. There is no limit to the amount of deception and self-deception when there is money involved.
- colesantiago 5y ago
  So Stellar, Cardano and XRP are all scams? > Polkadot: They claim everywhere to have 'Parachains'. The reality is that this feature doesn't exist yet. So it's a scam because it doesn't exist yet and it's planned on the roadmap? That's like saying Ethereum 2.0 is a scam because it doesn't exist yet. It's extremely easy to call projects scams when you're not the one doing the work.
  - applepple 5y ago
    >> So Stellar, Cardano and XRP are all scams? When Stellar started, they were all about 'Quorums'; trying to imply that this was the secret sauce which would allow it to scale unlike any other blockchain. I initially thought that quorums were like separate shards but after asking around years ago, I found out that it was not the case; all transactions pass through all nodes; exactly the same as a plain old blockchain. These days they barely even mention the concept of a 'quorum' because it was never anything more than a scammy marketing tool. I don't know too much about Cardano so I won't criticize too much but when I skim-read their whitepaper about 1 year ago, it sounded over-complicated. This is a red flag for me. Also, they are yet to implement smart contracts; so there is a long way ahead. I don't like that they keep bragging about their all-PhD team. In my experience, PhDs aren't good at delivering good developer experiences or limiting the amount of complexity. I wouldn't say that XRP/Ripple is a scam; but only because they don't make it a secret that they are essentially a centralized crytocurrency with multiple nodes for redundancy. But some could argue that they are a scam based on the fact that they don't solve any of the problems that a cryptocurrency is meant to solve (this critique pretty much applies to all top cryptocurrencies BTW; they don't solve any significant economic problem aside from upholding the status quo; the opposite of what they claim to do). >> So it's a scam because it doesn't exist yet and it's planned on the roadmap? It's scammy because they sell it as if it already exists, but it doesn't.
    - mike00632 5y ago
      What's funny is I think that Ripple is the only one of the bunch who had legal action taken against them. https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-338 https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-338 Ripple likening themselves to other cryptocurrencies when they are centralized is scammy in my book. There is a reason that video game currencies or Magic Cards aren't listed on exchanges.