When you invest in crypto you are giving people your hard earned money.

The implied agreement is that you trust them to look after it for you. You trust them to be responsible, to make good decisions to the best of their knowledge and to keep your investment safe (and hopefully grow it).

Crypto is risky, we all know this. It is very easy for something to crash and for you to lose your investment in it (see my post on diversification to help mitigate that risk https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@bitbrain/how-to-diversify-your-crypto-portfolio-part-1-intro). Risk is not a factor when determining trust, you must accept the risk of investing in the project, and then you trust the team to do their best with your investment.

From https://www.thedailybeast.com/in-god-we-trust-doesnt-mean-what-you-think-it-does

Who do you trust with your crypto funds?

I'm writing this today because I heard some news earlier which rather surprised me:

COSS have improved their exchange and it is now operating well.

That news left me in a difficult position in regard to COSS. Pausing to think about it, I realised that I already knew the solution to my problem, and I knew it because of trust. I believe that as a crypto trader, you may well face similar situations in the future. I hope that you can use this method to decide the path ahead like I did.

Once bitten, twice shy

Trust is difficult to gain and easy to lose. Once lost, it takes great effort and time to win back.

COSS lost my trust. I used to once hold a fair amount of COSS. I bought it when KuCoin launched. I still remember comparing the two coins and seeing that, on paper at least, COSS was going to pay four times more in dividends than Kucoin was. So I chose COSS.

What a mistake. I'm not going to bore you with the all of the details, but whereas KuCoin launched a sleek and effective platform, COSS launched a bit of a lemon. The platform started off fine, the interface wasn't what I was used to (coming mainly from Bittrex and the newly formed Binance), but it was easy enough to learn, if not quite as good as the other exchanges. But after a few months it got bad. I sold half my COSS (at a tidy profit for the time). And then it got worse. At that stage I still had COSS on the platform and some SUB. I sold more COSS and I got my SUB into a proper wallet. I kept about a third of my COSS, incase things changed and COSS picked up again.

Meanwhile I had bought some KuCoins and they were performing spectacularly. The payouts were coming in daily and value of the coins was going through the roof. COSS on the other hand, got so bad that I made the decision to get out entirely. Transactions were so slow and painful to execute that it just wasn't worth it any more. I wasn't the only one to have noticed. Trading volume at COSS was really poor, the exchange looked like a morgue. It took me days to get out. Offline wallets, huge spreads in the coins I was trying to trade to, slow transactions, having to swap on crypto to another and then re-swap it to another, all to just find a working way to get my money out; it was terrible clearing my last funds out of COSS. I lost a lot of value. A lot.

COSS had burnt me and I had no desire to go back. That was, of course, until I heard the news today: COSS is back, it's running well, people are trading there again.

Instant FOMO reaction: the COSS token is climbing in value - buy some quick and ride the next COSS wave. Start using the platform again.

And then I remembered why I had left in the first place. COSS was probably my first really bad experience with a coin, a case of "it's over - get out while you can". You can go through an experience like that and not learn your lesson. But luckily for me, the lesson had been reinforced...

I participated in the Electroneum (ETN) ICO. To date that was, by far, the biggest crypto chaos I have ever seen. I don't want to be nasty, the ETN team don't mean anyone any harm or malice, but Hell's Bells, the frustration and exasperation of dealing with ETN! Aborted launches (yes, launches - plural), the constantly shifting time-lines, the non-existant phone miner (which turned out to be a simulator/faucet), the defective PC miner (you don't want to know), the broken promises. The wallet security facade (imagine a crypto that delays a launch for months because some of its investors have been stupid enough to use the same compromised passwords for multiple things on the internet. So everyone suffers while the crypto team tries in vain to protect the terminally stupid - who will no doubt just repeat the mistake with their next investment. It happened - ETN did it.).

ETN taught me that no matter how good the idea of the crypto, no matter how technically competent the team are; if they lack strategic vision and business sense, then they will fail over and over again.

Which is exactly what they do. I still get their emails (from being in the ICO). And what I see is just sad, they're still making mistakes due to poor strategic vision. Nothing personal against ETN, it was my decision to invest there and my risk, I can accept that. But I won't touch that crypto with a bargepole - even if the opportunity exists to make good money from it! I just don't want to suffer like that again, because I will never know when the team is going to make another stupid decision that wrecks my investment.

And today I realised that COSS is another ETN for me. I went to COSS, I checked the site. It IS up and running, trades ARE happening. It has TradingView charts now, the COSS token has been forked, changes have been made. It looks good.

But I won't touch it. Because COSS lost my trust. And you don't get trust back that easily.

Conclusion

Look, I'm not saying: "don't use COSS" or "don't buy ETN", that's your choice.
I'm saying: " don't be stupid enough to go back to a bad coin that has already failed you before!"
We are lucky in crypto, there are plenty of fish in the sea. Two days back I sold my Centra (CTR) because the leaders of the team were arrested on some rather nasty looking charges. BOOM! - trust gone. Bye Bye Centra. I'm never going to buy Centra again, even if it looks very good. And why should I? I can buy TenX / Monaco / OmiseGo / UTrust - all good coins, all similar to Centra - all of which I still trust.

So don't give your hard earned money to those who don't deserve it. Don't help the ICOs or the communities of those coins which are failing to put in the effort to grow your investment in the manner that you expect them to. Rather cut your losses and put your funds in a place that will allow you to sleep safely at night. Because once trust has been broken, you're a fool if you give it back to the same people who abused it in the first place.

I hope that as crypto matures we will see fewer and fewer incidents like this. Please note: I'm not talking here about the obvious scams; those are evil charlatans out to steal your money from the word go, and are perhaps a topic for another day. I'm talking about legitimate coins that don't do what they should do. Who don't put you, the investor, first. Those who abuse your trust.

I trust that this post was enlightening and I trust that you will enjoy the rest of your day.

Yours in crypto,
Bit Brain

P.S. - fair warning. I have no idea why, but most ETN fans behave like rabid lunatics, and that's putting it nicely. Don't try to tell them that their coin has even the slightest fault... You have been warned.

DISCLAIMER:
I am not a financial advisor nor am I a professional trader/investor. This is not financial advice, investment advice or trading advice. Unless otherwise stated, all my posts are my opinion and nothing more. Crypto is highly volatile and you can easily lose everything in crypto. You invest at your own risk! Information I post may be erroneous or construed as being misleading. I will not be held responsible for anything which is incorrect, missing, out-of-date or fabricated. Any information you use is done so at your own risk. Always Do Your Own Research (DYOR) and realise that you and you alone are responsible for your crypto portfolio and whatever happens to it.