“This is Not Financial Advice”

Hold Onto Y’r Butts

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The current situation with Bitconnect is an incredible tangled knot of drama. Many of us saw it coming, many willingly partook in a sketchy technology, and many fell victim to the culture built around the coin that is now almost universally deemed a scam.

If you’re ever interested in diving deep in the updates, controversy, and heart-breaking/gut-wrenching absurdity that has come out of this, I would point you to the Bitconnect subreddit.

• Living memes

But I don’t want to focus on what this particular tech/company/program/platform/community did over the past few years. BCC is but only one of the dangerous paths and attitudes that anyone new to cryptocurrency can take on. It was admittedly one of the most concrete and nefarious ‘solutions’ to financial success but it is only one of many and many more to come.

I’m definitely not the most knowledgeable nor the most experienced when it comes to trading, prediction markets, and overall portfolio growth, but there are number of things that concern me when I survey over the way crypto rhetoric is developing in the public spheres, namely on Youtube and even here on Steemit. I want to address these things, both as hope to cool the hot-blooded decisions of some who might read this and as a reminder to myself to not let emotions get the better of me.

Above all else, this is the only hard truth and constantly repeat - Everything crypto-related is money-related in the end and anything you put into cryptocurrency, even if it is converted from Steem/SBD that you’ve earned without USD, is absolutely a risked investment on your part. This seems less so to people who earned a good profit after hodl-ing Ether and Satoshis over the last few years but this is but a small slice of investors, most of whom are charging their credit cards through Coinbase.

Anyway, let’s look at what the hell I’m alluding to.

A Culture of Risk

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Don’t be fooled. “This is not financial advice” is just a weak excuse to put out attention-grabbing material and not be held accountable. I’m not saying these analysts and video personalities are all frauds with malicious intent. In fact, I’ve learned a tremendous deal and made what turned out to be very positive investments from these types of personalities. At the end of the day though, almost all the people in this sector are here for the interest in growing investments.

• TOP X COINS of 201X! Source: Make Money a Day

“Don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose” is another popular disclaimer. No one has money that they would be fine losing and nurturing a sentiment of sparing an extra hundred or thousand bucks laying around is again an excuse of liability.

FOMO and FUD are very real influencers in all markets and especially one that has such a speculative component to it. A great number of us have been around long enough to have survived massive plunges and rebounds in the market. Our thicker skin gained through experience allows us to trudge on despite market lows. But just as many gained while many lost inexplicable amounts during the Dot-com bubble, fomenting a culture of risk that can put its subscribers at risk.

Self-fulfilling Prophesies

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The crypto market is a bull market. It is, on average, exponential in growth and unprecedented rises/losses can be triggered by pure hype and hearsay. This makes it all the more difficult to weed out ‘good’ choices from the bad. Let’s not forget that BCC held its position …

• Source

The sensitivity of the market means that FOMO can be both easily and inadvertently created. To take Youtube as a case study, because it has become the most accessible public outlet for any “information” related to blockchain, we’re seeing the creation of self-fulfilling speculation. The circle of crypto-concerned media is still fairly small and most newcomers get caught up in the same pond of personalities. When 1 or 2 new prospects come about as the special flavor of the day or week, we see interest hop from one channel to the other. Eventually, tens and even hundreds of thousands of people learn superficially about what they believe to be “peer-reviewed” and infallible investments.

Hell, we even saw Trevon James and Craig Grant generate a combined subscriber audience of almost 200,000 despite their channels being nothing more than Bitconnect shilling and pure incoherent speculation on bullish coins. Many many people invested in BCC because of this culture. This will not be the last of the collisions created by people being led down dark roads.

Again I repeat, not all of these personalities are malicious and a great number of the more conscientious ones warn viewers of the pitfalls in ill-informed investing. Some channels are genuinely curious and want to share part of their insights. But the bottom line with any media personality, especially that on Youtube where success is directly correlated to views and likes, is attention. These people would not share anything if they wanted to no attention at all and this implicitly colors the message to be more self-serving. In the same way CNN is prone hysterical newscasting (and I say this as a left-leaning moderate) because they have to fill up 24 hours a day with something interesting and retain attention, crypto-personalities will always err on the side of speculative excitement and controversy (even where there is none) when it comes to keeping their audiences invested.

On top of this, the attention is circled around financial investments. No matter the ethics or moral foundation of these Youtubers, Jesus - the immaculately conceived son of Mary and Joseph - himself wouldn’t pass up on the opportunity to speak highly of his own investments. Again (I promise for the last time), I don’t believe that all personalities do this intentionally and maliciously but there is no way in hell that consideration doesn’t drive at least some of this content.

• Source: WWKI

Do your research. Look at the white papers. Look at the team. Go through the forums. Follow their twitter. Test out their platforms and programs. Engage with the community on their public chats. Do all the of the previous steps again and then place your bets. But don’t be pulled off-roads just because you got all tingly after an episode of Savage Cash or Altcoin Buzz (no offense Suppoman and Jeff).

Reorient Yourself

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Buy the dip, HODL, don’t invest what you can’t lose, diversify, go all-in - the cryptosphere is seemingly filled with never-ending things that you apparently should or actively should not be doing. But sometimes, it’s good to take a breather and take note of all the reasons you’re basing your decisions on. After all, it is your money.