But man the past few months, the doge coin mania has birthed an astonishing amount of scams, rugpulls and zero-utility coins. I really can’t defend crypto at this point at all.
When tor was full of bitcoin doubler websites I tracked multiple hundred thousand dollars getting burned daily for months until it cooled down. This is like 6 years ago. I guess many back then learned their lesson, so do many others today. Or remember Mt gox? When like half of the active bitcoin market was suddenly lost?
I tend to disagree a bit. In the early days, most scams at least pretended to have some non-pump-and-dump usecase. Like Dentacoin or Filecoin. You could at least pretend to "buy filecoin today so you can store PB's worth of data in a year" or "buying Dentacoin now because in a year you need some dental work done".
Nowadays all new tokens/coins have 0 usecases attached and only exist to be pancake swapped and pumped and separating other people from their money. It's all about lending, yielding, farming, interest rates, staking, ...
Jumping about 3-4 years ago, just before NFTs became a thing and ETH transactions were still cheap there was a grace of the most simple, basic and stupid ponzi "games" the world has ever seen. "Buy color #24384, the next pays 150% of the price and you get 120% back" that often collapsed the same day, and as NFTs weren't a thing yet basically disappeared once the website went down. Yet people threw thousands of dollars at these games without asking questions.
Today's "bullshit" is much more sophisticated and usually doesn't collapse after only a few days, as well as is harder to see trough for naive investors.
But really I can't say it got worse, if anything these 'scams' have more winners because most 'investors' aren't that naive anymore.
The most traded coins right now according to CoinGecko are almost entirely memecoins with no utility whatsoever.
And if I’m honest, BTC was the original memecoin.
Seems like self regulation at its worst.
Every bull market has brought the scams. This isn't just in crypto. How many penny stock scams were perpetrated during the dot com bubble by adding ".com" to the name of a company?
Scams are nothing new, scams in cryptocurrency are nothing new, and in all honesty 90% of them are obvious. General rule of thumb, if someone is telling you you can make money by spending some of your money right now, it is probably a scam, if they're saying you can make money by giving them some of your money then it is almost 100% certain to be a scam.