I couldn't get people to sign mine share contracts with me to support the operating costs, I ended up spending most of it on my power bill, food, and my therapist (that sounds like it's a joke, but it's not). At the time my tiny run-of-the-mill software consultancy barely kept it's head above water. This thing actually put me deeply in the red. Texas summers. heh.
All the people I offered those mine shares to have called me this year thinking I was on to something! I wasn't on to something, I lucked into a situation and did something with computers that I liked. I didn't hold shit. I regret nothing. After the 2014 crash, everyone was saying "I told you so!" and I had some bills to pay. Jokes on them, I had a blast.
I really love what blockchain can do for consensus. I love that ETH can be used for address resolution outside of DNS. I love what is happening with IPFS. There is so much growing out of this that is good.
A partner in my mine got me on a call a year and a half ago with a friend of his from Bloomberg. The call was (from my perspective) supposed to be about my AR GIS platform. It turned out the dude was specifically a crypto journalist and had a stake in a Puerto Rico "Crypto Hedge Fund". Whatever that is. To his surprise, I had no opinions on hot coins!
Unlike the internet, the first "killer app" for this was about literally printing money. It's not a fair comparison. The real work that is happening with decentralized systems around this stuff is happening quietly. How many of you are listening to podcasts about DNS? People want to get rich quick. Sharks love to eat people that want that. It's a shame people got shucked.
Last year when people decided to give me calls about it, especially friends and family, my response was "How much do you know about cryptography? How much do you think you understand this stuff? I barely understand it. In my opinion, no one really understands what we are doing or what we are capable of with it. That doesn't make it an investment. Stick your money in an index fund."
My superpower: Taking things literally. Still more useful than the last 10 ICOs. And my bad jokes aren't as bad for the environment. 10k joke-coins pre-ICO and 2 downvotes for that one for me!
We had three innovative ideas in the financial sector - certificate of debt, compounded interest and book money. And now the fourth - trolling idiots to risk their retirement money because they want to get rich "with that computer money my son told me about".
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1026931/?&utm_m...
r/memeeconomy but irl, if you will.
You don't appear to actually understand what the phrase "snake oil" means in English. It doesn't mean "snake oil isn't useful".
It means: during in the 1800s Chinese immigrants to American used snake oil (from the Chinese water snake; the one in your link) as a cure-all. Unscrupulous "snake oil salesmen" would sell what-they-called-snake-oil-but-actually-wasn't. Or it used rattlesnake oil instead of water snake oil.
Here's a 90 second video that says the same thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaDsOJATX3A
Exactly why so much wealth was created by the Internet boom. The wealth came from utility that already existed, just needed to be harnessed to its fullest potential. ICO scams are based on generating wealth first and hoping that utility follows at some undetermined time in the future.
It's all snake oil. Maybe snake oil can be useful to someone at some point in time, but until then it's still just a scam.