The Crypto-Wilderness Survival Guide pt.1
The ultimate survival guide for the dark web of the crypto-wilderness. In crypto, you can choose to be the hunter or the hunted. Be the hunter.
Foreword: You have come this far ped, the chilling wind of crypto winter has almost turned, as the winds change and seasons shift, crypto summer is soon to be upon us again. With the change in weather will come the bull markets, bringing with it fresh pedestrians, and parasitic creatures who want your crypto. I have prepared for you the ultimate crypto-wilderness survival guide, introducing iron-clad rules and logic for identifying and eliminating scams. — Highside
Don’t trust, verify.
Don’t trust, verify. The principles of removing trust is the bedrock on which cryptocurrency was formed, and it’s a goddamn solid foundation.
Don’t trust, verify. Learn it. Live by it. Sharpen your blade with information. Hone your weapon with the blood of your vanquished foes, those that seek to deceive and impoverish you.
Be vigilant. Trust nobody. The web is dark and full of terrors, crypto is only as safe as you make it.
You will need the following to survive crypto:
Grit, a little misanthropy, deliberate research, diligent knowledge gathering, logical processes, critical analysis, a bit of elbow grease, a dash of cunning, and a sprinkling of google savvy.
I got 99 problems, but due diligence ain’t one…
Everything, every ICO, every crypto trader selling a premium membership, every crypto service, every crypto MLM, every damn thing in crypto is a scam until it’s not a scam.
Don’t trust, verify. Live by this rule and you will survive and prosper in crypto. Fail to be vigilant and you will probably find yourself broke, broken, and bag holding. Choose to trust nobody’s decision but your own.
The ‘scam first’ rule is merely the easiest, fastest, and the most logical way given the high incidence in crypto to scams and scammers. To easily sort the chaff from the wheat in crypto is to use a guilty till proven innocent strategy.
Rule: Until any project, person, or service in crypto can prove by some exhaustive measure that it isn’t a scam or scammer, then for all intents and purposes you should either treat it as such or prove that it is not.
Caveat: Now that’s not to say that everything in crypto is a scammer, but if they want your money, this rule definitely always applies. Arm yourself with knowledge, for it is your greatest weapon in your arsenal to protect your crypto from scams.
Schrödinger’s scam
Until you can prove otherwise through a reasonable level of due diligence, consider every single thing in crypto to be vibrating in a superposition between both the states of being a ‘scam’ and ‘not a scam’. Everything in crypto is both of these states simultaneously, that is until you have conclusive evidence to prove the definitive current state.
Rule: crypto[] == “Scam” = True or False until crypto[] == “Scam” = False
crypto[] is a list containing every possible variable to concatenate(combine) with crypto e.g crypto services, crypto exchanges, crypto influencers, crypto initial coin offerings, crypto investment opportunities, et al..
== is a comparison operator, comparing the variable on each side of the operator and returning a True or False result. See example:
- “Yes” == “No” = False
- “Yes” == “Yes” = True
It is only by observation of crypto[] that we can ascertain its state i.e By performing thorough due diligence research, and using rational processes to evaluate each individual case, then, and only then, can we determine the true state of crypto[].
Curiosity Killed The Scam
You should make it a habit of arming yourself with enough knowledge about everything you can about your investments. Be like bitcoin, be vigilant, trust nobody.
Only you will save yourself from scams. If you want to learn how to survive in a hostile and adversarial environment, then you better trust that nobody will have your self interests above their own.
Cryptocurrency is the Wild Wild West kid, it will eat you up, spit you out, sell you a shit ICO, charge you a monthly fee, and find a way to extract and as many of your bitcoins as possible along the way.
Be Smart, Be Vigilant
Now I know the following sounds entirely unreasonable of me, an arrogant writer, to ask you to be diligent, but you definitely should spend the time proportionate to your level of investment becoming intimate with the moving pieces.
If you have a small fortune invested in anything and you blindly trust the ‘crypto gods’, or you haven’t spent the appropriate time in proportion to that investment to learn what it is that you’re buying… You gon’ get rekt son.
“Listen up ped, I’ll teach you how to leverage like a real man…100x on ‘Mex, follow my simple steps to success, from street level ped, to rainin’ pay cheques… I’ll take you from the pathetic depths of rekt, to the simmering heights of crypto trading god, like me… All for just $75.95 a month”
Crypto Trader Scam
Everything that shines is not gold. Surprise goddamn surprise, every amateur trader who was partaking in the ‘2017 crypto trading madness’ is now selling a killer premium subscription course.
These confidence men use every single obvious and non-obvious persuasion tactic in the confidence man 101 handbook, reeling in peds wanting to emulate their success like lambs to the slaughter.
Rule: crypto[trader] == “scam” = True if crypto[trader] “marketing” = “persuasion”
The Persuasive Trader
The crypto trading confidence man performs many persuasion tricks to sell their subscription services to those hapless victims hoping to mirror their miraculous trading success. The persuasive trickster employs the following as common practice:
- Public displays of their wealth.
- Public acts of charity.
- Bragging about open trade positions e.g. “I’am 10 BTC deep in X”.
- Glorifying leveraged trading wins.
- Bragging about wins while removing traces of losses.
- Selling falsified ratios of past wins as reasons to pay them for their advice.
- Cherry pick the 1 correct guess out of the 100 as evidence of authority.
- Falsifying social proof i.e group stuffing with fake accounts, friends, non-paying members, and respected community leaders (also non-paying) for social proof, authority, and to create FOMO.
- Develop a cult of personality around their perceived authority.
Anything to sell the illusion of wealth and success to those hopeful to mirror it. And it works for a while. Any one game enough to question why so many of their charts or trades don’t play out is quickly shuffled out of the echo chamber.
Your stops just weren’t tight enough kid, you get a life ban.
Crypto Trading Survival Guide
Never pay for a premium service without researching who and what you are paying for.
Before paying for a premium service ask for their credentials, and ask to see their trade history. A profitable trader selling his services shouldn’t be shy, unless, of course, they aren’t really all too profitable before your subscription fee.
Traders selling trading advice should ultimately be experts in the field with relevant industry experience. Crypto is one of the only fields in the world I have witnessed swarms of people willing to pay rank novices for advice, per month, every month, again and again.
Rule: crypto[trader] == “scam” = True until crypto[trader] “experience” = “expert” and until crypto[trader] “trades” = “profitable”
What is an expert trader in crypto?
An expert trader ideally is somebody who has an expert knowledge of traditional financial markets such as Forex, stocks, CFD’s, et al, then applies that expert knowledge to cryptocurrency trading, honing it to a profitable strategy to beat the market consistently.
This doesn’t really give us a definitive answer without first setting a baseline. The answer to this question really lies in what defines an expert.
What is an expert?
A theory by Malcolm Gladwell in the book Outliers postulates it takes around 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an elite performer in a given subject.
At the marginal requirement set by Gladwell it would take 9.6 years of 4 hours of deliberate practice a day, 5 days a week to become an elite in a narrow niche. Considering there is only so much you can learn, retain, and put into practice in a day, and that the average human is only productive for about 4 hours a day, we are going to make our assumptions based on this regiment of practices. 4 hours a day of deliberate practice every single week day for almost 10 years.
This isn’t your standard practice either, this means four 4 hours of rigorous practice, be it study or practical, but always designed in a way to hone and push your skills to the limit. Becoming an expert is hard work.
A crypto trading expert should at the very least have reached expert level in the traditional markets, then enough time translating this expertise to the crypto markets. By the time this equation is finished you are looking for somebody with atleast 10 years experience.
You have two options when it comes to learning how to trade crypto:
- Find the profitable elite expert, pay that guy to train you, spend 10 years of rigorous almost daily ritual practice, become the elite expert.
- Find a amateur, pay that guy, have less money than last month.
Cloud Mining Scam
If you’ve been in crypto for longer than a few weeks you’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase “If you don’t own the private key, it’s not yours”, the same can be said for cloud mining.
If you don’t own the actual physical miner, then it’s not yours, and it possibly doesn’t exist at all.
Read the fine print, most (if not all) cloud mining contracts have not only a back door clause to change the contracts terms, but to terminate them at their own discretion, or based on means they can determine arbitrarily.
Some make grounds for their termination based on profitability or being able to pay maintenance fees, but the majority leave the actual discretion of executing this clause to the judgement of the cloud mining supplier.
If the cloud mining service deems it unprofitable you will likely be holding hot air and a contract that never even turned cash flow positive. It’s easier to mark this one always a scam, and to stay away from cloud mining entirely.
There is a high likelihood that whether or not all of these are a scam, they represent a massive risk of overselling their services, or cutting off the access from underneath you. Many of these use MLM style recruitment schemes to oversubscribe and eventually cannot sustain payments anymore.
Whether or not this represents a outright scam to begin with or not, the state is unpredictable. Therefore, cloud mining is always a scam.
Rule: crypto[cloud_mining] = “scam”
The High Yeild Investment scam
Anything in crypto that offers guaranteed rewards is a scam.
Rule: crypto[investment] == “scam” = True if crypto[investment] = “guaranteed_rewards”
BITCONNNECTTTTTTTTT! Anything in crypto that asks for your crypto, and promises to give you back significantly more crypto, and has the ability to continually compound reinvest those returns is definitely a scam.
Rule: crypto[investment] == “scam” = True if crypto[investment] = “high_yeild_investment” or if crypto[investment] = “compound_investing”
Don’t listen to Malcolm Turnbull, The laws of mathematics do apply in Australia. You simply cannot earn 1%, or anywhere even remotely close to this every day, compounding ad infinitum.
The result of this equation is an eventual monopoly over the money supply of the entire world, and as you add more people into the HYIP equation the time span becomes significantly shorter for your collective to own the entire money supply of the world. Hint, it’s impossible.
There is no free money machine, free energy machine, or way to return astronomically high interest returns daily / weekly simply because of ‘crypto’.
These HYIP operations are only even remotely possible while the operation continues to grow exponentially, which is why the majority of their focus on marketing, seminars, and MLM style pyramid incentives. Eventually all of these pyramid or ponzis collapse under their own weight, are shut down by the SEC, or perform an exit scam in the middle of the night.