Observers of the crypto world may be forgiven for having a sense of déjà vu. Bitcoin and the rest have clawed their way back to levels not seen since November of 2021. Along the way many learned painful lessons about crypto wealth and power, believing every word that wealthy crypto promoters said. Many businesses that worked under the assumption that crypto would go up forever have gone bankrupt. Sam Bankman-Fried has begun a 25-year prison sentence for fraud. And here we are again with the emergence of crypto scams now aided by social media and artificial intelligence. Was this increase in scams following crypto resurgence something innate to the crypto world? How should serious crypto investors and folks building the new world of decentralized finance deal with this phenomenon?
Fake Crypto Promotions on the Rise
Bloomberg published an article recently about a new wave of crypto market scams. New attempts to fool potential crypto investors include photos of real people given fake names and said to be principals in new crypto companies. These scams include AI generated press releases claiming association with reputable crypto business entities and fundraising in the world of venture capital.
Beware of Following Fake Money into Crypto Investments
Follow the money is an old saying and an often useful investment guide. Many mom and pop investors have done well over the years simply imitating the investment strategies and actual investments of giants like Warren Buffett. The world of serious investors often profits by keeping an eye on where venture capital giants are putting their money to work. Sadly, a naïve crypto investor may be led astray by very elegant and comprehensive scams that are simply newer versions of old crypto pump and dump schemes. As noted in the Bloomberg article, folks like Dragonfly and Andreessen Horowitz had nothing to do with the FlexyStakes and InfinityStakeChain scams. However, overeager investors in the crypto world who thought they were getting ahead of the rest of the pack may have thrown away their money when fooled by this new wave of scams.
A bit of simple research would have shown an investor that both of the above mentioned crypto entities are fake. When Bloomberg attempted to contact these companies they found that first of all they had the same listed address in Melbourne, Australia. When they persisted they discovered that there never have been such business entities working at the listed address. What industry experts explain is that such ploys are simply meant to get a person to provide access to their crypto wallet and then steal the contents.
How Can You Take Advantage of the Crypto Resurgence?
Years ago we wrote an article about what is now a standard approach for long term stock investing called intrinsic stock value. We noted that back in the 1920s before the world crash in stock market history people commonly “played the stock market.” The assumption was that money put in the stock market was always going to make more money because that is what happened for several years. Then the bottom fell out in 1929 and the stock market collapse did not stop for three years by which time more than eighty percent of the market’s dollar value was gone.
In the years after the market crash an investor named Benjamin Graham developed a reliable way of appraising stocks and deciding which to buy for the long term and which to avoid or sell. The concept is still in use and is called intrinsic value. This way to invest has to do with potential forward looking earnings and how such earnings tell us about whether a stock is accurately valued by the current market price or not.
Markets tend to overshoot when going up and when going down. Thus there was good reason to believe that when Bitcoin fell into the $16,000 that it would not stay there. Likewise, Ether and other top cryptocurrencies were likely to make a recovery. Many tiny altcoins were not likely to come back from the abyss and they didn’t. The question for crypto investors today is how to appraise the values of Bitcoin, Ether and a few other cryptocurrencies from this point on. Is the impressive rise in value of Bitcoin over the period from 2008 to 2021 an accurate guide for the next decade or will we be looking at the 1920s and the stock market all over again.
Our take has always been that the value of crypto will be in its usefulness as a way of doing business much like the original intent of Bitcoin. As such we believe that the entire Ethereum ecosystem, complete with smart contracts and the rest is a better bet for the future. To the extent that intrinsic value can be applied to the crypto world it seems to work best with decentralized finance and the cryptocurrencies best positioned to take advantage as DeFi grows. That slot belongs to Ethereum and the Ether token. Focusing on how this world will make money and avoiding the glitz and glitter of all of the current crypto scams seems like the best path forward to long term success in crypto investing.