Crypto Noob Question - In a Nutshell, WTH is going on?

Total crypto noob here. I have no idea what the heck this is all about
other than it sounds like a gambling video game of people buying coins at low prices and
selling them off at higher prices, and repeat, until you are happily rich or painfully broke.

Why are there so many coins coming out? Are the different coins like different currencies (USD, Pound, Yen, etc).
Who is just inventing these coins and putting them out there for sale?

It's like anyone that has some money is able to just make their own coin and slap on a silly name
and put it out there on the market and then make fake videos on TikTok telling everyone Elon is gonna buy
"X" coins so you should too, hurry up while it's cheap!

Where is all this wealth coming from? Is it just imaginary pulled out from the air and then when you have a profit
be smart and pay out and runaway with real money? Crypto makes stock markets look like a kid's playground.
People can invest $1000 in crypto and make $10k overnight? WTH.

I thought you were supposed to invest money and it takes 10, 20, 30 years for it to grow and mature and then
retire on a nice matured portfolio. What's with teens becoming so-called millionaires cuz they bought some crypto
2 years ago? I don't get this lol.

oatmeal said:

Total crypto noob here. I have no idea what the heck this is all about
other than it sounds like a gambling video game of people buying coins at low prices and
selling them off at higher prices, and repeat, until you are happily rich or painfully broke.

Why are there so many coins coming out? Are the different coins like different currencies (USD, Pound, Yen, etc).
Who is just inventing these coins and putting them out there for sale?

It's like anyone that has some money is able to just make their own coin and slap on a silly name
and put it out there on the market and then make fake videos on TikTok telling everyone Elon is gonna buy
"X" coins so you should too, hurry up while it's cheap!

Where is all this wealth coming from? Is it just imaginary pulled out from the air and then when you have a profit
be smart and pay out and runaway with real money? Crypto makes stock markets look like a kid's playground.
People can invest $1000 in crypto and make $10k overnight? WTH.

I thought you were supposed to invest money and it takes 10, 20, 30 years for it to grow and mature and then
retire on a nice matured portfolio. What's with teens becoming so-called millionaires cuz they bought some crypto
2 years ago? I don't get this lol.

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Yeah unfortunately you're joining the party during a bull run year and the perception of what cryptocurrency is that you and millions of other people get is that it's a joke.

Come back in 2022, you'll get a more accurate idea of what it really is.

Have you ever tried to learn about crypto by doing your own research? read some articles, watch some youtube videos many great explanation videos are available for free, you just need to put in some time.
In the beginning, you can go ahead with any of the top 3 coins. once you confident enough you can start looking at shitcoins or pump and dump coins.

The interesting part today, as opposed to the previous big bull run in 2018, is that all these coins/tokens pop up and some of them gain traction, without even presenting a descent project. At least in 2018, all those ICOs had to show a heavy whitepaper from a reputable team. Regardless they (almost) all ended up abandoned.
Today, a whole new culture of "investors" has been formed, jumping from "shitcoin" to "shitcoin" based on the shilling their creators do on various channels.

Don't question it, join the party.

This is like the Dotcom bubble back in the days.

Crypto is here to stay, the tech is new and helpful but all those coins, only time will tell which one survives.
If you jump on the right coin at the right time, you can get 2x-10x-50x-100x returns but jump on the wrong one and you can lose all your money.

Dot com bubble 5.0

ant1kan said:

The interesting part today, as opposed to the previous big bull run in 2018, is that all these coins/tokens pop up and some of them gain traction, without even presenting a descent project. At least in 2018, all those ICOs had to show a heavy whitepaper from a reputable team.

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Yeah this is completely not accurate. Minimum 80% of ICO's in 2017 were laughable, many of them use photographs of d-list celebrities as their "CTO" or "Head of Marketing". It was a complete shitshow with organisations creating ICO's en masse for months and raking in hundreds of millions. The quality of whitepapers were only marginally worse than Safemoon's, but it was like almost every single project at one point.

From the very beginnings of 2017 (and even a bit earlier than that) until about Aug/Sept, ICO's still maintained some kind of air of legitimacy as a way of making quick money (ring any bells?), but shortly after the EOS ICO they fell out of favour fast because the ratio of winners to losers went from initially about 9 winners for every 1 loser, to about 5:5, then eventually like 98 losers for every 2 winners and it morphed into an abject raping where there was no effort to even create a pump anymore and "investors" just lost whatever they put in from the beginning.

ICO's lingered on for months even after the bull run ended, but they were clearly regarded as a stitch up and the only people buying into them were the fresh stream of crypto noobs that were late to the bull run but still had big dreams of turning $1,000 into $1,000,000. Needless to say, most of them fled crypto in 2018, learning literally nothing about the industry or the technology, and instead went back to working in Burger King where they belonged.

The circle of life.

VSYNC said:

Yeah unfortunately you're joining the party during a bull run year and the perception of what cryptocurrency is that you and millions of other people get is that it's a joke.

Come back in 2022, you'll get a more accurate idea of what it really is.

Click to expand...

I do agree. Without knowing what it really is and how it works, it looks like a game to me. AFAIK, the coins don't actually exist. It's all imaginary. People are just trading "value" and then I guess either you cash it out into real dollars into your bank OR the entire crypto market takes over the official financial system to become the main form of exhanging value.

It’s digital transformation for money.

There’s such a buzz around it, that it’s hard to understand what’s going on, what coins have real value and what ones are just rolling with the hype.

Id personally say stick with the foundational players like BTC and ETH and you should be safe.

Ashway said:

Have you ever tried to learn about crypto by doing your own research? read some articles, watch some youtube videos many great explanation videos are available for free, you just need to put in some time.
In the beginning, you can go ahead with any of the top 3 coins. once you confident enough you can start looking at shitcoins or pump and dump coins.

Click to expand...

Yes I remember watching a couple about a year ago. I understood the ideal behind it being "outside of the system" method of payment that can't be tracked or traced for privacy etc. I definitely would need to set aside a lot of time to actually "study" this. What boggles my mind is if crypto markets is becoming the new financial norm or heading that way, why don't they have actual school courses on crypto and teach everyone how to manage their money using crypto? I never understood why in all our years of schooling, the one thing they never teach you about is the most important thing and that is money management / assets (houses).

Why would they teach us about the food groups and how to live a healthy lifestyle but not teach you about how to use your money wisely? School really put the blind covers over our eyes on this didn't they? Kept us completely clueless and dumb about it. That's why the people that dropped out of school knew more about making money on the internet, real estate etc., than the people who put themselves 100k in debt in college courses.

Word Wizard said:

Don't question it, join the party.

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That's the problem. I don't even know what the party is lol. Is it basically one giant ass video game to play with money?

TheGreyMatter said:

This is like the Dotcom bubble back in the days.

Crypto is here to stay, the tech is new and helpful but all those coins, only time will tell which one survives.
If you jump on the right coin at the right time, you can get 2x-10x-50x-100x returns but jump on the wrong one and you can lose all your money.

Click to expand...

Yes agree. But the thing is, it only requires you to spend $1000 to make millions. You couldn't do that in the past with stocks or mutual funds or stuff like that. It'd take you 40 years to build maturity, even compound high interest savings account would take you 4 decades. This crypto game thingy takes you 1 year or 2 to make a lifetime's worth of money if you got the right one.

So would it be safe to say that if people just invest in 10 different coins, $1000 each for a total of 10K, that's a good gamble that one of them will net you massive returns
in a couple years?

oatmeal said:

I do agree. Without knowing what it really is and how it works, it looks like a game to me. AFAIK, the coins don't actually exist. It's all imaginary. People are just trading "value" and then I guess either you cash it out into real dollars into your bank OR the entire crypto market takes over the official financial system to become the main form of exhanging value.

Click to expand...

You know what, when you said the coins don't exist I was getting ready to reply to that saying that they do, but you're actually pretty much on the money with the point that value is the thing being traded and that the tokens are just a vessel for that.

Even with the most heinous shitcoin, the token represents perceived future value. In that abstract sense, shitcoins are in fact comparable to Bitcoin or any other crypto. The difference is the forms of value are totally different, as are the reliability in the prediction of future value, unless you were comparing the reliability of Bitcoin having future value with the reliability of a majority of shitcoins not having future value - in which case they're probably as reliable predictions as each other.

But yeah, good point. It's the key to create a cryptocurrency that holds water.

davids355 said:

It’s digital transformation for money.

There’s such a buzz around it, that it’s hard to understand what’s going on, what coins have real value and what ones are just rolling with the hype.

Id personally say stick with the foundational players like BTC and ETH and you should be safe.

Click to expand...

I remembered Ethereum a while back. I had no clue what all this bitcoin stuff was but when I heard the name Ethereum, I thought to myself, this name sounds cool. I would invest in Ethereum LOL just based on the name. Now I hear Ethereum is worth thousands for 1 coin. I guess we should buy it when they were 20 cents.

oatmeal said:

Yes agree. But the thing is, it only requires you to spend $1000 to make millions. You couldn't do that in the past with stocks or mutual funds or stuff like that. It'd take you 40 years to build maturity, even compound high interest savings account would take you 4 decades. This crypto game thingy takes you 1 year or 2 to make a lifetime's worth of money if you got the right one.

So would it be safe to say that if people just invest in 10 different coins, $1000 each for a total of 10K, that's a good gamble that one of them will net you massive returns
in a couple years?

Click to expand...

People should be 'playing' with money they can afford to lose, especially with all these alt coins out there.

I personally look at BTC and ETH as investments. Why stick that spare£ £5k into a UK bank and earn 0.2% interest. ETH is up 13% overnight currently or 430% YTD.

oatmeal said:

That's the problem. I don't even know what the party is lol. Is it basically one giant ass video game to play with money?

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Pretty much. It's fun, and everyone is winning right now.

All I know is that ETH has been good to me and is my one true love.

MisterF said:

People should be 'playing' with money they can afford to lose, especially with all these alt coins out there.

I personally look at BTC and ETH as investments. Why stick that spare£ £5k into a UK bank and earn 0.2% interest. ETH is up 13% overnight currently or 430% YTD.

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ETH is my new savings account.

MisterF said:

People should be 'playing' with money they can afford to lose, especially with all these alt coins out there.

I personally look at BTC and ETH as investments. Why stick that spare£ £5k into a UK bank and earn 0.2% interest. ETH is up 13% overnight currently or 430% YTD.

Click to expand...

Agree! Yes, play money is easier it seems now with Crypto because you only need $1000 bucks or less to potentially make a million. The older forms of investing, you wouldn't make much returns on just $1000 bucks + it'd take you your entire lifetime to see it grow. What it seems like is this crypto stuff allows you to have play money that is little but has the potential to retire you if you get the right one and do it all in just 5 years or less. I don't understand this concept lol. It goes against everything we were taught in life.

So the guy who sold 2 pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins i believe back in 2013 would have 400 million or something like that now??

Word Wizard said:

ETH is my new savings account.

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So are you allowed to cash out? If so, does ETH actually have money to pay you? Let's say you a 500k dollars worth of ETH. It's just on paper right? Is that purchasing power? Can you actually go out and buy a few cars and house with it right now? Or are you just holding it there watching it climb and one day cash out to turn it into real world purchasing power like buying a few houses or cars etc. I think I heard somewhere that if someone like Elon were to try and cash out 1 billion dollars of dogecoin (?) that nobody actually has 1 billion to pay you.

Now on the other hand, if the world financial market is replaced by crypto and everything is paid and bought via crypto, then you don't ever have to cash out. Crypto itself becomes real money. o.o mind boggling.


Just for example, I used to play maplestory. I was a billionaire on that game. I had 30 billion mesos. Now mesos is just an imaginary currency in game. But in real world you could sell mesos for real dollars and ppl did this to make money. I sold some of my mesos too. Of course the exchange rate was awful. 1 billion mesos = $100 bucks.

But let's say the world decided we are going to buy and pay for everything using mesos. Then suddenly I don't need to cash out my mesos for dollars as dollars becomes obsolete. Now I'd be an instant billionaire cuz I had 30 billion mesos just for playing a game.