I'm Andrew Levine, the CEO of Koinos Group, and in the latest episode of Our Decentralized Future, I talk with Adam from gFam about how to avoid scams, which is an especially useful skill in the crypto space!
The most important point I wanted to make in this discussion was with respect to the topic of "self-sovereignty." In my eyes, and I think the eyes of my teammates at Koinos Group, self-sovereignty is what crypto is all about. It is precisely those who lose sight of this, or abandon it entirely, that often get involved with scams.
Blockchains /= Black Magic
I say "get involved with scams," because in my experience many of the projects that turn out to be scams, weren't necessarily conceived as such. What's more common is that a team interpreted "blockchain" or "cryptocurrency" as some kind of black magic that they can use in their application to solve some previously unsolvable problem.
With their new magic tool they profess their intention to solve said unsolvable problem even though they have not yet developed a solution to that problem. Some people believe them though and invest in an ICO, which the team interprets as validation that they are on the right track. But after a few years of money-burning (depending on whether they launched in a bull or bear market), the project fails to ship and is pronounced a scam.
The problem is that blockchains aren't black magic, in fact, they often add a a lot of complexity and technical challenges to the application development process which increases a developer's costs and decrease the odds that they will be able to find product-market-fit.
What are blockchains good for?
Where blockchains do outperform other solutions is in the domain of self-sovereignty. There is simply no better technology, period, for giving people ownership and control over their digital lives. If that's what attracts you to the space, then you should be looking for projects that are leaning into that feature and delivering real products, with sustainable business models, to the market.
All of that being said, it is possible to make it orders of magnitude faster, easier, and cheaper to integrate blockchains into applications and empower users through self-sovereignty. Koinos is the foundational tool that we at Koinos Group are building to accomplish exactly that and the testnet is coming soon!
To watch more episodes of Our Decentralized Future, be sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel and follow us on twitter; OurDecentralizedFuture, Andrew, Adam.