Generally speaking I don't really like to mention crypto projects by name because I think there's a fine line between shilling and sharing. But since this topic involves negativaty I think there's little harm.😂 Plus the fact I really need the distraction now that a historically rich, secular nation is being torn to pieces by radical islamists via Turkey from the north and war criminals of a radical jewish state from the south, as the Kurds are infighting on whether or not they should join the land theft to finally establish their own state, or to play by the rules and risk getting fooked over (again).

So on that confusing and utterly miserable note:

XDAI, rebranded as STAKE (no, not the shameless child targeting casino)

I know that's an image that speaks a thousand words, but it's not all as black and white as it seems. They now merged or something, IDK exactly but it's now called the Gnosis chain and are focusing on decentralized AI and other stuff. Anyways the main reason I started this is to mention the false hype that sucked me into these black holes. I didn't invest a lot in this since I am generally overly skeptical, but I remember the FOMO hype back then on how "XDai is going to solve Ethereum's scaling problems, so if you were late to Ethereum, don't be late to XDai".

Needles to say I lost on this one. I really don't remember the exact numbers to be honest, but I had about 25 XDai bought around 15 Euros and sold at less than 5 Euros each. So I'm not saying it was a scam or anything, just that it was overly hyped and that I was the fool that FOMOd in. Now the next one was both overly hyped and a scam.

Non-fungible yearn (NFY)

When Non-fungible yearn came out people were so hyped about the possibilities, but later on learned it was just a scamming team who afterwards played the blame game among themselves. Believe it or not, some are still waiting to this very day for some members of that very same scamming team to compensate them with TEK or something, which I think is some promise by one of the team members for a future token to prove they really weren't in on the rug pull. I'm not really sure what they're waiting for, but am afraid they're just clinging to false hope to help ease the pain of losing all their ETH since this name TEK has been floating around for 2 years now without any visible progress.

I actually covered this separately already a while ago, reason I got involved was 'I guess still got a small stack due to FOMO in case they really did recover and break past ATHs.' In it I explained how I had 10 NFY for around 15 Euros each, so that's another 150 Euro down the sh!thouse drain.

Of course there were other cases where I lost, but these two were the ones were outside influence played a major role. Because notice that the reoccurring theme here is ''falsely hyped up.'' So then I got to thinking, where or who was it that introduce me to these things? This is something everyone must do for themselves IMO. Ever got scammed or rug pulled? Think back who shilled it to you and led you falling off that red candle cliff. Not to lay blame or even for revenge, but to learn from it and most importantly remember to never trust that source again.

At the time I really did my own research, but I also diversified my sources. Meaning I really went the extra mile the rest doesn't think or care to do. Like searching names of cryptos and their developers on different search engines from different countries in different languages. Even back then I cross checked the info from e.g. English on Duck.com, to English on Youtube and Yandex, to Russian on Yandex and VK, to Chinese on Baidu and Weibo. Can you guess where I got the names XDai and NFY from?

Even though it's been over 5 years ago, I am 100% sure one of these was a suggested algorithm video introduced to me by YouTube because I watched/searched for other crypto videos and articles. The ones I specifically searched for were under the radar coins back then that mostly boomed to success, but at the time these were ''the mainstream'' hype topics regarding crypto I guess, so they got picked up by Youtube and introduced amass to people. And the crucial mistake then was checking it's chart. Ohhh that correction looked so good to FOMO in and hope for them ATHs. Needles to say I only got to witness ATLs.😒

But what the **** you expect tho? As if promoters with their undisclosed agreements or an already purchased bag making promotional videos which are then promoted to you by some vague platform algorithm will lead to your success. Let me ask the question this way: Did ayone who was heavily into IT, finance, online transactions or digital tech ever see these videos get pushed in their face by Youtube when they were uploaded?