Whether you invest, trade, or simply hold some crypto-assets, you are being used in a game, where the many are going to make fortunes for a few. The motive is as always the easy and quick profit, by making you believe that you can be smarter than those who have created the game you are into. You can't. And this is true for both outright scams and popular crypto-assets, starting with Bitcoin.

You don't make the rules

As a crypto-holder, you can only do one thing: follow the rules others have written years ago. And those rules are written with on thing in the minds of the rulemakers: how to make money, by deceiving people.

What's included in the price you pay for any crypto-asset, other than the expectation of a higher market valuation? What is the fair price for most crypto-assets? The answer is simple: you don't know. Or, if you wanted to be honest to yourself, the fair price is 0.

It all starts with perceived profit

Take an imaginary ETH token. Nowadays anyone can create one. Even you. What it would be used for? The most obvious deception, is voting power to a project. So, let's say you allocate one vote per token, and you create 100 million of them, and you decide to list them in an exchange. You offer each token for $1. Is 1/100,000,000 voting power in your project worth $1? And what is your project about anyway? Why would people be interested in participating in decision making of your project? In reality, people don't care about your project. They don't even bother to learn what your project is about. They only care to make some profit, by trading the worthless votes on your project.

With decentralized exchanges, this is easy - and relatively cheap - to do. The only thing you need to do is to create several wallets and start buying your own tokens, through them, so it looks like people are interested in your token. Even at the first trade, your worthless token has a market value (market capitalization) of $100,000,000. At the second trade, where you increase your bid by 10%, the market cap is raised at $110 million. After several trades using the wallets you created, you have increased the price at $1.50, and the exchange displays a price increase of 50%. And then the first crypto-gamblers show up and start buying your tokens at $1.60. Then, at $1.70. You go and buy some tokens, to offer some profit to those early buyers. Once they pocket their earnings, they will go out and spread the news about your token, and more crypto-gamblers will join the flock, raising the price at say $3.00 or higher. The exchange displays +200% price increase, and you start selling some of the tokens you hold. By the end of the day, the price is at $5.80 with a whopping +480% price increase. You have sold several thousands of the tokens for $40,000. The worthless voting power to your project, is now worth close to $600 million, and the gamblers are still lining up to buy more, while those who have already made some profit from their trades are spreading the news further.

By the end of the second day, more 'investors' have joined, and the crypto-related media start publishing stories about your project, and - most importantly - the price increase of your worthless tokens. The price has skyrocketed at $8.54, and you have sold over 1,000,000 of your tokens, for some $4 million, or more. Yes, you've deliberately lost some money in trades you needed to offer some profit to the gamblers, but this is peanuts compared to what you earned.

Most of those gamblers won't sell their tokens though. At least not all of them. With the price on the rise, who is so stupid to sell so early? Especially, if you have incentives to offer for holding your worthless token, or locking it in liquidity pools, where they expect to make even more?

In the coming days, the price peaks at $12.50, and you have sold another 3,000,000 of your tokens, pocketing $14 million in profit. The market value of your worthless tokens is way over $1 billion - yes, with a B. And then, you decide that 'everything must go'. And it does, sending the price down to several cents of the dollar. You pocket another $4-5 million down the way.

Although this is an over-simplified example, it depicts the mindset all those token developers out there. Maybe they didn't make all those millions. Maybe, originally, they had the best of intentions about their project. But what they end up doing is outright fraud. Because they know that the real value of the tokens they sell to the greedy gamblers is zero. Yes, some of those gamblers will make some profit. But most of them will lose. A lot.

Are all crypto-assets worthless?

Not all, but most of them, are. Ask yourself a simple question: what do I buy through those tokens? If it's something worthless, or worthless to you, chances are the token was created to make money for its creators.

There are some tokens that may have some value, though. For instance, Orchid (OXT) is used as a token to buy access to the Orchid VPN. Basic Attention Token (BAT) is used to buy ads in Brave browser. Binance coin (BNB) is used to pay discounted fees to Binance exchange. But you need to research on what the real value included in their price is, so you can decide whether they are fairly priced in the market.

And that is not always easy.