With all the new altcoins, wallets, exchanges, mining pools and all other things cryptocurrency, it's easy to want to participate and get started, but make sure you are being smart and not being taken advantage of.
Speaking from experience and from past events, exchanges can be up one day and disappear the next with your money. This is why it's not a good idea to keep large sums of altcoins or bitcoin in any exchange for a prolonged period of time. Doing so is risking your portfolio's demise as it's all to easy for that exchange to be hacked, to go offline or even be a scam from the beginning and all you end up with are numbers on a site. If you trade, I'm not discouraging that, because it's actually very profitable to play the arbitrage game, I just suggest removing your money after trading and don't keep it there too long.
New altcoins are very interesting and it's hard to not want to get in on the ground floor and potentially earn a large profit with a turn around. But remember many altcoins are not what they seem, do your research, some are pump and dump schemes, or worse they don't add anything of value or extra features and are just waiting or hoping that many people get interested in them just to sell their PREMINED ( Premines are large allotments of coins that a developer or others make take as payment but some are completely just to dump once the altcoin has any value. ) share later on.
Many wallets are fine, however there are some viruses in disguise. Always take caution when downloading any applications, just because you got it from a trusted source, doesn't always mean it's to be trusted.
This isn't as big an issue now, because many people who are mining in pools have been around a while and know what to look for. But when cryptocurrency was in it's infancy, everyone and their dad used any connected device to mine ( yes you heard that right, I was using tablets, smartphones, laptops, netbooks, even found a ps3 app to mine with ) that period of time, mining pools were poping up like vape stores and they were also disappearing just as fast, with user's coins. Some didn't even payout at all, you just were basically mining for them.
This is a huge issue, just because it seems offical, a startup needs funds to startup. However there is often nothing offical about the contract between you and the people you're giving money too, I mean, let's face it, a website can look like a .gov site and wouldn't mean anything if you personally don't have some documentation stating you own this much of this stock or company. I trade on Ameritrade and I get edocuments that are statements, I get the company voting and news briefings as well I can always talk to someone and see the stock price, if you can't have any of that, something is not right.
Understand that even having a contract on Ethereum isn't offical, that it has to come in form of a contract, or otherwise obligation of the company accepting the stockfunds to pay back money in the event you wish to sell or other issues that might warrant you obtaining your funds.
There's plenty of other scams and things to watch out for like coin faucets using your PC to mine while you collect a fraction of what they got from you. There is donations scams, payment scams and much more that I will update once I get proper information about them.
Bitcoin 1GBDHrUJDviqw4AaTZrG7vT39igskMHZhN
