Transparency Leads To Trust!
The blockchain world in general is still a lot like these old Wild West stories. More often than not, it's every man for himself. People either generally distrust everything they see or they pour money blindly into random projects, quite often leading to them being scammed and then falling into the former category afterwards. I have some random scammer DMing me in Discord almost daily, claiming I just need to send him my private keys to claim the BTC that I have won. So the obvious question is, where are all these scammers coming from, why are they roaming so freely in the crypto world, and what can be done to stop them?
Photo by wild vibes
The first obvious answer is, well, there's a lot of money on the line and where there's money to be made, all kinds of shady characters will follow and try to earn their share on the back of others. But the more important reason, in my opinion, is that it is so easy for them to get away with their scams. In the blockchain world, there's no safety net, there are no second chances. You are responsible for you actions just as you are responsible for your keys. Not your keys, not your coins is a saying you will hear quite often around here and it apparently is true. If you send your coins to an unknown address, if you give away your private keys, even if you just sign messages you do not understand, you will loose everything and there will be no getting it back ever.
The simple truth is, you alone are responsible to protect yourself from scams. The blockchain world is a decentralized one and there is never going to be a centralized entity protecting you from scams. Another fundamental principal of many blockchains is that of privacy, and this is both a major issue and the solution. An issue, because you usually just interact with addresses. If you send or receive ETH, all you get is a long address, but you will never be able to tell who the person controlling that address is or if there's even a real person behind it in the first place. The solution, because it solves a lot of the issues once you remove (at least parts) of that privacy.
On Hive, you are not just an address, you are an account name. Now obviously this can be your real name just as much as it can be a random combination of digits and characters. The important part is not necessarily to hint at any real person, but more to give an idea of what the person(s) behind an account represents. On Hive, there's still total privacy if you prefer, but at the same time, there's total transparency. I can take a look at everything an account has ever published, what and how many tokens he holds, where he's sending his funds to or where they are coming from. Most of us won't provide you with their real name, let alone give their real world address or any other personal information. Nevertheless, this transparency helps to create something way more important - trust.
With the recent launch of CubFinance, there were a lot of people coming to its Discord, spreading all kinds of FUD. Some had been following fund movements from and to addresses on BSC, concluding that the whole thing obviously had to be an exit scam. Quite honestly, this was rather amusing to me. To any of us involved with the project for a while, the chance of this being an exit scam was 0.00%. Not because I have any idea who the founder and developers of LeoFinance are in real life, what their real name is, or anything like that. But simply because I know khaleelkazi, what he has been doing on Hive these last few years. I don't know the real person but I trust the account he represents.
To me, that's something pretty unique. It's not about who you are in the real world, it's about what you are doing on the blockchain, how you interact with others, how you present yourself. This holds true for many different projects we have around here. When nealmcspadden launched YIELDBONDA (which sadly never got funded), I threw 500$ at it right away. Once again, not because I know anything about him in real life (although I might be able to figure things out in his case) but again simply because of what he was doing with his account. Although I never interacted with him other than battling in Splinterlands, I was certain that he had no intentions to scam me, simply because of what I had seen from him on (and off) Hive.
The same holds true for the recently released project Liotes run by ph1102 and achim03. If this was some random project on the blockchain world, I'd be very cautious to invest any money there. There wasn't really that much information available at first, just a white paper and some short videos. But I know these guys, I can look up what they are doing on Hive every day and that is all I need to trust the project they run. And then there's lbi-token, discohedge, and so much more. All these projects got my money simply because I was able to put my trust into the accounts running them.
To be perfectly clear here, I could obviously still get scammed. Any of the aforementioned could just run away with all my money, never looking back. Absolute safety doesn't exist. But I can invest my money with a lot less anxiousness by choosing projects run by accounts and thus people that I trust. Ultimately, past actions are not always an indication of future behavior but the simple fact is, all of the above would have a lot more to loose than what they would gain from running away with my funds. Trust in their account would obviously be gone forever and rebuilding that with another account would take years and also a lot of sweat and tears.
In the blockchain world, it might be every man for himself more often than not, but here on Hive and especially on LeoFinance, it feels like it's more of the opposite. It's a dedicated community working together to both advance the project as a whole but at the same time achieve the individual goals of each community member. Let the wider blockchain world live in their wild west scenario, let them distrust everybody not sitting within punching range. I'll keep hustling every day, using trust to fuel my growth. It's a wonderful (blockchain) world out there and we can all enjoy it together!
And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
