That article was very thought provoking. The part that sticks with me most is where it says easy money tends to breed helplessness and dependency. That's an interesting paradox. The article is referring to all those project leaders who didn't spend all their ICO money wisely and as a result didn't really create any truly innovative product, and yet all the people who bought into their ICO are dependent on them.

My personal experience with easy money breeding helplessness was watching the markets go way up in January, and thinking, finally, the real worth of cryptocurrency is being recognized, but also thinking it was happening way too fast to be real. Then it started to fall, and each month that it declined you kind of wish you'd sold out the previous month but didn't want to sell out this month because you hoped it would rise.

I didn't have much invested in a coin that had a meteoric rise so I got lucky, and had already made back way more than my initial investment. Still, I really hated the feeling of having this wealth on paper that I was completely not in control of. It was all about the price. And then I recently found out that the rise wasn't even real, in the sense that it was the result of market manipulation. I definitely prefer to be a part of a project where the impact of speculation and market manipulation on the price is a much smaller part of the picture. I know that will always be part of it, but there has got to be something more solid, or like the article said, few investors really break even, let alone make money.

I agree that recession is helping to reveal true colors much sooner. We've already had some exposee type articles about the market manipulation, the Bitcoin cartel, etc. And we're finding out about all kinds of projects that are at best not ready for the big time yet but have a lot of money into them already.