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Nearly Half of 2017's Cryptocurrencies Have Already Failed (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader shares an Engadget report: The surging price of bitcoin (among others) in 2017 led more than a few companies to hop on the cryptocurrency bandwagon with hopes of striking it rich almost overnight. Many of their initial coin offerings seemed dodgy from the outset... and it turns out they were. Bitcoin.com has conducted a study of ICOs tracked by Tokendata, and a whopping 46 percent of the 902 crowdsale-based virtual currencies have already failed. Of these, 142 never got enough funding; another 276 have either slowly faded away or were out scams.
Is it really that surprising to see these kind of results? You have something that has both seen incredible growth in terms of raw percentage increases and is ill-understood at best by most people. This makes it an incredibly good target for Ponzi schemes and other common financial scams because people see the big returns and get greedy and have no idea if they're being fed a line of complete bullshit when it comes to the technology itself.
Even my father has heard about crytocurrencies and has asked me questions about them and he's generally not interested in technology in the slightest. I'm reminded of the old quote about someone realizing they needed to get out of the market when their shoeshiner was giving out stock tips.