Bitcoin seems to be the talk at the moment with the prices soaring higher than ever but 2017 proves that when you invest into something where you really do not understand how it works or whom works for it just shows the risk you are taking.  Bitcoin had numerous companies jumping in during 2017 with the hopes of striking a gold mine.  The initial offerings to the public seemed to be a long shot due to the fact you would hand over funds and needed to wait days before getting something back into your wallet.

Following on Bitcoin.com there was a study done where a huge 46 percent of the virtual currencies have already failed.   Out of the 902 vendors or pseudo banks, 142 never received enough funding to get off the ground, another 276 disappeared from the planet and finally there were scams.  One big one out of Long Island was the Long Island Ice Tea company who decided to put the magic word blockchain thus creating a false impressive that they were changing their business.  They are now being thrown off of NASDAQ and could face fraud charges.

Numerous ICOS have stopped relying on social media which is evidence they are leaving the business or even governments have decided to step in to shut them down.

Excluding the scams, a large chunk of them were targeted at niches like dentistry, freight trucking or real estate.  They were never going to attract broad audiences. Others, meanwhile, were me-too efforts that had no real advantage over pouring money into an established format, where prices were more likely to climb.

So in hindsight it is extremely risky to invest your entire life savings in a currency that has no paper trail nor insurance behind it.  You can always get better returns on ponzi schemes.