Perhaps it can be argued that anytime there is the potential to lose money, that fear, uncertainty, and doubt will not be far behind. Therefore it is no surprise that we are seeing monumental amounts of FUD when it comes to the crypto markets.
One of the most stark examples of FUD in recent times that I can remember, is when the Bitfinex exchange was hacked, and a number of people had their Bitcoin stolen. It was of course a problem for the exchange, not for the currency itself, however the news caused the price to crash from a then $700ish dollars, to around $200.
By the next day the price was back up to around 95% of what it was before the FUD, and of course now is many times that.
It is easy to dismiss the fudders as flighty fools who only exist to sell the wiser among us, their assets on the cheap. However it is fudders that can often determine a market's direction.
Clearly it is good to have some FUD, because as mentioned above, a little bit of FUD can turn out to be very lucrative for the patient and canny investor. However too much of it can bring a market crashing down.
Enter The FUD Wars
Of course the concept of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, is nothing new. However perhaps it is the fact that cryptocurrencies are often based on a kind of virtual value that is hard to quantify in real terms, that make it particularly susceptible to FUD.
In more traditional markets you have real world events to measure your FUD against. So if you are invested in coffee and you're worried about tropical storms ruining crops (I know nothing about coffee), then you can either allay, or confirm your fears by learning about the weather.
Or perhaps you want to invest in a particular mineral that comes from a country on the brink of war, again a bit of research may be able to help you.
However when the kind of FUD that surrounds crypto starts to spread, it can be a lot harder, if not impossible to use real world events to help you work out whether you should be panicking or not.
Old School FUD, Banking Style
The rhetoric we have heard from the banks regarding cryptocurrency, has not been at all surprising. Various luminaries from the world of finance, have been warning us about the Bitcoin bubble, which of course is an old tactic. It's good now; but will it last?
Then we have seen the banks try and create FUD around the use of cryptocurrency. Are you unwittingly funding terrorism and/or paedophillia?
Which of course, coming from a bank is laughable, but still they try.
We have even seen Eco FUD, There isn't enough electricity to keep Bitcoin going! It is worse than 1000 nuclear bombs being detonated in the atmosphere!
Apart from providing me with some big lols, the FUD from the banks will have its own successes and failures, however there is something comforting about it.
We didn't expect them to go quietly, so now we see that they aren't, it is just the natural order of things; the devil you know, so to speak.
The Network Wars
Often when a new innovative technology comes along, at first there are many who take advantage of it, and attempt to sell it to the masses. Then after not very long, there are few.
Thus there will always be struggles for dominance in new fields, and cryptocurrency will be no different. Recently for instance we saw the Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, call the Litecoin Cash (LCC) fork a scam.
From as far as anyone can tell, he had no reason to do so, other than he didn't want another coin with Litecoin in the name.
He cited reasons such as the LCC devs hadn't even released a whitepaper, of course omitting the fact that Litecoin; itself being a fork of Bitcoin, does not have a whitepaper also.
Also recently there were some FUD ripples caused on the Ethereum network by CryptoKitties. Claiming that the little feline crypto token could bring down the entire network due to huge bandwidth issues.
I believe we may just be seeing the start of the network wars. Silent wars, whereby instead of weapons of mass destruction, it will be the bombs of FUD that are the main ordinance used.
WHAT ENGINEERED FUD HAVE YOU WITNESSED? ARE YOU YOURSELF CONSUMED WITH FEAR UNCERTAINTY AND DOUBT? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!