FUD… for lack of a better word… is good.
FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) once had a defined (and confined) boundary. It described anti-competitive behavior from competitive organizations, who’s sole purpose was to scare users away from direct competitors (and back into their own services).
Microsoft became famous for creating fake error messages on competitor’s software to make it seem like there was a problem when there was none. Apple too has been accused of spreading FUD around jailbroken iPhones, insinuating that they could take down entire phone networks. All for the purpose of destroying a competitor and improving their own brand.
Today, the term FUD seems to imply the old meaning… anti-competitive behavior from market competition… but shares none of the same characteristics. FUD is a blanket description to describe any bad news that’s intended to ‘scare away the weak hands’ and directly impact price. The term has become so loose that literally any bad news, no matter how true, no matter the intention, can be dismissed with a wave of the hand… like a magic word to completely erase any objections. No one wants you to worried.
The problem is that if you are in the cryptocurrency industry, especially today, you should be a bit fearful. You should be a bit uncertain. You should have your doubts. It’s an incredibly fast moving, volatile industry and you’ve likely been given bad, very bad, information about your investments.
In the same way that yelling fire in a crowded theater is illegal unless there’s a fire, telling everyone their investments are in jeopardy is appropriate when the market is on the brink of chaos.
And the risks of investing early can’t be overstated. Ask the Bitconnect investor who lost $80,000 by investing in the con. Or the $400 million lost to hackers in fradulent ICO’s since 2015. Or the holders of the 25% of all BTC that is lost due to wallet mis-management. The big winners get Forbes covers, but the losers rarely even get an obituary.
It’s easy in hindsight to look at these groups and say they should have seen this coming. Yes, people should have suspected Bitconnect was a scam. There should have been more due diligence on that ICO. But for every hack or fraudulent ICO, there were hundreds of people cheering them on, saying that they’re making the right decision. That the should ignore the FUD because they’re shills for another token and they just want you to lose money.
In such a volatile industry, calling ‘FUD’ (this version of FUD) is more often used to dismiss good (or at least interesting) information, rather than protect people from ‘misinformation’. Unchecked optimism leads people to believe that they got everything under control when they do not. If someone says there’s a problem, you should investigate it on your own standards, not based on the word of someone telling you to ignore it.
You shouldn’t outright believe the ‘FUD’ either… you should evaluate it as another piece of data. It’s perfectly acceptable to hear bad news, consider it eyes wide open and then keep your current opinions, unchanged. And if it’s bad information, you shouldn’t need ‘FUD’ to explain it… you can just argue against it with facts and reason. But you shouldn’t ignore it… certainly not under the pretense of being ‘FUD’.
This is the problem with calling something ‘FUD’, it’s the crypto-shills way of closing their ears to bad news and just believing that things will go their way. This is cowardly and, if you call things ‘FUD’ for this sake, unethical. More often than not, the person yelling FUD is not trying to protect you, but protecting their own investments.
So FUD… for lack of a better word… is good. You should be reading articles that are unfavorable to the industry. You should be questioning if your assumptions (and investments) are well founded. People should read your thoughts and be a little less certain about what they think they know. The threat of serious loss outweighs the potential gains for those just entering the industry, and ‘FUD’ does a much better job of informing than unchecked optimism.
But most importantly, you need to preserve. Despite how strongly I feel about embracing bad news when it appears, I’m an eternal optimist about this technology. Despite the scams, scandals, unlikable personalities and immature technology, there is something here that is truly brilliant. It will question our assumptions on what software is and who is really in control of our money, data and future. Great organizations, perhaps even those that will dominant the world markets one day, will be built in this industry.
There is no conflict between being a long-term optimist, but a short term pessimist (or a better term, an optimistic contrarian). The greatest leaders are those that can take the bad news as it comes, evaluate it, and then at the end of the day believe in building a bright future for the industry.
So, embrace the FUD. Read unfavorable information. Make people a bit uncomfortable. If you are being honest and truly building the industry, you have to bring the good with the bad. It’s the only way you can make any lasting impact on the industry.
