How Scammers and Media Destroy Honest Businesses

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I'm writing this as my own experience about what the current landscape looks like in the cryptocurrency business. I have a startup, which I won't detail to avoid being seen as advertising. What I will say is that it focuses on P2P money transfer, using bitcoin as both collateral and a medium to secure and transfer value. I started with very limited resources and no prior knowledge about programming or running a startup. This naivety actually helped me to get this far; if I had known what awaited me, I would never have started. ????

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Most of the work is complete, we even have a few customers, and the product is beginning to improve. But to truly succeed and have a global reach, we either need to find an investor or create some sort of "shitcoin" promising massive returns. I have always found this path highly unappealing and hope never to go down it. So that left only the option of an investor. We prepared a perfect business plan, pitch deck, and compiled an endless list of venture capital firms and potential investors to kick off this whole venture. Most VCs replied saying they had no interest in investing in a cryptocurrency project.

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The second most common reason for rejection was that it's a money-involved and risky type of business from a legislative standpoint. Even when we showed all our licenses and confirmations that our type of business is legit, we were turned down. Another issue was that the startup originated in Slovakia, a small country in central Europe, which most people we communicated with hadn't even heard of. Before we started reaching out to venture capital, I did a little research into what VCs invest in and what kinds of companies they're interested in. I can tell you that the range varied wildly, from tokens you collect for running at least 1 km daily to "Trump" or "Putin" coins.

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Based on that, I was convinced that we wouldn't have a problem finding an investor and that each investor would fill our pockets with millions of dollars. Oh, my naivety and foolishness. After some time came a sobering period of depression and desperation. Finally, I decided to try it on my own, without an investor. I planned on doing guerrilla marketing where I would often publish articles, introduce our product in Facebook groups, and other social networks to gradually get to where we want to be. And guess what? Once again, my naivety and foolishness. We were automatically blocked everywhere and no one wanted to share our content without even looking at what the project was about.

I get it; there are many scammers on the internet, and admins are just trying to protect their readers. But come on, at least look at what it's about before blocking. So that strategy failed. Next, we tried publishing in various reputable online magazines. We contacted them to see if they could write an article about us. The first, unnamed, online magazine immediately demanded 15,000 USD for three articles, and that was their cheapest offering. When I heard that number, I couldn't believe my ears. I understand they have to make a living, but jeez, 15,000 USD for three small articles. When I explained that we don't have such a budget and that we have a positive social impact and are the first in the world to create this type of money transfer, they didn't even reply.

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In conclusion, it's very difficult to get into VC, especially with this type of product, and even more so if you're from a small country and don't have fancy schools or background. They don't care at all if you have a functional product that is already generating profits and that you are the first of your kind in the world. They'd rather invest in "running tokens." ???? As for online magazines, that's a category unto itself. They are not interested in any form of help or community building; they just want to make money, and it's a tough business. I've contacted the biggest online magazine in the crypto topic space. I'm seriously considering creating some SHITCOIN that is an outright scam, just to see if they would agree to write an article about it if I pay them. I'm curious to see what they'll reply. After these experiences, I believe that TRUST IS NOT BUILT, IT IS BOUGHT, which is precisely why we have so many people who have lost their money by investing in these shitcoins, thus utterly destroying their trust in bitcoin itself. Whether this will ever change, I don't know, but it sickens me that scammers can so easily buy people's trust.