Hardforks, Splits, and Airdrops are the coolest things that can (possibly) happen to you in crypto world. Where else are you getting "free" money for doing nothing? At least nearly nothing... and taking some risk... and spending other coins...
The latest trend is Airdrops from what I investigate this is not only Steemit specific but has turned out to be the newest idea to quickly get people involved in cryptocurrencies, tokens, and coins. It sounds great to get coins for "free" but look at two examples.
AVA, i.e., Travala
This one sounded like a quick hit, assure that you are holding a minimum of 2,000 SWITCHEO SHW tokens in your NEO compatible wallet and you will be granted an enormous amount of AVA tokens. It turned out to be a hard exercise to get these tokens since SWHis only traded a Switcheo and Gate.io. If you did not have them in your wallet, you had to register an account there. This action is not to hard to do.
I am still a little old fashioned and do not like the idea of pasting my NEO Private key into a browser, so I selected Gate.io.
All seemed fine, I bought my SWH tokens and was about to transfer them to my wallet, when SWITCHEO had the idea to switch tokens and call them SWTH from now on suddenly. This lead to all tokens being frozen on Gate.io. It took some days to solve the switch out and finally I was able to transfer the tokens to my wallet.
Phew! Great, now let us get rich!
Well, assuming that the SWTH tokens have been dropping in price by 11% last three days it should be a massive amount to be dropped to break even.
Here we are, as promised the tokens arrived in my wallet. I am now a proud owner of a total of 15.77 AVA. The actual value of each is assumed to be 0.35 USD, so that's leaving me far away from rich. In fact, I lost a bit of money due to the dropping price of SWITCHEO.
How good that there is still an Airdrop of SPOTCOIN around the corner which will also require SWTH Tokens. This Airdrop will most likely make me wealthy.
Don't get me wrong; I am not complaining, just trying to give an example of how crazy it can be to try and get those valuable airdrops. Think twice before moving the world to get one!
Another great example that I am honestly not yet sure about: Scatter!
Sailing on the waves of the EOS-Switch, another cool option is available. Scatter allows you to register your unique name for the new NEO Mainnet. I do not have a clue why you would want to do this but the opportunity to get a total of 100 RIDL Tokens got me tied into this.
OMG, a total of 100 Tokens!
In fact what made me do this was the idea of trying out the MetaMask Plugin for Chrome and see how it works.
Before you run now to get your tokens, better read this:
To be clear, these tokens are not an ICO, they do not belong to one and it might be, but it is not assured, that those will be tradeable in the future. So in fact, for now, you could name it "scam" if you were a bad guy.
It is, of course, interesting that scatter is also referenced on a wallet login page related to EOS, but it is not clear if this givesany value to you.
I took the chance to register my name on Scatter, it took me some time to figure out how to transfer some ETH and EOS to it since the network fees are not well documented.
Finally, I logged into my Binance account, bought some EOS and transferred to MetaMask, this finally worked without trouble.
You need to know that you will need 1 EOS to register your name on Scatter, which equals to 13.29$ right now. Remeber, you are getting a name registration and 100 RIDL Tokens for this amount.
I registered for the fun of it but have already removed the amount of my balance since I do not expect to gain anything from it.
Conclusion
These are only two examples of recent Airdrops. An annoying amount of others are flooding Steemit and the web, which is most likely the consequence of adverts for ICO´s being prohibited in all relevant channels.
Once more, I am not complaining about these opportunities. There are, for sure Airprops that justify the effort and some event take you by surprise like ONT, MCT and HAV.
While it might sound cool, use your mind, like everywhere in crypto and think if the carrot is big enough to justify your effort!
Looking forward to your comments and experiences!