A few months ago, I got interested in air drops. Which basically are people or companies who create tokens or otherwise give away tokens to advertise their products-often the token itself. Some do an initial coin offering, and some don't. Originally I just collected tokens and would see what happens. I recently started to find out what they are trading for. For tokens that may ultimate be worthless, what they are trading for isn't exactly worthless as of this writing. Keeping in mind that they probably are ultimately worthless, I have no idea if it is legal to sell them in the USA. It isn't enough to pay for an attorney to find out one way or the other. I don't ever recommend buying any. But if they are free, you might as well get free tokens To learn how, You can scroll down past the horizontal bar if you want to skip all the reasons that I would avoid buying ERC-20s. But as you do try for them, know in advance that many will not deliver.
Ideally I tend to stick with those that have online wallets, and I try to avoid the ones that require you to download a wallet-and more and more frequently the downloads have viruses and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that's bad. So pretty much if it is waves or ethereum based, I may sign up for them. if i get them, I will look at what the company does or plans to do, but most have nothing viable to offer. My advice is always, do not buy ICOs and do not buy ERC-20s. As @Jefft shows us, the tokens are quite easy to make. https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@jefft/how-to-build-a-cryptocurrency-in-15-minutes . I was tempted to try making one myself as a demonstration, but it looks like it cost money to do and requires running a chrome extension. I'll pass for now.
Basically ERC-20s are just as bad, if not worse, than pink sheets. Although, When I am able to restart my company, I would definitely consider doing issuing an ERC-20 and launching an ICO and treat it as a security-obviously without the dividends and without the shareholder having votes in the company. But my advise remains, do not buy them. Maybe there are a few legitimate companies out there since they are easier to deal with than the SEC as of this writing, but you may want to physically visit the company (or hire an agent to physically visit the company for safety reasons) before investing money into them. Webpages, social media accounts, physical addresses, videos, photos, and most of the words spoken mean absolutely nothing as to the viability of what is behind the token. People can even clone the name and symbol of a token, but have a different contract address as the scam people out of their money. It is likely because of all the fraud that they will be regulated, and that when regulated, the demand for etherium will decline as will the prices. If you hold etherium, you definitely want to pay attention to how the governments will regulate tokens and ICOs.
Many times the sales pitch of ERC-20s are claims they are cheaper and faster than bitcoin cause they use etherium-but since you are using steem you know that steem is already free to transfer funds between steem accounts (there are fees in buying bitcoin with cash, then buying steem with bitcoin) and is usually pretty quick. but even if steem didn't exist why not just use ethereum in the first place instead of the added volatility of a token? To be fair, steem does have quite a few middle men too to go from cash to crypto, just not in transferring steem from one account to another. The latter part is why in the long term, it could be argued that Steem has more untapped potential than Ether or bitcoin. I am surprised there isn't yet a steem backed debit card.
Some Erc-20s claim they are building a community, well that would be nice if they were marketing something other than their token. Unless they find extremely niche markets, it sounds like ERC's do more to deter clients. Imagine a customer wanting to buy a product in dollars or through bitcoin, and a company says sorry you have to go through an additional 20 step process and buy our volatile crapcoins in order to do business with us. Lost business I think.
For those who would like to at least accumulate ERC-20s, the first thing you should do is create a new email address so you don't get spam. Protonmail, yahoo, gmail, etc.
Secondly, I would would go to https://etherdelta.com (most places recommend https://www.myetherwallet.com/ for airdrops, but myetherdelta has the exchange) and create a new etherium address. Print out the keys, and keep it safe. NEVER share your private key. Although to be honest, i did import my keys from myetherwallet into etherdelta. Bad me, Bad me. Well, I never (at this stage) put money into the account, but did later.
note: If for some reason you use an old eth address, it may not be token compatible.
-The site takes a long time to load. Where you see the black bar (I added the black bar to the image) at the top is a drop down list of supported tokens. On the upper right you'll see a drop down menu where you can create an account, or import one.
There are many sources to try to find free airdrops. I will say this in advanced, most do not deliver. Maybe out of 40-60, only about 7 have actually delivered tokens. Among the sites listing them are:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1438371.0
you can find airdrop listings on https://www.facebook.com/groups/freecrypto/ which I think is admin'd by @sixexgames who has posts here on steemit.
you can also find some on, although it is a bit spammy now, https://airdropalert.com/
Many times you'll need to form a https://bitcointalk.org account and maintain a certain rank, and have a telegram account too.
Basically from there you fill out forms basically saying what your bitcointalk user id is, maybe the bitcointalk profile address, an email address, a telegram id, your name, and your public ethereum address.
-an example of a previous form
How will you know when the coins are deposited? It is unlikely that you will receive an alert. But you can visit https://ethplorer.io/ and paste in your public address and check. Every once in a rare while you'll find that one of the companies actually did an air drop.
Now assuming that you are actually sent some erc-20 tokens. You may not have enough to ever trade, so they become essentially dead tokens. Of the 7 that I received, about 3 are basically dead on arrival, and another isn't supported by the exchange. If you do find some that do have value, you'll soon realize that you can't trade them without physically holding ethereum to pay for the transaction.
How do you get ethereum? Well, surprisingly many exchanges do not accept cash because it is claimed they don't want to be involved in money laundering. There are a few who do accept cash, and i ended up finding and using coinbase. When I tried to make my first purchase, the bank blocked the transaction as fraud, and the location was from a place called "cheapside", which had me panicked. Started reading the reviews, and well it has tons of negative reviews, lost funds, international processing fees, and yet even more panic. I ultimately found a video by jerry banfield which said that was the one he uses, and called up the bank to see why it didn't go through. The bank didn't like their verification system (withdraw, deposit, withdraw, withdraw or something so quickly) and they told me to wait a few days. Today, I bought $10 worth of ether for "gas" aka transactions. I think that is the first time I purchased crypto itself, though I have bought cloud mining in the past. I transferred it over to my ethereum account to enable me to trade. I am not sure what all the distinction is between coinbase and gdax, but it seems jerry banfield likes gdax and was previously using coinbase. https://steemit.com/tutorial/@jerrybanfield/1-coinbase-tip-transfer-wallet-funds-to-gdax . Well at this point I could trade and cash in these tokens, and at least describe the process thus far.
But I won't allow myself too sell them at this point. While it is legal to hold these tokens, I have no idea if it is legal to sell the tokens [in the usa] bearing in mind that they may ultimately end up being worth nothing. Maybe one of my readers could answer this. I guess I will hold onto them until I find out a more definite answer. As far as the morality of selling them? it is the free market rate, and people who made it this far are pretty determined and ambitious and entering it through their own free will. They are most likely daytraders, speculators, or people throwing a few crumbs around to see what happens. There is a certain mathematics involved in risk, but I am not sure if they have a mathematical model that permits such losses or if they are just gambling.
Feel free to collect the free tokens.
I haven't been able to find a definitive answer as to if it is legal to sell them. If these were shares of stock, it would be an obvious yes. So what I did instead was sent an email to the chairman of the SEC for an opinion. I imagine that it would probably be ignored.
After having registered for over 200 airdrops, I noticed that all of those who say "Airdrop will be delivered after the ICO", will not deliver. The ICO is over, they have the cash and the supporters may go F themselves.
The very few (can be counted with 1 hand) who deliver, actually do it before the end of the ICO.
From those who deliver 50% send such a small amount that they are dead on arrival. 35% deliver them on their own platforms where most of the times they cannot be transfered anywhere. That leaves us with 15% who actually send the tokens to an Ethereum address.
It's profitable for them, saving in marketing, it is a waste of time for you.
In the old days when ethereum was much cheaper, you would at least get tokens-even if they were garbage. Sadly since I posted this a lot of fake ones have come out, many of them pretending to be existing projects. That is why it is important to never send donations, and of course never send private keys. It is getting to be a pain in the butt to do the research to determine which are legit or not, and a pain to find something worth the effort of filling out a form.
If they say there is an ICO (and of course, I don't recommend buying-cause there are many scams there too), you may want to google the project actually doing an ICO. Go to their webpage and and their official twitter or telegram channels and see if they are actually doing an air drop, and get the official links if they are doing them. As already said there are many fraudsters pretending to be these coins. As you said it gets to be a complete waste of our time and why I slowed down filling them out significantly. There are still some promising airdrops out there, but the good ole days are over. That said, bob's repair may start doing a referral initiative on the 12th of march that may be worth looking into. https://t.me/Bobtoken .
We will announce this on March 12ish. Airdrop and referral program details.I too am cautious about the ones that exists just on a webpage that have started to spring up, and I will often skip those or throw in a dummy password; They are probably just hoping to hack peoples real life accounts.
I also see that many of the air drops I am receiving are like 1-5 coins. It is mostly psychology that has us believing it is a small amount, even insulting. Though I wouldn't mind having 5 bitcoins. The idea of a decimal is artificial, these are all great big integer numbers to get rid of many problems with decimal numbers-just the develop decided to say after so many digits to basically make it appear as if there is a decimal for readability. if 2000 tokens were issued but was assigned to have 3 decimal places, it would look like only 2 tokens. On the other hand is 2000 tokens were issued but as assigned to have 2 decimal places, it would make it look like there was 20 tokens created. Likewise we would typically say there were 2 and 20 tokens respectfully when at the raw data level they are the same. But what ultimately matters is percent ownership. 2 tokens out of 1000 issued, is the same thing as 2000 tokens out of 1000000 issued. Receiving 2 tokens again may seem insulting, but it is psychology. I think within the top 10 air drops I recieved, I recieved 19 of one token-coinmarketcap list it at just above $7 a coin. But I don't think I have seen a good air drop since December.
As far as the delays. There are two projects I am somewhat hopeful for that have been delayed for months. One (bob's repair) has John Macafee somewhere on the project. They distributed a promo token back in december, and somehow there is a conversion to the real tokens I think i read in April (originally march). Another was a project started last year. It got delayed as they had to do some legal research in which many people thought they were a scam, meanwhile the individual size of the air drop increased for the daily visitors. They completed their legal research, launched their ICO, and basically waiting for them to air drop.
Anyways sometimes when you take a break from doing the forms, you will still see you get random airdrops. This is just evidence that some air drops are not delivered as quickly as we would like.
Thanks for the shoutout to the Facebook group :) Yes, I do admin it... I've had to kick a couple people out who've spammed it recently.
There are so many airdrops lately I'd have to quit my job to apply and post about them all haha
This post seriously deserves some upvote love! Thanks for the Fb Airdrop group, that was a new find for me! I was only aware of the popular airdrop channels on telegram https://t.me/bigairdrops
I personally hunt for airdrops on Crypto Airdrops. I check it once daily, they seem to update free coins everyday https://airdrops.me/all
I received another erc-20 tonight. It is another token wanting to be another currency, they claimed to have no ico on their bitcointalk page...but they are/were selling them anyways on their webpage. for a "non-ico", and based upon the size of their givaway, they only planned to give out about 2.5% of their tokens this round.
It is trading, but if the aggregate of the received coins is below .01 eth, i consider it dead on arrival. I don't expect the coin will have much upwards movement, if it even happens at all, at least until they stop putting new tokens in the market out of their treasury. Even excessive coins in any one account is a big risk of a pump n dump. But i doubt it will ever get pumped.
I received two other tokens recently-not present on the exchange. One seems like more of a experiment that will dilute itself bigly. Up to over 1400% dilution over the next year. In anotherwords, not good for business nor as a currency.
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STOPThe one I mentioned wasn't listed was just listed. On etherdelta, the aggregate of what I received from that one token seems to be trading for (.04-.08) ETH or about $12-25 USD. Far from the best performer, but can't complain.