Anatomy of a Scam
A couple years ago I had the privileged of getting to overhear an adjacent table where a scam cryptocurrency founder was pitching their ICO to an investor in a restaurant in mountain view. At the time I hadn&#x27;t even heard of it but it went on to raise a lot of money then end up mired in legal trouble.<p>The central premise of the pitch was to repeadily go over how Bitcoin market price had changed from 2009 to whenever it was (probably around $3000 at the time), and then suggest that their new asset would experience even greater increases even faster because &lt;jargon&gt;. Paraphrasing: &quot;So if I invest $1m today, in seven years...?&quot; &quot;Your investment be worth 100 billion! maybe more, but I can&#x27;t promise that. 100,000x growth is the _minimum_ but the maximum is anyone&#x27;s guess&quot;. They looped over and over again, I think with the prospective investor making extra sure he understood before writing the guy he was talking to off as a scammer.<p>At that point I stopped worrying about the particular pitchee was going to get scammed, it was too absurd. (I&#x27;m sure my numbers aren&#x27;t exactly right, for one they had a bunch of excess precision in reality, presumably based on the day&#x27;s Bitcoin price, but whatever it was was totally absurd).<p>&gt;  or even a VC that is not tech savvy<p>Honestly, I think being &quot;tech savvy&quot; is a liability.  Someone who doesn&#x27;t think they&#x27;re tech savvy knows they don&#x27;t know. It takes a certain level of expertise to talk yourself into something extremely dumb. They might not fall for this particular pitch deck (or the one I overheard), but there are scams for every skill level. And the more confident you are in your understanding, the larger the &quot;investment&quot; you will being willing to make.