Blockchain: Is it a hoax?  115

Fake Platform

This is a well-planned scam. The fraudsters make a platform to provide the

functionality to deposit and trade your cryptocurrency. They make sure it

looks established and legit. One of the best examples of a fake platform is

Bitconnect. They were well-established and seemed legit. Bitconnect was

put under pressure from regulators to show its trading system and it turned

out that they were a Ponzi scheme. Many people ended up losing all the

money, and some of them were as high as $100k+ investments.

• Recommendations: Always carry out your research before deposit-

ing your cryptocurrencies on an online exchange platform. Preferably

always make sure that you store your cryptocurrencies on your own

local wallet and do not share your private keys with anyone.

Holding User’s Private Keys

Many exchanges hold your cryptocurrencies in their wallet. This means

your investments are under full control of the exchange as they own the

private keys. There have been multiple incidents whereby the exchange gets

hacked losing all the cryptocurrencies including yours.

• Recommendations: Avoid transferring your crypto assets into an online

platform. Always store your crypto offline inside your own wallet, or if

you want to use an online wallet, then make sure that it is protected by

your private keys and you own the private keys without disclosing them

to anyone.

EDUCATIONAL AND CAPABILITY GAP

IN BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

Although the footprint of blockchain-based projects, ICOs and cryptocur-

rencies have significantly increased over the last decade, the skill uplift has

not been matched to the growth. There is a significant gap in the market for

blockchain resources and essentially leaving a gap in appropriately match-

ing skills to support the use cases.

A lot of private training companies and universities have some shape or

form of blockchain modules; however, in my opinion, the quality of educa-

tion (majorly) is not practical enough to suit the businesses. Due to the lack

of skills, any company that would like to launch a use case using block-

chain, need to spend a lot of money on consulting with blockchain special-

ists. It can be an expensive business.