Electric Fox, I take your point about the word 'investor', but I think you're too hung up on the semantics. There are many investment options that are high risk. Futures, derivatives and short selling established stock all fill that category. Commodites can carry very high risk at times because of the bid/ask spread. Yes, they're riskier than buying a tranche of Microsoft or Exxon, but they are still investments. That said, if you prefer betting terminology, gambler it is. After all it was John Maynard Keynes who said:
'It is generally agreed that Casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of stock exchanges.'
Perhaps that's even more true for the cryptocurrency jungle. As for the rest, and to answer Conan's very reasonable enquiry, there are undoubtedly many successful people who have struggled before hitting pay dirt. Richard Branson had a setback or two in his teens but was a millionaire in his early twenties. The point is, Bushnell is nearly forty and has some way to go before he buys a microlight, never mind a hangar full of Boeings. I suppose there's still a remote chance that he might stumble across the next Mike Oldfield.
The important questions to ask yourself are these:
Why do I believe LIFE is the token for me?
What is the basis of that belief?
How much do I know about the people associated with the LIFE project, other than what they have told me?
How well funded is the venture and have I verfified that to the fullest possible extent?
Is the LIFE team being transparent and honest?
You may be right to have faith in this project and you are refreshingly frank in acknowledging that the cryptocurrency market is essentially a casino. But you wouldn't buy a car without checking it out first. Just keep in mind that faith is simply belief without evidence. And faith allied to the gambler's fallacy is a very bad combination.
As a point of clarification, there is a bankruptcy issue, although it applies to Mr Bushnell's previous venture, RP Assure Ltd, of which he was CEO and ultimate controlling party, rather than him personally. This company was compulsorily liquidated in 2016 following an insolvency petition from HMRC. For those of you outside the UK, that is Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs - essentially the same as the US IRS. To cut to the chase, RP Assure ran out of cash, was unable to meet HMRC's tax demands and continue trading, and was wound up. It happens to plenty of businesses, but Mr Bushnell's inability to achieve commercial sustainabiltiy with RP Assure should not be ignored if you are trusting him to take LIFE forward. Nor should his obfuscation of the true natue of his relationship with LIFE's 'adopters'.
Finally, not everyone buying cryptocurrency is a shark. There are plenty of honest minnows out there too. People risking a few hundred dollars in the hope of a return. They're the ones I'm primarily addressing. Whatever you may think, there is substance to Livewryght's concerns. And, just for the record, these statements are made in good faith,with the reasonable belief that they are true. They are not intended to defame, calumnify,villify or traduce the LIFE team or its associated parties. They are, however, intended to shed light.
Thank you for finally bringing some common sense and founded arguments in this thread.
I agree with your point about stock markets. To make things short, this is what I do for a living, as a professional investor for a wealth management company. My point was that I'm fed up reading teenagers who bought 200$ worth of crypto and calling themselves investors. Also the huge difference between stock markets and crypto is that apart from an ICO, the team has no responsablility towards the people who bought the coins (unlike it would be the case with stocks for example). Those people bought for profit, and ususally for immediate profit, and when it doesn't happen they blame the team, as if they were the one deciding the price. This is not how it works so it gives me headaches when those people start calling themselves as investors when the only thing they really do is gamble on a coin/token, without even reading about the project, etc.
It is also important to stay clear minded about what happens and to keep a critical mind when it comes to the team communication. But it has been proved by A+B that Livewryght's concern is far beyond only bringing those "for now unexplained" spots to light. It is clearly done in a FUD intention in order to damage the project's reputation and bring the price down. Otherwise why would he ask for 100 millions tokens to stop his campaign ? Also why would he go on like this, spending time and efforts to bring down a project which is according to him bound to crash ? This doesn't make sense at all. Actually he is doing exactly what McAffee has been doing when he shilled XVG and then asked for a ransom in order to not bring it down.
To make it short, the concern are indeed interesting, but the person who is carrying them is not neutral and is instrumentalizing those concerns to reach his goal, the goal of a psychopath.
Let's hope that more open minded people speak up, in the middle of all this mess.