Now that people are finally beginning to wake up to the reality of cloudmining, perhaps I should focus my attention on the next looming disaster: lending bitcoins. Here is what I wrote in another thread:
Lending bitcoins is generally an even worse idea than (cloud) mining. Its hard to see why a legitimate borrower would want to borrow bitcoins, considering its volatility. Most investments and costs are still fiat denominated, so the exchange risk is enormous for a borrower, he might see his debt double or triple in mere months. The sad reality is that most of these borrowers will end up using the BTC for (cloudmining) ponzi's and will default on their loans when said ponzi collapses, for gambling (same thing, you might as well gamble yourself), as a way to short sell bitcoin (probably resulting in a default if BTC price goes up significantly) or plain old scamming the lenders by taking out ever bigger loans, increasing their credibility rating each time, until one day, they run. Cloudmining is usually a bad idea, lending out BTC an even worse one.
As for 'investing'; there is pretty much nothing you should even consider investing BTC in. Out of 100's or 1000's of IPO and scheme's Ive seen over the years, I can name precisely ONE that actually returned substantially more to its investors than it collected (asicminer). There are plenty of BTC related companies I would like to be able to invest in (bitpay to name just one), but none of them raise capital through BTC, for the same reasons explained above.
In the end, bitcoin itself is your investment. Dont try to 'grow' it, you dont do that with an investment in gold or silver either. Put it in a cold wallet and hang on to it. Thats the only truly sensible thing you can do with it, besides using it for buying stuff.