16,844 crypto currencies. 80% of them are pure garbage

According to Coin Market cap there are 16,844 cryptos out on the world market although Coin Gecko shows 12,463. Still, that's a shitload. No wonder some of my non crypto friends think crypto is simply a penny stock market. Those of us in the space know some project have very good intentions and fail. Some succeed. Some just hang out. But so many others are pure scam and we all know it. I guess that is the price of decentralization and I sometimes struggle with this. We don't believe in censorship so why would we be in the business of telling new projects they aren't allowed because we are already too many in the room.

Sadly too many people will invest their life in dumb things like squid game tokens only to find no liquidity when trying to cash out. Others will simply be rug pulled. The worse part is the hit we as investors and believers of fundamentals take as it creates a bad reputation and gives crypto a terrible image. If politicians and regulators should have a beef with anything about crypto its these shady scam projects but how to determine a shady scam project until it is officially a scam. Many people in the crypto world still say Shib for example is a scam and that's their opinion. Many people not in crypto say Bitcoin is a scam. Many bitcoiners say ethereum is a scam and so on. So where do we go from here? One critique politicians often use is crypto can't police itself when it comes to these scams and rug pulls so they need harsh and strict regulation to be enforced and penalized. How can crypto police itself when project tribes can't stand each other and all they do is throw each other trash on twitter.

My hope is that in time as more and more people come in there are better educational tools for noobs to be aware of what is a fire hazard but I am not optimistic. People will do what they want to do in hopes of hitting a moon shot and some shady scammers know this so I imagine that number I typed in the title will likely reach 20,000 or 25,0000 by the time 2022 is over.