First of all, why should you care about my opinion?

Well, first of all, 9 months before Bitconnect ran away with everyone's money, I wrote an article about it on Steemit, article which quickly ranked #1 on Google when you searched for "Bitconnect scam" and other related terms, and was on the first page of google when you searched for "Bitconnect" up until a few days after the scam closed down. Here's the article:

https://steemit.com/scam/@thegrinder/the-bitconnect-scam-exposed

It gained over 300K views and 600 comments in those 9 months in which it was ranked #1, which I hope helped save a lot of people a lot of money. I also have extensive experience in online security and never got scammed online in my life. I did get scammed for $12 offline, though, so maybe don't listen to me after all :)).

If you know nothing about HEX, then some of the following information might not make sense without knowing what I'm talking about. You can read the basics of it on the HEX website .

So, question number one: is HEX a scam or not?

For that, let's look at why some people say it's a scam in the first place.

• "HEX is a scam because the origin address holds a lot of coins." - Well, no shit it does! Look at basically any crypto, including Bitcoin and the other top 10 cryptos - the founder always has a big bag of it. Who would spend a lot of time and money to make something awesome just to not own a good chunk of it? There are coins in the top 100 that are 80% to 90%+ owned by their founders, which is insanely more than in HEX, and they are actively dumping on their users. I personally consider them to be shitcoins at that percentage point, so I won't name them to give free attention to them, but you can easily find them on coinmarketcap with a bit of browsing.

• "But what if the founder dumps all of his HEX and the price goes to zero?" - He can't, because he locked them for 10 years, visible on the blockchain. If this is a scam, it's gonna be the longest-running scam in the history of crypto.

• "But he's getting a lot of money (ETH) from the launch phase." - Again, show me a crypto founder who DIDN'T profit from his crypto. The EOS guys got $4.2 BILLION.

• "What if he uses that ETH to put it back into the adoption amplifier to artificially increase the price?" - We are nearing the end of the adoption amplifier and that never happened, because we would see it on the blockchain, since all that ETH initially goes to a single address and is trackable.

• "It has referral links! Scams have referral links!" - So does Amazon, Google, PayPal, Tesla, Microsoft etc. . It's free advertising. Also, scams almost always have multi-level referral programs, HEX has a single-level referral program that ends at the end of the launch phase.

I think most of the scam allegations come from the fact that Richard Heart (the founder) is a very outspoken guy that made a lot of big name enemies in the crypto community (mostly Bitcoin maximalists and bullshitters he called out, like fake Satoshi), so they all jumped on the opportunity to bash him when he made his own project.

I guess those about cover what concerns people have. If you have any extra ones, I'll be happy to discuss them with you in the comments. Here's a few more things that I find worth mentioning:

• The HEX code was audited 3 times by chainsecurity.com and coinfabrik.com, 2 reputable blockchain security and smart contract audit companies. How many code audits do most cryptos have, including Bitcoin? Zero.

• Richard Heart was already verifiably a billionaire before creating HEX. What's most valuable for him in life at this point is time, not more money. He used both a lot of time AND money to create HEX. Why would he spend all of those resources to create a triple-audited, openly verifiable, trustless technology when he could have just made a shitcoin and shill it to his huge audience with minimal time and money spent on it? Also, why would a billionaire living in the US risk his liberty and wealth by scamming people?

Question number two: What will the HEX price do in the next 45 days, and even beyond?

To get an idea of what might happen, let's take the following things into consideration:

• Before a coin is about to give something away for free (for example a hard fork that results in you having coins on 2 different chains), the coin pumps because people want the free stuff and buy the coin, then the coin drops back down after they got their free stuff because they sell the coin. Some of them keep it for longer.

• The launch phase (called "adoption amplifier" in the case of HEX) ends in around a month and a half, at which point all the people that have staked coins will get a huge one-time bonus to their HEX holdings (called big payday). There's no minimum coins requirement for staking, so a lot of people will probably buy in and stake for the bonus, as history would suggest. The bonus depends on a few different factors, so it can't be precisely calculated until that day, but it will be quite significant. With current metrics and a short stake, it will give you around 170% more coins, but I presume more people will stake as the day approaches and it will drop down a few dozens of percents. The inflation on that day will be around 30%, then it will drop down to less than 3.69% a year, which will be paid to the stakers.

• The adoption amplifier is absorbing a huge portion of total investments into HEX, and after it ends, all that buy pressure of millions of dollars per day will move to exchanges. People buying something more than selling it usually results in a price increase.

• Richard Heart, a guy with a very big ego, a big bag of HEX locked for 10 years and billions of dollars (hundreds of millions just from the ETH from this project) will probably want his coin to succeed. It's probably reasonable to assume that he will spend some of that money and ETH on marketing HEX after the launch phase is over, because he knows that's when the coin can blow up the most - when the inflation is the lowest and all the buy pressure is transferred to the exchanges.

Taking those 4 things into account, I think that the coin will pump significantly (1.5x to 4x, maybe more) in the coming weeks before the big payday, then it will proceed to drop when people get their bonus and some of them will sell it. I don't have an estimate on how much it will drop, since this part is different from hard fork situations, but considering that stakers also get a lot of free coins on the last day, even if it drops 50% from the current price (around $0.004 at the time of writing), the extra coins should make up for a lot of it, maybe even for all of it, making instant profit if it doesn't drop too hard.

As for the future, the extra buy pressure put on exchanges, the potential hardcore marketing and the fact that the coin heavily encourages holding it (so, not selling it) through the way it was designed, I think that there will be a lot of growth in the coming year. How much, I can't say for such a young crypto, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did anywhere from 10x to 100x+ in price in that time frame from the current price. The difference between buy pressure and sell pressure is what drives any price up or down at the end of the day, and the reasons listed above lead me to believe there will be significantly more buy pressure than sell pressure. That being said, if the entire crypto market has a huge crash, then HEX will most likely crash along with it, and all investments carry risk, especially crypto ones.

I think the optimal play here if you want to minimize your risk as much as possible would be to get some HEX, stake half of it until the big payday and keep the other half unlocked, ready to sell on a good price increase before the big payday. If all goes as planned, you will end up with your money back in less than 2 months and with a bonus potentially very lucrative investment for the next years.

If you want to get some, you might as well use my referral link , which will give you a 10% HEX bonus if you get in through the adoption amplifier, which is the most direct way to get some and stake, and will give me a little bonus too. If you want to use an exchange instead, I'd recommend Uniswap because it's decentralized and requires no identity verifications.

Full disclosure: I do have money to gain if the price goes up, so you can consider me biased. Personally, I think this project has tons of profit potential and, as a result, all of my HEX is staked at least until the last day of the launch phase, I bought it all with my own money (even today) and I will be restaking most or all of it after that, and I already have a significant part of it staked for 3 years, as you can see in the screenshot below:

(Pending ones were staked today and start the next day)

That being said, these are just my opinions, I'm not a financial advisor and I can't see the future.