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TL;DR: What attributes qualify a crypto to be a Sh* t Coin? Serious question, not trolling. I am asking as there's a sea of shilling and mis-information out t

TL;DR: What attributes qualify a crypto to be a Sh* t Coin? Serious question, not trolling. I am asking as there's a sea of shilling and mis-information out there and it's getting very difficult to figure out what's real and what's pump-and-dump / shilling, painting the tape, washtrading type scam. My question is, What makes a "Sh* t" coin a "Sh* t" coin? I'm getting varying answers depending on source. Is it the current price (like fraction of cents) or is it a coin that has a landing page site with a "White paper" but no usage, or something else? I thought Ripple ( XRP ) was onto something when they claimed that they have "partnered" with 100+ Banks, Financial institutions to provide liquidity and fees saving in cross border transfers. Further research unearthed the fact that they do not have a SINGLE real customer, and that all the ones they hype on reddit r/Ripple and on CNBC are "Trials" / Pilots of their xCurrent and xRapid blockchain based software. So does this make XRP also a Sh*t coin?

empath75 9y ago
It’s whatever coins people are buying that isn’t the one you want them to buy so you can buy a Lambo.
- nefitty 9y ago
  If your intent is to eventually buy a Lambo, then you're probably the kind of person who is duped by shitcoins. "Investing in depreciating assets, that's an interesting strategy." - Carter Thomas
ricardobeat 9y ago
Where do you get that? Ripple seems to really have a few dozen banks as clients. The main issue with it is that the XRP token is not what actually powers their banking products, but an additional (possibly slightly cheaper) system which may not have any value after all. Shitcoins are the ones that put up a fancy website, a babble-filled whitepaper, maybe have an ICO, but their economic model makes no sense (blockchain for dentists anyone?), or they have no product at all and just clicked a few buttons to generate an Ethereum/Waves/etc token. Thus their ‘currency’ is likely to have zero utility. They still go up on wild speculation, because why not.
- deevolution 9y ago
  The major issue i have with ripple is that they essentially minted all of the coins themselves and then are selling them off as time progresses. Its completely missing the point of decentralized cryptocurrencies! Anyone buying ripple is the greater fool. There is no way for users to contribute to the ripple network other than trading amongst themselves. If ripple decides to shut shop, thats the end of ripple. Also the small number of master nodes means easy targets for DDOS attacks...
QuackingJimbo 9y ago
A knowledgeable crypto friend of mine says that the primary factor is the extent of the pre-mining.
- Alex3917 9y ago
  So then is AAPL stock a shitcoin because it was 100% pre-mined (the founders started with 100% of the equity)? That logic make no sense.
  - insette 9y ago
    > So then is AAPL stock a shitcoin because it was 100% pre-mined (the founders started with 100% of the equity)? That logic make no sense. Of course not. Judging by the fact 75% of the top 20 coins on CMC are premined, the only people who have an issue with founders premining the coin are delusional. Even if you did want to launch a coin with no premine in today's market, due to the insane amount of interest in cryptocurrency, it's virtually impossible for founders to mine their own coin en masse (per Satoshi). In the absence of an explicit premine, industrial scale miners effectively "premine" the coin in lieu of the founders premining the coin. And typically, coins that claim they aren't premined have a checkered history of ninjamining or cripplemining or instamining etc; while the founders tout "no premine" to noobs, in reality they just played games to get around the (pointless) stigma of it.
    - nefitty 9y ago
      Verge is one of the biggest path-finding shitcoins around. One of their selling points is "no pre-mine", but in terms of community, technology, dev team, and so on, it has little to no value in the context of other projects. Eerily, new coins are emulating Verge's model, most notable of which, at the moment, is Tron. A great heuristic that will cut a lot of the chaff is: how organic/productive is their community, and is the technology there/actually possible? A more formal method is SpacesuitX which is a method of breaking projects down into categories and rating them based on personal research. http://SpacesuitX.org http://SpacesuitX.org
  - 9y ago
sdrothrock 9y ago
I would put all ponzi scheme "coins" into the shitcoin pile. https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7r6chx/here_is_a_list_of_crypto_ponzi_schemes_and_people/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7r6chx/here...
StavrosK 9y ago
Any coin I can't personally see a use for is a shitcoin to me. Unless it does something innovative that excites me to write stuff for, I'm not interested. By that definition, most coins are shitcoins, but there's no objective shitcoin test anyway. Not to mention that nobody really uses any coins right now because of all the hype, so it's not a great time for people who want cryptocurrency usage to eventually be widespread.
- AznHisoka 9y ago
  I agree. A good question to ask is: would you buy this coin if you could never ever sell it ?
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    Ah, very astute, and it hits the nail right on the head. Thanks for that, that's what I'll use when people ask me what to buy.
  - conanbatt 9y ago
    Unfortunately, money in itself is that thing you would never have if you could not sell it. That is the noticeable exception of purely exchange value items.
    - umanwizard 9y ago
      Plenty of people want to acquire USD independently of the fact that it can be exchanged for EUR, for example.
      - IncRnd 9y ago
        > Plenty of people want to acquire USD independently of the fact that it can be exchanged for EUR, for example. It's doubtful that any of those people would want to acquire USD if it couldn't be traded for bread, gasoline, or anything else. People want USD, precisely because it can be traded for items.
      - 9y ago
tptacek 9y ago
What makes you think this would be a property of the crypto instrument itself, and not of the entire concept of entirely unregulated trading in purely speculative virtual currencies? The people starting cryptocurrency projects don't even need to be aware of manipulation, let alone desirous of it, to have the "shitcoin/buttcoin" property. Any set of traders in any instrument can manipulate it.
goldenkey 9y ago
The answer is not black and white. Most coins are filled with all kinds of illegal activity like wash trading that would never happen at such a scale on a real stock exchange. There are little to no regulations. So pretty much everything in the cryptocurrency sector is being manipulated heavily by people who've invested in the founders' coin or by the founders' themselves. Most of it comes down to the common sense test: ponzi. Did the founder give themselves 50% of the lions' share of the coin supply? Is the code just a copy of something else but changed to give the founder extra coins or abilities? The list goes on. Pretty much everything out there is a mixture of both. No founder wants to be poor if people will accept these diluted offerings. After all, you take $1 from everybody, and no one screams and shouts, yet you become one of the richest people in the world. Same principle applies with initial supply dilution in some respects.
hypron 9y ago
>So does this make XRP also a Sh*t coin? Yes.
baby 9y ago
Www.cryptoisnotcryptocurrency.com
drb91 9y ago
I think it's safe to assume any cryptocoin is a pump-and-dump scheme without evidence it's somehow resistant to that.
temp-dude-87844 9y ago
Hindsight.
throwaway011818 9y ago
At the very least a coin should function as a coin. Over the last two weeks I evaluated the user experience of several coins based on the following steps. 1) Buy the coin on an exchange. 2) Install the wallet from the coin's official website. 3) Get a text based pass phrase or private key so that I can restore the wallet at any time from a paper backup. 4) Transfer money from the exchange to the wallet. 5) Restore my wallet on another computer using step 3 and verify money from step 4 is present. 6) Transfer some coins back to the exchange. Ripple only passed steps 1-3. It failed for step 4, in the sense it was a bad user experience, because you find out the wallet will cost you 20 XRP which you can never get back ($40+ when I tried it). It failed step 5 because the website suddenly stopped letting you download their wallet, which is still in Beta, even if you agreed to all the popup warnings asking you to accept the risks. Some other results... ADA/Cardano: I tried installing their wallet 5 times on 3 different computers (macOS and Windows 10) and just got random errors or hang ups. I got one wallet to work out of 5 attempts and was never able to restore that wallet from my pass phrase. ZEC/ZCash: The macOS GUI wallet often crashes immediately. When it didn't crash it was easier to find a "donation" address than my own public (send to) address. PIVX: Fails step 3. Verge: The video at the top of their website to "learn more" before installing the wallet is beyond words bad -- I couldn't bring myself to perform step 2. NAV: Great, passed all steps. Just not sure how it will compete against Monero long term. Monero XMR: Looks good so far. But my exchange (Binance) charges about $15 for each transfer to my wallet. Transfers for most coins cost under $1. ARK was absolutely the best experience. Passed all steps first try and took very little time. I really loved the UX and UI.
- whataretensors 9y ago
  Re: PIVX I think you can just run `dumpprivkey` in the console.
- umanwizard 9y ago
  Binance is famous for overcharging for withdrawals — the fees you paid to withdraw XMR aren’t a property of XMR, but of Binance.
  - justboxing 9y ago
matthewbauer 9y ago
It’s all shit coins now. Block chain will probably come back someday but it’s all interconnected and will probably be worth nothing after the crash.
JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
Many in crypto consider Ripple king sh*tcoin and I and many others don't even consider it cryptocurrency. "A defining feature of a cryptocurrency, and arguably its most endearing allure, is its organic nature; it is not issued by any central authority, rendering it theoretically immune to government interference or manipulation."
- katastic 9y ago
  >rendering it theoretically immune to government interference or manipulation." Which is hilariously naive. Governments can manipulate markets with their orders-of-a-magnitude more capital and power. They can set up mining farms, research better methods, or pull a South Korea and straight up make cryptocurrecy illegal. Also, crypto is hardly the anarchist nirvana people think it is. It's been proven that it's used for buying drugs and illegal weapons... but also human beings. http://humantraffickingsearch.org/bitcoin-fuels-the-human-trafficking-market/ http://humantraffickingsearch.org/bitcoin-fuels-the-human-tr... https://www.coindesk.com/vatican-address-highlight-bitcoin-use-human-slave-trade/ https://www.coindesk.com/vatican-address-highlight-bitcoin-u... http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/08/16/in-a-step-toward-fighting-human-trafficking-sex-ads-are-linked-to-bitcoin-data/ http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/08/16/in-a-step-toward-fightin...
coderdude 9y ago
The rule of thumb is that all coins are shit coins. That's it. This is the rule that everyone not currently trying to scam you keeps in mind. There is actually nothing else to it but maintaining that mindset.
thisisit 9y ago
Short answer - It depends. Long answer - It takes lot of research before you can label something a shtcoin. How to do that research is one of the longer blog posts pending in my draft folder. Starting point can be the ownership aspect of a coin. There are coins which are pre-mine or instamine. Shameless plug and a badly written blog post: https://blockchaintechblog.com/2017/09/02/ico-token-explained/ https://blockchaintechblog.com/2017/09/02/ico-token-explaine... Ethereum is one of the biggest example. During it's launch developers owned ~12% of the supply. Now, pre-mine is not exactly bad. Developers need money for things like listing. HitBTC, consider to be one of the worst exchanges, cost 25 BTC per listing. But, on the other end of spectrum you have Veritaseum where the developers still own 95% of the coins. People might support it but in my book it is a shtcoin even at $373 per coin.

empath75 9y ago

It’s whatever coins people are buying that isn’t the one you want them to buy so you can buy a Lambo.

nefitty 9y ago
If your intent is to eventually buy a Lambo, then you're probably the kind of person who is duped by shitcoins. "Investing in depreciating assets, that's an interesting strategy." - Carter Thomas

ricardobeat 9y ago

Where do you get that? Ripple seems to really have a few dozen banks as clients. The main issue with it is that the XRP token is not what actually powers their banking products, but an additional (possibly slightly cheaper) system which may not have any value after all. Shitcoins are the ones that put up a fancy website, a babble-filled whitepaper, maybe have an ICO, but their economic model makes no sense (blockchain for dentists anyone?), or they have no product at all and just clicked a few buttons to generate an Ethereum/Waves/etc token. Thus their ‘currency’ is likely to have zero utility. They still go up on wild speculation, because why not.

deevolution 9y ago
The major issue i have with ripple is that they essentially minted all of the coins themselves and then are selling them off as time progresses. Its completely missing the point of decentralized cryptocurrencies! Anyone buying ripple is the greater fool. There is no way for users to contribute to the ripple network other than trading amongst themselves. If ripple decides to shut shop, thats the end of ripple. Also the small number of master nodes means easy targets for DDOS attacks...

QuackingJimbo 9y ago

A knowledgeable crypto friend of mine says that the primary factor is the extent of the pre-mining.

Alex3917 9y ago
So then is AAPL stock a shitcoin because it was 100% pre-mined (the founders started with 100% of the equity)? That logic make no sense.
- insette 9y ago
  > So then is AAPL stock a shitcoin because it was 100% pre-mined (the founders started with 100% of the equity)? That logic make no sense. Of course not. Judging by the fact 75% of the top 20 coins on CMC are premined, the only people who have an issue with founders premining the coin are delusional. Even if you did want to launch a coin with no premine in today's market, due to the insane amount of interest in cryptocurrency, it's virtually impossible for founders to mine their own coin en masse (per Satoshi). In the absence of an explicit premine, industrial scale miners effectively "premine" the coin in lieu of the founders premining the coin. And typically, coins that claim they aren't premined have a checkered history of ninjamining or cripplemining or instamining etc; while the founders tout "no premine" to noobs, in reality they just played games to get around the (pointless) stigma of it.
  - nefitty 9y ago
    Verge is one of the biggest path-finding shitcoins around. One of their selling points is "no pre-mine", but in terms of community, technology, dev team, and so on, it has little to no value in the context of other projects. Eerily, new coins are emulating Verge's model, most notable of which, at the moment, is Tron. A great heuristic that will cut a lot of the chaff is: how organic/productive is their community, and is the technology there/actually possible? A more formal method is SpacesuitX which is a method of breaking projects down into categories and rating them based on personal research. http://SpacesuitX.org http://SpacesuitX.org
- 9y ago

sdrothrock 9y ago

I would put all ponzi scheme "coins" into the shitcoin pile. https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7r6chx/here_is_a_list_of_crypto_ponzi_schemes_and_people/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7r6chx/here...

StavrosK 9y ago

Any coin I can't personally see a use for is a shitcoin to me. Unless it does something innovative that excites me to write stuff for, I'm not interested. By that definition, most coins are shitcoins, but there's no objective shitcoin test anyway. Not to mention that nobody really uses any coins right now because of all the hype, so it's not a great time for people who want cryptocurrency usage to eventually be widespread.

AznHisoka 9y ago
I agree. A good question to ask is: would you buy this coin if you could never ever sell it ?
- StavrosK 9y ago
  Ah, very astute, and it hits the nail right on the head. Thanks for that, that's what I'll use when people ask me what to buy.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  Unfortunately, money in itself is that thing you would never have if you could not sell it. That is the noticeable exception of purely exchange value items.
  - umanwizard 9y ago
    Plenty of people want to acquire USD independently of the fact that it can be exchanged for EUR, for example.
    - IncRnd 9y ago
      > Plenty of people want to acquire USD independently of the fact that it can be exchanged for EUR, for example. It's doubtful that any of those people would want to acquire USD if it couldn't be traded for bread, gasoline, or anything else. People want USD, precisely because it can be traded for items.
    - 9y ago

tptacek 9y ago

What makes you think this would be a property of the crypto instrument itself, and not of the entire concept of entirely unregulated trading in purely speculative virtual currencies? The people starting cryptocurrency projects don't even need to be aware of manipulation, let alone desirous of it, to have the "shitcoin/buttcoin" property. Any set of traders in any instrument can manipulate it.

goldenkey 9y ago

The answer is not black and white. Most coins are filled with all kinds of illegal activity like wash trading that would never happen at such a scale on a real stock exchange. There are little to no regulations. So pretty much everything in the cryptocurrency sector is being manipulated heavily by people who've invested in the founders' coin or by the founders' themselves. Most of it comes down to the common sense test: ponzi. Did the founder give themselves 50% of the lions' share of the coin supply? Is the code just a copy of something else but changed to give the founder extra coins or abilities? The list goes on. Pretty much everything out there is a mixture of both. No founder wants to be poor if people will accept these diluted offerings. After all, you take $1 from everybody, and no one screams and shouts, yet you become one of the richest people in the world. Same principle applies with initial supply dilution in some respects.

hypron 9y ago

>So does this make XRP also a Sh*t coin? Yes.

baby 9y ago

Www.cryptoisnotcryptocurrency.com

drb91 9y ago

I think it's safe to assume any cryptocoin is a pump-and-dump scheme without evidence it's somehow resistant to that.

temp-dude-87844 9y ago

Hindsight.

throwaway011818 9y ago

At the very least a coin should function as a coin. Over the last two weeks I evaluated the user experience of several coins based on the following steps. 1) Buy the coin on an exchange. 2) Install the wallet from the coin's official website. 3) Get a text based pass phrase or private key so that I can restore the wallet at any time from a paper backup. 4) Transfer money from the exchange to the wallet. 5) Restore my wallet on another computer using step 3 and verify money from step 4 is present. 6) Transfer some coins back to the exchange. Ripple only passed steps 1-3. It failed for step 4, in the sense it was a bad user experience, because you find out the wallet will cost you 20 XRP which you can never get back ($40+ when I tried it). It failed step 5 because the website suddenly stopped letting you download their wallet, which is still in Beta, even if you agreed to all the popup warnings asking you to accept the risks. Some other results... ADA/Cardano: I tried installing their wallet 5 times on 3 different computers (macOS and Windows 10) and just got random errors or hang ups. I got one wallet to work out of 5 attempts and was never able to restore that wallet from my pass phrase. ZEC/ZCash: The macOS GUI wallet often crashes immediately. When it didn't crash it was easier to find a "donation" address than my own public (send to) address. PIVX: Fails step 3. Verge: The video at the top of their website to "learn more" before installing the wallet is beyond words bad -- I couldn't bring myself to perform step 2. NAV: Great, passed all steps. Just not sure how it will compete against Monero long term. Monero XMR: Looks good so far. But my exchange (Binance) charges about $15 for each transfer to my wallet. Transfers for most coins cost under $1. ARK was absolutely the best experience. Passed all steps first try and took very little time. I really loved the UX and UI.

whataretensors 9y ago
Re: PIVX I think you can just run `dumpprivkey` in the console.
umanwizard 9y ago
Binance is famous for overcharging for withdrawals — the fees you paid to withdraw XMR aren’t a property of XMR, but of Binance.
- justboxing 9y ago

matthewbauer 9y ago

It’s all shit coins now. Block chain will probably come back someday but it’s all interconnected and will probably be worth nothing after the crash.

JohnJamesRambo 9y ago

Many in crypto consider Ripple king sh*tcoin and I and many others don't even consider it cryptocurrency. "A defining feature of a cryptocurrency, and arguably its most endearing allure, is its organic nature; it is not issued by any central authority, rendering it theoretically immune to government interference or manipulation."

katastic 9y ago
>rendering it theoretically immune to government interference or manipulation." Which is hilariously naive. Governments can manipulate markets with their orders-of-a-magnitude more capital and power. They can set up mining farms, research better methods, or pull a South Korea and straight up make cryptocurrecy illegal. Also, crypto is hardly the anarchist nirvana people think it is. It's been proven that it's used for buying drugs and illegal weapons... but also human beings. http://humantraffickingsearch.org/bitcoin-fuels-the-human-trafficking-market/ http://humantraffickingsearch.org/bitcoin-fuels-the-human-tr... https://www.coindesk.com/vatican-address-highlight-bitcoin-use-human-slave-trade/ https://www.coindesk.com/vatican-address-highlight-bitcoin-u... http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/08/16/in-a-step-toward-fighting-human-trafficking-sex-ads-are-linked-to-bitcoin-data/ http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/08/16/in-a-step-toward-fightin...

coderdude 9y ago

The rule of thumb is that all coins are shit coins. That's it. This is the rule that everyone not currently trying to scam you keeps in mind. There is actually nothing else to it but maintaining that mindset.

thisisit 9y ago

Short answer - It depends. Long answer - It takes lot of research before you can label something a shtcoin. How to do that research is one of the longer blog posts pending in my draft folder. Starting point can be the ownership aspect of a coin. There are coins which are pre-mine or instamine. Shameless plug and a badly written blog post: https://blockchaintechblog.com/2017/09/02/ico-token-explained/ https://blockchaintechblog.com/2017/09/02/ico-token-explaine... Ethereum is one of the biggest example. During it's launch developers owned ~12% of the supply. Now, pre-mine is not exactly bad. Developers need money for things like listing. HitBTC, consider to be one of the worst exchanges, cost 25 BTC per listing. But, on the other end of spectrum you have Veritaseum where the developers still own 95% of the coins. People might support it but in my book it is a shtcoin even at $373 per coin.