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Ethereum: A number of hard forks turn out to be scams
- momentmaker 8y agoA number of Bitcoin hard forks are scams as well and a few of them are in the top 100 in terms of market cap. The same thing could be said about airdrops.
- SkidanovAlex 8y agoYou don't need to go to top 100. Two Bitcoin forks that are scams are in Top 10 right now.
- stale2002 8y agoScam implies theft. Those forks aren't being used to steal money from people.
- asaph 8y ago> You don't need to go to top 100. Two Bitcoin forks that are scams are in Top 10 right now. The 2 forks he's referring to are Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV in case anyone was wondering.
- trsfgbb 8y agoBitcoin Core and Bitcoin SV? Last time I tried Core fork of Bitcoin, it was useless, it had $30 transaction fees (due to artificial block size limit). I was scammed out of my money, couldn't move it. This isn't fixed yet, fees will appear again when transaction volume increases. Meanwhile with Bitcoin Cash I was sending $1 to Venezuelian for less than $0.01.
- NathanCH 8y agoGoing on Coinmarketcap and clicking any coin's website in the top 50 will take you to basically the same type of site. - Featuring voice-over video explaining why _this_ coin is the most decentralized and secure. - A team page showcasing an absurdly large number of team members with stockphoto-like profiles photos. - A roadmap, of which they're all on stage one. - Whitepaper linked from primary navigation.
- duxup 8y agoI'm at the point where I just assume that if it is cryptocurrency, I assume the likelihood of being a scam is close to 100%. I followed cryptocurrency just casually out of curiosity for awhile but the association between that and scams and crime and such are just so high I have to wonder if I'm alone or if there really eventually is a perception problem. Obviously you could argue "hey just money has that problem" maybe, but for some reason I don't make that association.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y agoI think if the crypocommodity game has done anything it's created a more clever and more technically proficient scammer. According to the article, many real people who likely consider themselves experts in this "field" were at least initially fooled. I don't think your comparison to real money is wrong at all. Look, we can mostly all understand what real government issued money is. If people into crypto were first forced to understand what it is - the entire system would disappear in an instant. I've said it before, there are geniuses in the cryptocommodity game. But they aren't the ones trying to buy low and sell high and concerned about forks. They're the ones pumping out SEO-invested ICOs, running exchanges, selling newsletters and books (or whatever the current version of that is). War is profitable if you're the arms dealer, not the solider.
- walrus01 8y ago> According to the article, many real people who likely consider themselves experts in this "field" A lot of people who thought they were bitcoin "experts" lost all or most of their coins to MtGox.
- baxtr 8y agoThat’s unfortunate. Many of my friends/colleague now say that Cryptos per se are a scam
- duxup 8y agoHeck I said I feel that way in my post. I wonder at what point is a high percentage of scams just so many people just don't want to chance it? At least with banks or whatever we expect some safety net to some extent ... the irreversible crypto... man that's rough.
- Animats 8y agoAnonymous, remote, irreversible transactions - the scammer's dream. That's why cryptocurrencies are such a scam magnet. The marks don't know who you are, the marks are far away, and they can't get their money back.
- duxup 8y agoAnd if you trust a company with holding your coins....no reason they can't steal it just the same.
- umanwizard 8y agoThey are correct.
- cwkoss 8y agoLooks like we're halfway through the next cycle. :-P
- monochromatic 8y agoThat’s a position that’s sort of hard to argue against.
- aakilfernandes 8y agoMy hunch is that the only people buying into these obvious scams is other scammers. They look at it and think "hey, I bet a bunch of people will fall for this. I'll buy some first.". But maybe I'm too naive =/.
- keketi 8y agoOr people who follow the greater fool theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
- dajohnson89 8y agoThat describes a significant portion of investment behavior, across all asset classes.
- g45y45 8y agoHard Forks that end up spawning their own coins, (ie: continue to be mined under old consensus rules) are 100% scams. None of these are legit: Ethereum Classic, BCash, Bcash SV, MoneroV, Litecoin Cash. Never trust these -- at worst you can lose your money due to tx replays, fraud, pump-n-dump, etc.
- JeremyBanks 8y agoWhat is "BCash"? That doesn't seem to be the name of any existing crypto project.
- coralreef 8y agoIts Bitcoin Cash, but I think the 'bitcoin core' group doesn't like them using the word 'Bitcoin' in their name, so it uses Bcash to refer/denigrate them, etc...
- hombre_fatal 8y agoOn the other hand, the people who forked Bitcoin into "Bitcoin Cash" would love for you to confuse them with Bitcoin. It's like someone starting a company "Nike Shoes", getting mad when people disambiguate them from Nike with "NShoes" ("hey, that's not my branding!"), and insisting that people call Nike "Nike Core". What makes cryptocurrency politics so uniquely toxic is that people will align themselves with a faction because they have $5 invested. The barrier to conflicts of interest are so low that it makes you wonder if anyone is speaking earnestly on even the most trivial issues, like the person above who asserted that Bcash didn't exist despite a quick google proving otherwise. Though some people even do the same thing when you mention Golang. ;)
- brokensegue 8y agoExcept proponents of crypto currency are exactly the kind of libertarians who would oppose trademark protections like this so it's ironic when they get strung up by this particular petard.
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- walrus01 8y agoI'm old enough to have been watching financial markets for about twenty years now, and in my opinion a great percentage of the "cryptocurrency entrepreneurs" running cryptocurrency scams aren't really doing anything novel. They just have new shiny tech bullshit to baffle people with. Twenty years ago they would be running pump-and-dump penny stock scams with Canadian small-cap mining stocks.
- mr_isomies 8y agoAnd subsequently loosing everyone's investment when the mine's head engineer gets thrown out of an helicopter
- jonathankoren 8y agoPerhaps, but then the real innovation isn’t in the bits, but rather in marketing to the “The apocalypse is nigh!” crowd, and other right wing conspiracy theory aficionados, that were previously dominated by the gold coin and dehydrated food grifters.
- walrus01 8y agoYeah, it is probably a lot easier to get right-wing conspiracy theory enthusiasts to "invest" in something if you can convince them it's an ideological soulmate to their libertarian utopia, than it is to get them to open brokerage accounts and start buying stocks.
- mgavaudan 8y agoA lot of people are saying that crypto is a scam because there are malicious actors in the industry. This claim is as far fetched as saying emails are a scam because Nigerian Princes want to wire you millions of dollars or that the Internet is a scam because some websites contain viruses. Don't let these small bumps distract from the greater picture and all the amazing work the developers at Ethereum, Bitcoin etc are doing.
- umanwizard 8y agoEmail is useful for purposes other than scams and buying drugs. Crypto is, to a first-order approximation, not.
- hopler 8y agoEmail is mostly a scam, but you don't notice because you don't run your own mailserver and you have spam protection from a legitimate provider, and for now there is no direct way to transfer money via email.
- umanwizard 8y agoActually, I do run my own mailserver, with no spam filtering whatsoever. The volume of spam is high, but low enough to ignore.
- Sargos 8y ago> The volume of spam is high, but low enough to ignore. Same with crypto. The projects people actually care about and follow aren't scams. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Nano, etc are not scams. Sure there are some scams out there but they are mostly obvious. Just like email. But because some people have a personal crusade against crypto they like to play up the obvious scams as commonplace when they really aren't.
- walrus01 8y agoCounterpoint: Nigerian scams are not an appreciable percentage of SMTP traffic by volume, if you look at what goes through a busy mail server. Even if you believe that cryptocurrency as a whole is not a scam, you have to acknowledge that a significant and appreciable percentage of the "coins" that you would see in a top-50 list of cryptocurrencies are highly suspicious or outright scams.
- arisAlexis 8y agowhy are people surprised in 2019 about online scams and what's different here?
- iblaine 8y agoCrypt has too many opportunists. It really is tragic because the technology is interesting. I do not see it the problem being fixed.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoOr perhaps crypto has too many naive amateur opportunists, who can't compete - in either effectiveness or toxicity - with the established financial industries.
- sneakernets 8y agoBeing scammed is just one of many sacrifices one must make in the name of freedom, or, something. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to check my Dogecoin Wallet...
- berbec 8y agoHey DogeCoin has the full faith and credit of tens of thousands of Reddit users behind it! That's way better than /bCoin.
- dooglius 8y agoThe biggest and most successful hard fork scam was the one moving from what is now called Etherium Classic to what is now called Etherium.
- crankylinuxuser 8y agos/number of hard forks turn out to be scams/Scam/ I've been saying that since their decision how to handle the DAO. The devs have a special vip() function that effectively allows a hard fork if the devs lose money. And that vip() is located on the updater on each ethereum miner's machine.
- Proven 8y agoConsidering the long-promised and never delivered features as well as the messing with the supposedly immutable blockchain, Ethereum itself likely qualifies as well