Timeline of the ChainCoin Scam – Massive Cryptocurrency Pump and Dump Scheme | Hacker News Reader

Timeline of the ChainCoin Scam – Massive Cryptocurrency Pump and Dump Scheme

storeofvalue.github.io

78 pointsnotlikethis199416 comments

What country is this guy from? This is exactly the type of thing that the SEC would go after. Replace ChainCoin with any penny stock and this story has been told countless times. Only new angle is YouTube videos and Slack channels instead of boiler room call centers.

Daly City, San Francisco, Cali

ChainCoin has no value proposition, nothing to differentiate it, and the dev team abandoned it a long time ago, so why would anyone purchase this crypto? It's the same with stocks; you have to be able to understand the financials, product, roadmap, etc. of the company you're investing in.

I've purchased a few altcoins with differentiation and solid dev teams behind them. And it's still a gamble; I expect most to die off.

My current picks are siacoin (devs seems smart, but had a few missteps, storage could be a real market in the cryptocurrency space), monero (seems like they're doing anonymity right), litecoin (potential for LN first mover advantage) and bitcoin (pure network effect). Care to share any of yours?

From what I understand, SiaCoin has almost no customers.

Yes. To put it in startup terms, SiaCoin has an MVP and is post Series-A but is still building out the product.

Storj, which is in the same space, is a couple year ahead and is just starting to try and get traction (but had a management shake up)

The most serious alt coins are very much like startups.

Factom, which is sort of a digital notary service, seems to have been working for several years on their platform and only just recently picked a market- Mortgages- Claiming they want to prevent the problems that happened in 2009 by making auditing and verifying mortgage documents better. They closed their Series A last year, but did their ICO a couple years before that.

For those that didn't pick it up, this is sarcasm - playing on someone giving pithy reasons for stock tips.

> ChainCoin has no value proposition, nothing to differentiate it, and the dev team abandoned it a long time ago, so why would anyone purchase this crypto? It's the same with stocks; you have to be able to understand the financials, product, roadmap, etc. of the company you're investing in.

Same reason people buy deep out of the money call options or do leveraged FX trading - they just like to gamble. The whole FX brokerage business (and that includes crypto) is basically run like a casino.

I noticed the huge price swings of this orphaned coin over the last month ... looked very suspicious for a coordinated pump and dump. What I didn't know was that this was being done by a youtuber who basically stole money from his own followers through this scam. What a scumbag.

There was a not-dissimilar scam orchestrated by some popular Youtube channels last year, also mostly targeted at their own followers and fans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8fU2QG-lV0

They created a Counter-Strike "lottery" website and uploaded a lot of videos of themselves winning big, while never disclosing that they were the secret owners of the site. Of course, their supposed recorded lottery winnings were staged as a way to drive traffic and money to the site.

Cryptocurrencies are best described as being like penny stocks - they don't represent any underlying value or investment, meaning that prices are low and large gains can be realised through a small change in price - making them vulnerable to people manipulating investors as part of a pump and dump scheme.

From the Willy bot through to the latest ICO craze, the whole cryptocurrency scene is riddled with people engaging in pumping prices - which means that any reverses in price hit sentiment hard and cause price shocks, something I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of over the next year or so...

"they don't represent any underlying value or investment" - You should try sending money to a friend or relative in a foreign country. You'll love the cost of what should be nothing more than a basic electronic transaction.

People who say there is no use case for bitcoin or they have no value tend to be in places where there is a somewhat reliable banking system and they do not use that banking system to transfer money internationally, because even a good banking system has a very high charge for international transfers, and as this is usually a flat fee it makes it very expensive for small transfers. However I have seen some places that charge a flat fee plus a %age of the total, which means large transfers are also relatively expensive.

Bitcoin is volatile and transactions are slow. This means it's not really fungible for general purpose money.

You bring up a good niche that it can fill, though.

> Bitcoin is volatile and transactions are slow.

The Bitcoin blockchain is slow (as all blockchain are, relatively speaking) but most Bitcoin transactions happen off-chain, for example at the many Bitcoin exchanges, where bitcoins are transferred between customers at thousands of transactions per second using a central clearer (the exchange). By depositing bitcoins at an exchange, you exchange it for that exchange’s Bitcoin credit, which has no limit on transaction speed, and when you want out you redeem your credit into a Bitcoin transaction.

This page shows the USD price of the credit instruments of the various Bitcoin exchanges: https://bitcoincharts.com/markets/currency/USD.html — e.g. a Bitcoin on Bitstamp currently costs 2439.84 USD, whereas the price of GDAX (Coinbase) Bitcoin credit is currently a bit more expensive at 2456.44 USD.

I wouldn't call the whole of China a niche. International transfers from there aren't expensive but they're mostly impossible by official means. Banks don't allow citizens to send money overseas except for a few specific and verified reasons, which importantly don't include gifts to family members or buying things (eg real estate).

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