Bitcoin Forum

Note: Charlie Shrem is a bitcoin advocate who co-founded a bitcoin exchange start-up Bitinstant in 2011. The company charged a fee for users to purchase and make purchases with bitcoins at over 700,000 locations. On January 27, 2014, Charlie Shrem was arrested at New York’s JFK airport and charged with “conspiring to commit money laundering by selling more than $1 million in bitcoins to users of the black market website Silk Road”. BitInstant website has been blank since then. Charlie  was sentenced to two years behind bars, serving his time at Lewisburg Federal Prison Camp in Pennsylvania. He has now been released from imprisonment and is serving three years of supervised release.

His recent ICO plan was questioned by Chinese lawyer:



http://news.8btc.com/bitcoins-first-felon-charlie-shrem-speaks-about-his-new-investment-fund

Why are they singling out Charlie Shrem? There are other ICOs in China that also deserves the same kind of attention. There is this new big ICO called Qtum that was featured in Coindesk a few months ago and it has formally announced that they had $1m in VC funding. They are also claiming that Roger Ver is an investor.

If you check their ANN thread there are a lot of dishonest stuff being exposed there. The lead developer or something was involved in an altcoin scam and ran away with hundreds of Bitcoins. The Chinese lawyer should question them too without bias.

ICO=pre-mined coins

majority of pre-mined coins are pump and dumps.
it does not matter how many coins are produced or any of that. unless a coin serves an actual purpose and actually has places to use a coin. its useless.

treat ICO's as penny stocks (pumps and dumps) only throw a penny at them, and at most just the same amount you would waste on fast food that just gets flushed away in the toilet 6 hours later.

and as for all governments that all make the standard investment advice of "investors should consider it as carrying a “high degree of risk”. and not to expect guaranteed returns or profits. because you can make a loss aswell as a gain"

Why would Chinese investor be gullible?

I'm probably not understanding the full story. Are you saying that Chinese investors are gullible for considering an ICO or that Chinese investors are gullible because they need or are listening to the Chinese lawyer's questions/guidance?

What exactly are you asking here?

Sorry, the title is a quote from Chinese news comments.

The government has a obligation to protect consumers from fraudulent operations and any information that would help to inform gullible people, will help. Most people's judgement is clouded by greed and then they make bad decisions. Just look at the success of MMM for instance and with a simple "Google" search, losses could have been avoided.

There is a difference between being gullible and being greedy. ^hmmmmmm^

This is just another story mentioning someone got arrested and went to prison simply because was involved with bitcoin, I'd strongly suggest to ignore any information on this thread because a homeless man can get arrested and go to prison due to involvement with begging for paper money :D
And about ICO, why would you offer coins to people if you know you can succeed? yes ICO usually puts the risks of failure on investors.

Can you give me the link?

Never invest money in ICO which is found by criminals, your tokens will be worthless if he gets arrested again.

I don't think they are gullible but they are generally genuine risk takers who want to see the good outcome of a risky venture.

It's human nature to take risk, only difference is preference.

Well you should tell Yobit and the likes to stop listing shitcoins on their platforms to defraud investors of their hard earned money(Bitcoins). They've found the easiest root to riches is to fork coin to create a shit coin and run an ICO.

Chinese exchanges might never touch any ICO again if they follow the self-regulation rules.


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1801250.msg17944659#msg17944659

first of all i think yobit is russian or mostly of unknown origin and shady.
second of all they will never do that. because listing these shitcoins is how they earn money. first they get paid to list some of these from the developer then they may get paid to pump it. even if they are not they fake pump it when it died and nobody were watching to fool their newbie users to buy from the inflated price and then dump on them.

This brings me to this question. If an ICO coin or token has serves some actual purpose in its own platform like how Ethereum is used for "gas"to run smart contracts in the platform, would you say that kind of "use" is justifiable to not brand it as a pump and dump or ponzi scheme?

if ethereum cannot function without gas. and if ethereum too has an actual use. thus making 'gas' essential and usable for something real.. then yes it passes the usability test that it can survive beyond some fabricated promotional period.

but if its just a Kenyewest coin. created for no purpose but to have a famous persona brand name.. and wont survive past a promotional period, because people cant use it for anything real. then treat it as a pump and dump coin/novelty.  not as a asset

well risk should be taken? Yes it should be , but should it be taken with not too much information. Well we study the market very careful before doing anything.

But what if the platform itself is not scalable and cannot work as promised? These concerns are already slowly being voiced by some observers but they are not recognized by the developers. Instead the developers keep saying that Ethereum will work as promised but there is a chance they are hiding the truth. How would you classify something like that which is still hanging but know that there is a big chance it will not work? Ponzi or not?

Franky1, it would be nice if you answer my question in the post I made before this. I would like to know what you think because I value your opinion even if we have different views and opinions sometimes. Thanks.

a ponzi is where you hand funds over. and those funds are just used to pay off the middle mans other debtors. where you are left with nothing.
basically hand over X with promises of X+0.X return. but wher X pays out to others as their 0.X return.

totally different game theory to cryptocurrencies

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crap coins are you buying an 'asset' with the knowledge/naivity that the asset may go up or down in value.
if it goes down and becomes worthless. you might aswell have bought a bag of dogs mess..(hence crapcoin)

unless a coin has REAL utility its a crapcoin. and its 'value' is short lived with a pump and dump.
some try to rinse and repeat empty promises of FUTURE POSSIBLE uses.. but unless it has ACTUAL REAL USE NOW. treat it as a pump and dump crap coin.

if a crapcoins 'utility' is just a peg to another coin. but that second coin has no REAL WORLD UTILITY. then defacto the first coin is just as crap.

---

EG
bitcoin is great example of how real utility gave real value. it was released in january 2009. but did not actually get any "value" until 2010 when it obtained REAL UTILITY (bitcoin pizza / alpaca socks) and its VALUE increased due to REAL UTILITY (silkroad then more legit merchants).

in short if a coin just mentions future 'possibilities' your playing 100% speculation (pump and dump).

look for where it has REAL AND ACTUAL USE and follow the real and actual utility growth to know of its 'value' and longevity

You can remove the word "Chinese" and the answer remains an emphatic, "Yes."

Yes, yes we are that gullible. We fall for it time after time.

It's almost like a rite of passage.

Chinese are business minded peopla and they have the urge to take advantage of any business that offers potential income. They are also risk takers and that is why they have no fear in investing. There are many Chinese who suffered a big loss in their investment but there are also many chinese who hits the jackpot that moment that investment succeeds.

yes i will agree with you. they are the most hard working people of the world and they all the time thinking about to make their business more and more successful and that work for it all the time and that is the reason that that they are now emerging as the best economic county.

In my view ETH is still a ponzi because the market participants sell their coins to a greater fool and it is very much comparable to a ponzi scheme when more money comes in by new speculators and this gives the holders a window to sell to them at a higher price.


From this definition I can see that ETH is a crapcoin. I see that you will not say it directly because of reasons you do not want to divulge. That is ok and I understand.

But with utility or not, if their developers promise something that they cannot deliver then that should be considered a scam.


It is good that it happened or else Bitcoin would ne considered a ponzi crapcoin by many right now.

I disagree with this, you have the obligation to prot3ect your money, at best a government will come late to the party and will able to get some money back but don't count on it, so we must be watchful of where we invest our money since we are the only ones that truly care about our economic fate.

I think not all Chinese are gullible but most of them are can be a gullible. And one more thing, regarding the story above that you had said charlie shrem was imprisoned because of money laundering and has been released after 2years, I don't get exactly what your trying to intend here.

The main problem in China is that you can lose your life for illegal financial transactions. There the government solves the problems very harshly and sharply. The Chinese state itself does not mind making money on the crypto currency, but it's allowed only to him and no one else.