Bitcoin Forum

I've noticed that there seems to be a lot of experienced miners who trawl the altcoin announcements looking for promising new coins to 'pump & dump'. Is this something that's worth a newbie having a go at?


As I understand it, these vultures ;) apply a ton of hashing power to the new coin from the minute it launches, to get a pile of coins in a short amount of time, before the difficulty goes up. As soon as another interesting coin launches they switch to that one. They then keep an eye on Cryptsy etc in the hope that one or more of these new coins will get listed. If so they sell their coins off as quick as possible, on the assumption that most of these 'crapcoins' will go downhill rapidly and are probably not worth holding.

As a noob with a very modest amount of power is this something that could be worth my while? Any tips on how to do it effectively?

Personally I'm less inclined to dump coins; I'd rather hold on to them and see if they develop into something substantial. If I end up with a few of my wallets being full of worthless dust that's fine - I didn't invest huge sums in GPUs and KWh!

Why would you want to do it anyway? Sure, maybe you can make some money, but you won't get rich. You have to be extremely lucky to cash in big time, but that's only if you're a very early adopter and the new coin has unique characteristics that make it worth using it. All the other coins are just invented, and are basically copies of Bitcoin with an other name or it generates blocks faster, just for the inventors to take money from people who get on board later.

it can be profitable if you choose the right coins in the right time. and possible more profitable than other options if you have a low quality mining equipment and can't compete with other miners in highly competitive coins.

Can be done but not every new coin has good pump period - also dont get greedy and sell when the price is going up (pump stage), after dump, your too late

I agree, unless a coin has an advantage there is little point in long term.

The way I see it is that it's akin to gambilng. At this point in time, there is very little point in the majority of altcoins. Most of them are just copy and pasted code with no unique traits. I would say you're better off mining something that you're actually interested in rather than wasting resources on all the pump and dumps.

Like BlockChainLottery siad - you won't get rich by doing it (probably) and for every coin that makes you a small profit, 10 others will never make it to an exchange, so you've wasted resource.

I'm very new though so might be totally wrong, but from my experience there really is no point in mining unless you have a decent rig with an AMD card. I do a bit of CPU mining for some of the more light hearted coin like Doge and Ermahgerd coin just for a bit of fun. I bought around £75 of Litecoin a few weeks back just to use to do a bit of trading, but again, I highly doubt I'll make anything substantial.

IMO if you come into cryptocurrency hoping to get rich then you'll most likely end up disappointed - it's not really much different to trading stocks except the values are far less stable.