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“There’s projects that never had a soul, that are just like, ra-ra, price go up,” he flaps his long hands, “Lambo[rghini], vrromm, buybuybuy now!” Then he blurts, “I’ll just say it, Tron is a scam”, breaking the tension by laughing uproariously. Tron is a token whose market valuation hit $17bn without any discernible product.

http://www.cryptoscoop.io/2018/04/ethereums-vitalik-buterin-on-the-bitcoin-bubble-and-running-a-125bn-blockchain/

Thoughts this was interesting to read and I love Vitalik's attitude of being so direct.

What do you think? Thoughts? Comments?

Not sure if necessarily a scam but it's definitely overhyped and I've heard their code isn't the best either, so.

I think he is trying to be a bit harsh, most of the projects are still under development so you cannot call them scam, i think he is dealing rudely with tron just because they were comparing tron with eth and were trying to prove that tron is superior as compared to eth, lets wait and see what services tron will come up in the future.

Yeah he really seems to be protective of eth ;D

Which is understandable, and no doubt he is very smart, but he can sometimes be emotional. And even though we'll see if tron really is a scam, so far, I'm still not really supporting it

Also Vitalik makes mistakes sometimes too.

We'll see if it's really a scam or not for sure in the future though.

Don't know how to react on this information. Tron on a hype right now, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a scam. i believe Vitalik on this one

I don't know if it's from a legit source or not but tron is not a scam. They have their own blockchain now. Their team has over 30 members. But still it is just a white paper project and not a fully functional one.

Not only now but most of the time when Tron was still new, it keeps on being hyped with these useless partnerships. It's all vocal but there's no application and real use-case of Tron.
I assume that he is also annoyed with those partnership and the way Justin is marketing that coin.
Many newbies are buying that partnership thing and as part of the community, who you will believe? we all know Vitalik is a genius and he's more believable.

What else do you call an idea that lives on a paper even after it has received months of funding? No MVP. nothing.  Only hype. Tell me,  why should it not be labelled a scam?

Wasn't it TRON were most of the whitepaper was copied from another ICO?
Anyways, no working product, no roadmap, nothing. TRON only lives on hype which is very dangerous in my opinion.

I think calling it a scam is probably to much. I agree with what he said about tron value being just to high because it still doesn't really have a product, but that is true for many other altcoins out there. I mean, EOS or maybe Cardano are not that different in my opinion. Tron price is probably hyped, but it's to soon to call it a scam.

I don't know whether it is scam or not, it is not probably scam it cannot be anymore but I agree with vitalik on that it have really no soul such projects are gambling for the long term.

Recently, Tron is very often compared with ethereum, so Vitalik thus tries to protect his creation. Tron, of course, is not a fraud, and every coin has flaws. The Tron is certainly not perfect, but it is still developing. It will take some time to give an objective assessment of this coin.

The vibe I get from tron is pump and dump to be honest :/
Starting to like Vitalik more and more.

There are so many of them, and obviously almost huge number of altcoins do not have real life product and they are just pretty much hyped, which makes them an easy target for pump and dump. Just very few coins have products you can at least confidently say would bring about huge demand and make impact, but those like Tron? It is just the lambo movement that is involved; typically P & D. Where is the future in such? and that makes me agree to such coins or tokens not just being scam but shitty!

I still have serious doubts about Tron, and I highly dislike Justin Sun's way of doing things but:

1)Justin Sun just bought BitTorrent - which kind of fits in really well with Tron's entertainement-focused decentralisation ethos

2) He has the ear of Jack Ma, who is just one of the most respected entrepreneurs out there

3) By extension (and I say this with limited knowledge, by chatting with close contacts of mine based in China and also into crypto. Fully open to additional opinion here) - he has a really good reputation in China which can make a huge impact on prices.

I will never be excited about TRON the way I am about Zilliqa or NEO but I still hedge my bets by holding a little bit because I do expect it to fly.

Also, Buterin has a history of trashing other competitors (EOS) and even his own coin ('ethereum could hit near zero') so I would do more research into what he really did say in case it was taken out of context or just blabbed out at the spur of the moment.

Maybe he had his own reasons behind that and that might be protecting his creation, be more successful, and being competitive. It is a great waste if your work will only go to waste. Comparing the two coins might be disadvantages to him that may look like tron outshine ethereum or something like that.

Tron have just bought their way to the front, they're not really a viable alternative to other smart contracting platforms. If you really think about it, you don't need any other cryptocurrencies other than Ethereum, yes there are a few that offer some modifications to the consensus algorithm that make transactions faster, or increases the network capacity by some irrelevant figure.

I think Vitalik is right, though technically they're not an outright scam, they are providing false representations of what their platform is capable of, and have proven very little of it. Ethereum came around, and has demonstrably changed the industry for the better, all these pretenders coming along are just one fork away from being obsolete, sharding, off-chain, side-chains none of it matters, as all can be integrated into the ETH protocol if necessary.

Vitalik is one of my favorite person in crypto world. I love to read his Tweets, fearless speaker and a person who really cares about cryptocurrencies and their survival as utility than as investment. Now coming to TRON, every word of Vitalik is truth. Tron is nothing but an excessively aggressively promoted coin. Dev of the coin always try to make pump from opportunities, he was never a serious guy! For example, game called Crypto Kitties went viral few months back, he tried to make pump from opportunity and announced similar game involving Dogs using TRX, God knows if that game ever released. I have written about my experience with TRON few week ago, quoted below:

It's just his opinion. I disagree with him, and not just because I have a little Tron.

That is because some lines in the tron project's whitepaper were copied from Ethereum network's whitepaper, so the realization of this fact is that tron should not have copied the whitepaper, although i do not think tron is a scam but vitalik's perspective was based on the plagiarism in tron's whitepaper.

Well Vitalik being Vitalik, he made a lot of controversial comments before so I don't think that we can made a big fuss about this one. Its his opinion, and maybe he smells something that we can't because for all we know he is ETH man himself. Maybe blurting out in public is not his real strengths but we love him to saying what he really thinks no matters who's going to sideswipe with his comments. Anyone can argue with him, but I wouldn't take him seriously though. If I wanted to invest on TRON then I will do it no matter what people says.

The worst thing is that if it falls everyone will be saying that all icos are scams and crypto is tulip-mania... and all that because too many people cannot accept they should not be investing.

I think we can perceive this as Vitalik's perspective it's not the truth ,it seems no body has the truth in this industry ;D ;)

most of the top 50 are obvious jokes, but the joke is on the noobs that bought these tokens

icos can generate huge fake caps due to terrible narrow distributions and dumb ass noob fools with their fomo

Not the first time Vitalik has this attitude if you noticed. He takes often the opportunity to be rude with different projects.

Not only the whitepaper, other things have been found to be copy pasted too. Now, obviously that doesn't make it a scam directly but it's definitely some shady behavior. At least laziness. Their excuse was also pretty bad, personally I just don't see why anyone would invest in Tron at this point, risk:reward  ratio is not there.

Vitalik is a genius guy he knows what's good for the ecosystem some Altcoins made a lot of money without any services that offers for the future smart contracts. Well TRX or Tron is really scam for me they have nice CEO and community but can't even deliver what's written on the White paper.

Tron's whitepaper has been described, in part, as a copy of the IPFS (https://ipfs.io) whitepaper:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tronix/comments/7ovwyu/my_analysis_of_the_tron_whitepaper_v17/

IPFS is an open source project without blockchain which enables files to be saved in a "decentralized cloud", very similar to a BitTorrent swarm, but with some important improvements like versioning. It could be one of the base technologies of a "decentralized web".

A blockchain connected to IPFS could help with some issues like data integrity and content monetarization. Some of the IPFS developers wanted to profit from their "baby" and started the Filecoin ICO, their plan is that Filecoin could be this blockchain.

So Tron, basically, is a competitor to IPFS&Filecoin.

Tron's way to do things seems to be, however, "first marketing & partnerships, then tech". Well, their advantage is that they can use IPFS code as it's open source, so they skip the development work of creating an own "decentralized cloud". So I don't rule out that Tron, at the end, could be a success.

That's why I myself wouldn't call it a scam still, although I wouldn't invest in it.

But that their way to do things (e.g. plagiarizing IPFS without mentioning it in their whitepaper) is morally questionable and maybe even illegal, is another issue.

I agree with Vitalik. Tron is too much hyped.
is a shit like EOS. it doesn't deserve that high market cap.

It does not have a product an the market cap is huge. It is with all likelyhood a shitty scam like many others anyway.

Does Bitcoin have discernible products? And whether the product can guarantee a coin will have a more stable price? Maybe he is right, but others also say that Ethereum is a scam.

He's not wrong about tron but it's too early to call it a scam.
tron has been slow on the development side. While many newer infrastructure projects have came and launched their product, Tron is going through slow progress.
The launch of Tron blockchain will answer to most of the questions.

Developing a blockchain project is not an easy task. It requires a lot of technology and a strong team and spirit. This is not something that a person can do by constantly propagating and imitating others. Projects that do not have actual application support will eventually die.

The possibility can happen, and even we can say it to all crypto. But if it's really a scam, chances are we will not see it in top10 right now.
If I buy a coin and can sell it at a higher price, I do not care what the name of the coin is.

I have heard about that, but also I seen the people who just sold everything in order to buy Tron, so I am sincerely hoping for them that they would not get scammed, as Vitalik said...

I really don't think they straight up plagiarised the paper, and also plagiarism is only illegal if the source file is copyright, which is probably unlikely otherwise I doubt TRON would have done so. All cryptos are just amalgamations of other crypto concepts or coins, the first innovation was Bitcoin, the second was Ethereum, everything since is a copycat with spinning rims.

I cite my source again ... draw your own conclusions:
They did not copy the whole paper, but some key concepts were taken out of the IPFS whitepaper.

That would not be a problem if they made that clear, i.e. cited IPFS as a source. And as IPFS is an open source, free software project, they can use the code like they want while respecting the license.

But for whatever reason - maybe simply negligence, but it would be worse if they intended to pretend they invented key IPFS concepts - they omitted to cite the IPFS paper as their source. In most countries, all texts with some originality are copyrighted. If you cite larger sections of an original paper, you must refer to the source, otherwise it's plagiarism and illegal.

In contrast, Ethereum's whitepaper mentions Satoshi's Bitcoin paper several times and cites it correctly, like it's standard in the academic world.

Anyway from what we have seen yet, we can see that the people are beneficial from Tron, and yet it is not uncovered as a scam scheme, but everything can happen, so I`m aware of it by myself.

But it seems that they copied different things from several other projects not just one:

https://bcfocus.com/altcoin/tron-trx-developers-plagiarised-code-from-other-crypto-projects-researchers-allege/16077/

''They apparently plagiarised code from Ethereum among the other projects and then changed filenames. It was done so that identifying the source of the code becomes difficult''

That seems pretty shady to me.