Bitcoin Forum

We already know that in the world of cryptocurrency we have valuable projects and platforms and at the same time as if existing in the parallel but intertwined universe are the shitcoins and there are many of them in the market today and more can be coming up soon. A shitcoin refers to a worthless project using cryptocurrency platform that is put up just for the sake of making money and nothing more. Of course, there are many types and forms of a shitcoin...and sometime determining one can be difficult that's why many innocent investors get victimized and can be victimized with their hard-earned money.

Aside from the usual reading of the WhitePaper and the scrutiny of the team behind if they are real or not...what other things do you use to see if one project has the potential to just be another shitcoin?

nowadays it is difficult to distinguish between the two, because the more days they get smarter and continue to make it perfect or more real to outwit or cheat all investors. for now I only choose old coins that have long survived and already have real products that have been useful for the community, have also been listed on various popular exchanges.

I think this can be done but it is very difficult, many people find that the results are the same as the projects that have been or have been running, there are those who make work plans from scratch, it gets worse. There are a lot of very good projects through ICO, but they are very detrimental, so I have never been a bit to try because I am very very low.

How to detect whether an ICO will become shitcoin, among others, by looking at the community such as group telegram, whether accountinvestor is often found or only a bot account or only bounty or airdrop participants. Reasonable problem solving and cooperation with exchange at the beginning of ICO i think its legit.

There are so many different ways a coin can become a shit coin that it's hard to say. Even great ideas can fail because the team don't follow through. But there are some sure fire ways to identify coins that are just so unlikely to make it, the first is considering the actual idea and if there is any real demand or use for it - I would say 95% or more of projects don't have any real substantial use or demand and that's why they'll fail. Infrastructure coins tend to always perform well as well as coins in finance, computing, data etc. Coins outside of that tend not to do very well at all.

whitepaper and team profile are the most basic thing that every project must have and it can not be considered as a vital point for us to determine whether it is scam/shit project or not. but if you find out some project that do not have both of it, you could say that they are scam or at least they are shitcoin directly(no doubt).
and the most important thing that we as an investor should ask them is their MVP aka early product,
what makes something useful or valuable is not its price but instead its usability, if they have a working product that means they have something to do with their project.

To realize it is easy, check out how their staff works. I have been working on the Beaxy project and it is still in development. The admin of the telegraph channel always responds in the shortest time. They are friendly and answer all questions and do not ignore any questions. That's my opinion of a good project. Bad projects often have managers who are careless and have no responsibility for their work.

You can answer a simple question to determine a shitcoin:

Q: Is your coin Bitcoin?

A: Yes
Result: Not a shitcoin!!

A: Yes, its Bitcoin Cash.
R: SHITCOIN!

A: Yes, its Bitcoin (ABC, XYX, Private, insert your preference here).
R: SHITCOIN!

A: No.
R: SHITCOIN!

This thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4467496.0) created by Coolcryptovator (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1980983) got my interest and I was really amaze on how this shit coins and scam ICO run their project. If you know how to play with your computer and got editing skills, creating a convincing website with fake details is a piece of cake. Doing further research always is a must if you are planning to invest to an ICO. When determining a shit coin, their website presentation and activeness on their social media accounts to promote the project is enough for me to know if they are worthy to invest with or another trash to crypto world.

A 'sh*tcoin' to me is something that has no liquidity and volume, no devs, no community, and no top exchange willing to add it on their roster for trading.

Basically somethng that's hard to sell at the market is a sh*tcoin.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to understand that a project is a deception, because fraudsters have begun to develop themselves and have started to make things more realistic. The important thing in this process is our identity and not to lose our money.

Shitcoins are never hard to find. Just make sure you are so keen about the product and the real life opportunities it would bring in the long run, based on demand for it. If it is not a product that look like it will be useful to you then do not invest, if there is no product at all, then it is just a typical bullshit. Product and team are usually my own main target, and every other thing comes after, most especially when it comes to going through the whitepaper and other technical details, which can be boring at times.

It's kind of a fanatic fan that will said other coin as a scam. But i can't understand about that if that guy was taking another coin as a scam because they are all have been using the bitcoin source code to create their own platform. Bitcoin is the best coin right now. jajajajaja

In your topic they're talking more about scams, not shitcoins. Shitcoin might be a legit project with real developers and a real community. Everyone has different understanding of the term, loads of people call Ripple shit because of their lack of decentralization, others because it's not a cryptocurrency in a traditional sense. And why people are still using the "shitcoin" term, it's more like "shitokens" now.
Shitcoins ≠ scamcoins

I think its hard to determine a shitcoin because prior ICO every developer has its own death awakening promise to gain investors but at the end we slowly know that its a shitcoin, this day there are many ICO that even not scam but there coins is having no value after market.

Shit coin is when you join a bounty for months and not getting paid, or getting paid with token but useless or you cant sell it..

A literal shitcoin to me is something with absolutely no value and no way it could ever have value. So projects that may or may not go to zero don't really count IMO because plenty of companies have good ideas end up bust too for various reasons, not just because it was an out and out scam.

For me when I'm trying to evaluate a coin, I'm looking at a few things.

Does it have a whitepaper that explains not only the goals of the project, but how it intends to reach them. So for example let's say the goal is distributed file storage, *how* are they going to do that on whatever blockchain tech of their choosing. I've read countless whitepapers that simply state a goal, but no idea how they will achieve it. Sometimes this is reasonable because they have a really proprietary idea, but most of the time it's because they have no idea what they're doing.

Is the team open and honest on who they are. Do they have a history of social profiles with some sort of work history. The work history does not have to be in tech, but it has to be there. Someone who studied at Stamford and was a research fellow is less likely to 1. Create something that is out and out crap. And 2. Out and out scam you. Because they have a real life reputation. If the team is completely anonymous, I generally stay away. There are obvious exceptions to this (Bitcoin for one), so it's not always a hard and fast rule.

Does the coin/token itself have a use. Sometimes this isn't even whether it's a "shit coin" persay. But you need to differentiate the coin/token from the project/company. Even larger projects like Ripple. You have to look at what Ripple is doing, and separate that away from what XRPs role is in all of it. For Ripples products, you barely need any XRP at all to participate. I'm probably picking on Ripple a bit here but you get the idea. Shitcoins often state lofty goals, but when it comes to "OK, so why do you have your own currency then?" everything falls apart.

Useless, worthless but there are investors that into this preference so you may not notice that some coins are like that because there are people who are still supporting it.

That is a scam or incompetence.

someone sometimes uses the word 'shitcoin' because of deep dislike or hatred or has a lot of losses money in the coin

While I don't necessarily agree, I think some alts like ETH for example are very useful and great coins - your post did make me laugh my butt off so thank you for that!

Apart from the team scrutinizing and the whitepaper as you mentioned, availability of a minimum viable product as well as business solution is something you really want to be checking out first.

In fact, personally, whitepaper is usually the last thing i check. Basically, I visit the website, look at the team, check their LinkedIn profile page as I believe in this jet age, there is actually no excuse for a well-informed team and experienced one not to have a LinkedIn profile page over the years, and with this I check their past experience, dig further on them if they are for real, contact some of them if I could, ask questions on their ANN and social media pages, and then from there I look if there is an MVP.

As long as the team is serious and ready for business, there should always be a MVP before I even start considering going through the whitepaper for business solutions.

The biggest indicator for me is if the project doesn't seem to meet any real-world need. This is sometimes easy to spot if their website and documentation is just meaningless buzzword-soup.

Seems like the case for 99% of so called "projects" these days.

To determine shitcoins
Is to look at all angle of a coin
I think the chart here https://www.coingecko.com/en will surely can help

I agree with you, there are many shitcoins that arrive every month, even some ico have no background in technology or those related to crypto. that's where we find out and if it doesn't scam it means it will become a new shitcoin.

I decided to read this post because I wanted to see what other people really thought about crypto projects these days.

I for one distinguish early on whether a coin is legit or 'shitcoin' these days from the initial review, But what saddens me and makes me second guess my self is how these 'shitcoins' can somehow survive, then become semi valuable on exchanges. I always see coins with no real world use earn a real value and I am sometimes scratching my head on how people think this project is going to become something in the crypto space.

Actually, many of them is a small understatement. The big majority of coins are shitcoins. If we believe the research that says 80% of ICOs are scams, then only 1 in 5 are not scams, and I bet you,,, half of those are shitcoins, so that leaves us with 90% scams and shitcoins.

The problem is that Shitcoins do not always have easily identifiable criteria. I mean,,, if they did, I would not have been cheated so many times last year ;)

Also most shitcoins are often free, no ICO, no use, they feed it up with hype and once they hit on shit exchanges and pumped people who invested are in deep trouble. Everyone should do thorough research before investing their hard earned money in any coin or token, but as matter fact a lot shitcoin are on cmc right now so beware.

I use a very simple method to analyze rating agencies. There, people who are already competent in this matter analyzed the projects and gave an assessment

Like you said it hard some time to detect shitcoins or projects and aside of reading the roadmap, white paper and doing some scrutiny of the involved. What I also watch out for is the traveling of the team to summit, the community support they had and the utility of their project. However, you could also find some answer on this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5004397.0

All of these factors that they were talking are the important and basics such as the team, WP, essence of their tokens, could it be useful in the long run etc... you should read all of these OP and list everything so you will have a lot of information and preferences in the future. Most of these who doesn't fit in the category are always a shitcoin.

For easy checking too is if there is a product. Most of the time there are coins that are too good in hype and forgets the product development.

don't forget to read their roadmap
its important to see the progress from the coin,,
if the team seriously develop the project, i believe thats is a big sign if the project is not a shitcooin project my friend

in my opinion shitcoin is a coin that is not attractive to investors and there is no real development of the coin.
What's more, Shitcoin will be very difficult to enter into a good exchange and only registered in small exchanges.

1. Projects that promises very high returns on investment is a shitcoin. Eg. Our long lost bro BITCONNECT. May you rest in peace.
2. Projects that tend to postpone their roadmap, canceling events are shitcoins
3. Team owning a majority of the tokens which can be dumped on investors.
4. Zero % token use case. Sometimes I wonder why some projects need a token?
5. Poor white paper with too much typo errors, no vivid explanation of project and fake background of team members

Very funny and honestly if we really want to look at it in a way that most altcoins are actually just there for nothing and most of them are just clones of bitcoin trying to prove nothing or promising a better currency than bitcoin or just some tokens that really does not even have any real life usage or possibility of any development or product that will bring in demand for it, on a large scale, we can just simply classify most altcoins as shit coins, with just some very few exceptions that are even still questionable.

Tom Lee once said something, make sure you are holding at least 1btc, and afterwards, you can decide to buy any shit coin you want to buy. That is one crazy message.

for me before investing on an ICO i always check if the team handling it has a good history and experience on handling successful ICO, i always see to it that their whitepaper is good and feasible.

"All altcoins is shitcoin because cloning bitcoin", said bitcoin hardcore fanatics, and more funny, "x coin is shitcoin because people say so"  :D
Many people call shitcoin just because they hate it, even if they can see in front of their eyes that coin already have real huge development

Mostly I think is inconsistent wp and no or just terrible team members The thing is you have to know where the project is heading to determine how effective its going to be

Check the ICO ratings on multiple web sites as a starting filter. After that, check team, advisors and investors quality, social media following  and project fundamentals. Low marks on most of these metrics should indicate another shitcoin.

Communication is very important when keeping investors happy, some ICOs finish and then lose contact. This is a sign that the project is a shitcoin, they just wanted some easy money and delivery will be stretched out for as long as possible until they eventually give up.

Yes this is a very time consuming and difficult task to determine shitcoins from legit and valuable coins because many ICOs are now being created almost everyday promising their ICOs token or coin will be the next bitcoin but the real truth is that it is just being created to rob their investors money.

Most of the ICO rating sites are run by money so if you give more money they will allocate good result. Other ideas are little bit useful in some projects bit real experts are analyse the softcap and hard cap then they will check the security of the project. The are all common analytics and finally we should check it was reached in softcap.

Besides those factors the most important aspect is to see if the coin is innovative at all, the scammers have no intention of creating anything new so even if they somehow are able to pass all your tests if the project does not bring something original to the market or it is done in a better way then you know the people behind that project are scammers or just want to make money.

For me it‘s a shitcoin if there is no real develoment, no history in achieving milestones that were outlined in the original whitepaper, and unfortunately that accounts for the large majority of altcoins. Then you have copycat projects, that do not come forward with a unique idea but that took the concept from another project. These I would not call shitcoins, but I would still stay away from them as in my experience most are just money grabs too. I am sure there are many other factors, but for me these count the most and serve as a simple compass.

It is pretty hard to define shitcoin because the most projects when they start don't have anything to show.

You can assess quality of whitepaper, icobench ratings and everything but project can still turn out to be shitcoin.

The best way for me is to google team members and see if they are real or fake. The best indicators are stock images on websites and lack of photos that have all team members in it(group photos).

Also look at their Telegram channel and ask questions about the project. Do answers make sense? If they try to avoid answering your questions, or try to insult you/block you form telegram channel when you repeat your questions then you have another good indicator that you are dealing with shitcoin.

There's so many ways to determine if the project is not good or the coin is shitcoin. First if the their white paper that they present is not unique and some details of their team is suspicious. That's why new to research about the team and the project before we participate to them.

Scruinity of the team is very important and u request all not to invest in projects which have anonymous developers as if the project turned out to be scam you will not be in a position to take legal action. Liquidity on exchange also plays an important role, if the projects which low liquidity on the exchange and developers are not acting to recover the position of the project in the market than this kind of projects are also scam and shitcoin.

They might want to rethink of what they have just said because there are existing altcoins that is quite useful than the other and they can't just say it's a shitcoin because they haven't use it, probably and most of them i guess?

Ethereum for example is in the top 2 next to bitcoin is quite useful in almost ICO that wanted to create a project. No matter how the price range change it will be on the second spot.

I also read reviews about the project on various information resources. I read chat in telegram, ask questions and check how competent developers and team are. Over time, it is already intuitively possible to understand whether something worthwhile with such a project or not.

 
Aside of white paper and Team behind IMO Probably the progress of the project also , wherein through the graph by doing hard technical analysis to determine easily how good the project is.  Because that's the common strategy now to recognize the pattern and potential of the projects. 

It is actually not that difficult, as you only need to up your game the more, as trust me, as long as a team or project is not for real, there will always be some red flag in their manner of approach to a lot of things. This is one of the reasons why product is always important, and not just product, but one that is visible, you can see how well you believe it would go when it comes to usage and the solution it provides, and that would actually give you a clue of a team that is actually ready to work.

However, this does not mean you should not do proper diligence on the team to see if they have the capability for long term development, as well as the way they tend to approach a lot of things for the progress of the project. If you cannot get most of all that answered positively, then it is a shit coin.

I think its difficult to find out if they are shitcoins, above from what yo mentioned i think, their community such as twitter, facebook, telegram group..But the thing is even they have enough member/follower its up to them if they will turn out to be shit project

Well, we cannot deny the fact that we have a lot of bitcoin fanatics in this space and a lot of people in that category actually see any altcoin as a distraction for this market, considering that bitcoin would have grown far more than this, if shit coins do not actually exist, or sorry, if altcoins do not actually exist. ;D
Jokes apart though, there are still some altcoins we can at least say they have some product, even though it is not set for real life usage, but not like the whole market is even set for that yet.

However, if we really want to look at the number of coins in this space with no product whatsoever, you will realize we actually have more of shit coins in the alt market than coins that should have real value. If not for hype, I will be paying a lot if I end up paying $0 for some of the altcoins, and in fact, it is even an insult to my Ether wallet if you dash me some tokens.

There is very good advice in this post, I have never thought about it but it is true, if a project doesn't have a picture of all its members present at the same place and at the same time then you know that most likely the pictures that are depicted in their website are taken from the Internet, and if you are moderated in their telegram channel or in this forum by just making good questions then you know the project is fake.

Really hard to do in my opinion when the bounty and ICO state of the coin/token are well conducted. It may even happen that when overall market conditions are good, the ShitCoin might still have some pretty nice monetary value in fiat.

I think the best way to locate shitcoins is to wait for the bear market and see how good/bad is your coin doing. If it indeed loses 80-90% of its value you know the coin was a rather bad one.

You are right. Fully agree with the ami, it is better to vintage old checked coins better than new ones, which may turn out to be just a deception

In times like this :) when more than 90% of coins on cmc are shitcoins, every coin is considered shitcoin until proven otherwise! When I research coins, usually i get through 8-9 shitcoins and 1 possible good coin out of 10.

Shitcoins have different classes;

There's a class of shitcoins that make it to the exchange, but the devs or so called team have no plans advancing the course of the project. There are no updates on the project and the community is stagnated. They simply fizzle out with time.

There's a worse class of shitcoins who's team after collecting millions from investors during ICO, leave you with shit tokens that amount to nothing and no value because they do not even make to the exchange. Most of the exit scams post ICO follow this pattern. They take the real coins from you and leave you with shitcoins from TGE.

'Projects' with telegram numbers that aren't organic are usually clear indicators of a scam. They lie about virtually everything just to lure people in to achieve their aim

You should not use the price as the only way to tell if a coin is a scam, there have been several projects that were very good and the value of their coins dropped and almost reach a price of zero and then months later and in some cases years later the coin recovered because finally the community acknowledged the project was very good and there have been cases of coins that were clearly scams having a very high value.

yes many new ico pops up, and if we are increasingly difficult to distinguish them because they do it better each time.
now a lot of ico are circulating with low gwei they are doing promotions but and it works the interest of most people, buy coins at 10 gwei prices and sell them at 40, and then die, over and over making new ico again.LOL.

Sh*tcoin is almost 90% of all the upcoming and 2018 ICO's to my mind.
The origins of this garbage can be:

• Scammy project that never aimed to be developed just to grab investors money and flee.
• Popularity of crypto spur some developers and enthusiasts to create their own coin (a lot of them are masternodes) with poor roadmap and sometimes even the community and even bounty campaign can be established but with no further development it remains garbage   
• Struggles during project creating and ICO stages
• And more.

It is difficult to determine what a crap coin is. It can be traded and even be presented in CMC but has no particular interest is incredibly volatile and unstable, with low cap therefore can highly pumped and dumped.
This is my personal determination to date and can be added.

Can also search for team if there are photos take from someone else, but not all coins show team

now its harder determine $shitcoin, cause i saw a lot of projects with the team, good website, a lot of activity and other stuff, but for regular user without good research its almost impossible to do it, cause if year ago i was 80% certain that project seems legit, now its about 5% only, cause we saw a lot of scams and projects that became dead and $shitcoins

If it have product and have active team as well future development then it might be worth having, those ICO that seems to be a duplicate project of others are not to be taken seriously.

yep,, need a good experience to determining a shitcoins,,
mostly people watch their team,, a shitcoins will show a fake team member
and when the shitcoins listed on exchange,, their team was not active to develop their project,,
so, everyone should beware at this moment

Sometimes I do investment to sihtcoins with little amount, if they are not scam project and I can trust to team I choose one or two coin after my research. When you are determining for investment, first rule must be this; marketcap must be 200-300k dollar maximum.

yeap, but all this things should be regulated by some pro, similar users like us on the forum or somewhere else almost in 99% of cases never find out for sure is it scam or not, but for now icos number is raising, but funds that they collect on ico is fall in 10-20 times, so no one shows ethereum addresses with the proof of deposits, just some number on the site  >:(

You do not give a definition for Shitcoins, to me they fall into different category because there are some that mere reading through their website you can understand that the project is going no where and are just here to raise money, there is another that have good idea but no real team behind it to make the idea a reality while another is a good project and relatively good team but have nothing to lose, sell their tokens and leave the project to die.

Team, motive, feasibility.
Look for all three..
There may be some icos who are still fake but will have these 3 qualities so better be aware of team personally via ama or live hangout sessions.

Very true.I am twice fooled by this kind of shitcoins also before even doing research.I don’t know where I lacked, maybe by not doing it full time in research since doing crypto is only my sideline since I have a job. In my own opinion, maybe by investigating the legitimacy also of the team dev and members by examining their linked in account or twitter. In that way we can truly assure that they are really legit.

   Everything can look good on coin, but deep in side something can be so rotten that it will lead
entire project down the river. Shitcoin is when there is some flaw in the project, that flaw can be
in idea, in team, developing, lack of knowledge, or anything else connected with project.
   Shitcoin can be recognized from the beginning, but it`s not necessary to be like that. Some flaws
are hidden very good. That is why we need to be careful all the time. We need to follow projects and
learn about project all the time, just investing is not enough.

There are plenty of ways to detect shitcoins from checking the team to their social media updates and more. The amount and time taken to raise even soft cap is a very easy indicator and if a project cannot even raise its soft cap in a month or two, then steer clear of it.

Basically its all relative and it matters who you ask.

The Ethereum people think BTC is a shitcoin.
The BTC people think Ethereum is a shitcoin.
The ETC people think ETH is a shitcoin.
The BCH people think BTC is a shitcoin.

And so on and so forth.

So its all depends on who you are talking to and most likely what they are invested in. Most people only support the coins that they own because its all about the profits for them.

And the fact that they don't have active developement doesn't mean much. Look how many millions was raised in ICOs last year for a simple idea, website and a whitepaper.

if team is anonymous, if they are escaping from giving clear answers, if they answer questions but hiding something, you can eassily understand that they are not honest and their project is a potential crap.

It should be ShitToken instead of calling it a ShitCoin, Many projects are Ethereum's ERC-20 based token and creating an ERC-20 token are easy job to c by developers. Whitepapers are easy to edit and easy to copy that's why there are lot offering this kind of service roaming around this forum. A project with no working products and poor community support are one of the indicators that it is a ShitToken/ShitCoin. Having a large member of telegram community does not guarantee that the project is good and if the token/coin are not listed on exchange before the project ends then there might be a possible that the project will end like shit. See to it that the team members are legit and have a good exposures to media and marketing.

I do look on the popularity of the project to determine which coin would be profitable once relwased on different exchangers. If a coin is not that popular during its crowdsale period there is a huge probability in my opinion that it would have a lower market value than its ICO price resulting to profit loss. But since the market at this moment is on continuous downfall, majority of coins are considered as deadcoin upon the listing in the market.

We can't really conclude those low valued coins will surely be at the shitcoin lists. As long as we see that their trading became no moving and the activity with trading was not doing good, maybe that's a candidate for shit ones. But if a new launched coins will have good project roadmap and the development was actively taking more updates, it couldn't be included to shitcoins lists and yet will grow at profitable price.

besides wp, usually I also see the seriousness of the team in the road map and their activity in the forum or telegram, I can't trust people who often disappear

I usually monitor the volume of coin on the exchange, if a coin has a volume that is too low for under $ 1,000 a day for a long time, then I really doubt it's a shitcoin.

For me I can call a token a shitcoin if it is listed for a long time into the Exchanges but the price has no improvement,as I observe almost of the tokens become a shitcoins even the TokenSale is not finish but they list their tokens into the Exchanges directly and the team is always making promises but they didn't make any improvements of their projects.

now more and more shit tokens and of course it's a loss because we know that nowadays more and more projects are deceiving many people. they run away after getting their money

yeap, it could be that thing that people could jsut dont like some coin, and love its analog and they will call it $hitcoin just cause they competitors. but by me on cmc easy to see $hitcoins, cause it is all that have market cap less than a 500k if this coin already have more than half year "life"

It is difficult to detect shitcoin, this is a lot of people who are fooled and deceived by the form of a campaign, but can still be careful and research to avoid the shitcoin.

because many of those projects were just relying on their fake advertisement and creating hype to enter the crypto market without developing their real product. This is obvious but people were buying on it and I don't know in the long run if they will survive.

As for me, I think currently since many projects are not getting enough funds for their projects, people now wait and see how the coin will perform after coming into the market. Reading community chats and website as well as the type of news surrounding the project can help a lot in determining what a shitcoin could be.

It is a project that was created only to speculate its price. He does not solve any problem and nobody needs it. Developers are only aiming to earn money on it and abandon it. This is in my opinion shitcoin.

Yeah, I agree with you. They rely on fake advertisements such as being listed in exchanges such as "M*&(DAJDLF" lol like it was Bittrex or any other greater exchanges. One thing I look at is the admin activity after the ICO. If they don't at least communicate with the community after that, it's automatically a shitcoin. Nobody buys a worthless crypto with no real team updates.

Yes, speaking of fake advertisement... recently many token had been announced that they will be listed in a new exchanges and the exchange confirmed that they will accept for trading those token. This is a strategy to make hype on their shitcoin and then they will delay the listing until it will announce that it will be pause due to some technical problems or market situation. This is connivance between those developer and the exchanges to make money and we should be careful with our decision in choosing a right coins.