Bitcoin Forum

1. Buy up large amounts of coins from unknown devs that are likely about to be voted onto Mintpal or wherever else people are spending lots of BTC to get their coin onto an exchange.

2. Sell hard within hours after a coin hits an exchange for the first time.

3. Use your profits to buy the same coin at the lowest price possible and then sell them at the lowest price possible.

4. Repeat for as long as you can, until you are at break-even.

5. True altruists will spend extra BTC trying to lower their prices even further.

If everyone gets on board and knows how to identify the potential scamcoins right away, it will be no longer profitable for their cheesy devs and they will at least have to up their game a little bit.

Great idea, but we would need a huge army of people, and a lot of capital.

There will always be more people buying than selling, assuming people are selling at really low prices like you advocate here. All it will accomplish is those buying the dumps will make more money, while those who try this plan break even or lose money.

And how many true altruists do you think are on this forum anyway? I'd say zero.

I don't think that's necessarily true given the fact that the general direction of the alt market is down, down, down. That would indicate that there is more selling than buying in general, and people tend to give up on coins rather easily.

The goal would be to minimize the amount of profit that the Pn'D devs and whales can make off of a shitcoin launch by selling into the pump. So instead of a coin shooting up 300% after launch it only shoots up 150%.

Then by funding the dump with your profits you can make people reach that "despair" phase more quickly. Hopefully the community at large is a bit more wary of scamcoins and won't continue to fund ducks that walk like a duck.

Well they say the human species is potentially the only truly altruistic animal, but you're right there's no evidence of that here.

Its a shame though because one truly "altruistic" whale could crush the entire shitcoin scene with about 10 BTC.

The problem with this sort of plan is first expecting profits to begin with. It's not a sure-thing that people can pick out what coins are going to go to a larger exchange, and even if they do, it's no guarantee than they can dump for a profit there. Quite often the profitable pumps occur before a coin hits a larger exchange. And unless you just happened to buy in cheaper, jumping into a pump is also no guarantee of a profit ... quite often the opposite.

But say we assume people can pick scam coins before they are on a larger exchange and sell for a profit. First off, how do they determine what is a scam before it's even a scam? If a coin has high volume, looks like it's going to a bigger exchange, why would someone automatically say, hey, this coin must be a scam? If it's overly shady, scammy behavior, dev not about, etc of course it's a sign the coin is a scam. But by then it's too late.

You also expect people to forgo profits in order to drive the price of a coin down. I'm extremely doubtful that is even possible, as you'd need an extremely large bankroll and a willingness to sell a coin for peanuts. And then hope that other people wouldn't simply gobble up the cheap coins and wait out the dumpers ... hence why I said I don't think it'd work.

Many countries have laws about this too.

e.g. in your quest to take down an alt-coin, you could end up behind bars.

I'm not a legal expert. Could you give an example of a particular country's law that applies to this?

Has this ever happened?

I also am curious about examples. I would think people like IE would be behind bars first.

He's the canary in the coalmine.

This is sort of the idea that CoinShield has. Not sure how well it's going to work yet, but it will be an interesting experiment.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=657601.0

It's called "Bear Raiding" - http://www.girardgibbs.com/market-manipulation-cases/

Furthermore, for those of you who don't want regulations on crypto-currencies, openly talking about colluding with others to manipulate the market is going to bring regulation.

Market manipulation is very serious and should not be done if a free market is what you want.

-=-

Furthermore, there have been numerous times when someone is accused of doing something on the Internet and a bunch of Internet people take action only to later find out the evidence was flawed or even completely untrue. This is why legal systems exist for taking action.

Vigilante justice doesn't work, the target needs to be able to defend themselves with law.

But market manipulation, that's stooping down to the same level as the scam coins.

Best thing you can do is get the word out. Demonstrate a coin is a scam on a public forum, and let the free market avoid it.

I've suggested education as a way to combat scam coins/shady behavior in several threads here, including that shitcoin killing thread. Some folks have gone around in threads pointing out shady behavior, but more often or not it's people just going around like a maniac spreading FUD. The noise gets drowned out.

Sometimes I think half the people here just like to complain. They got cheated by some coin, so they want to lash out... against every coin out there... it doesn't matter what method they use, or if it'll even work. Or they think that killing new coins will somehow make the older, more established alt they are holding worth more.

Problems arise when nobody can define what a 'scamcoin/shitcoin' even is. Determining a scamcoin after the scam is meaningless. Bias creeps in, and one person's treasure is another person's scamcoin. It basically turns into: the shitcoins I am holding are fine, but everything else is a scam.

How is this plan not getting the word out? If you coordinate a market manipulation in public, is it really manipulation, or is it just the free market reacting to the exchange of ideas?

Innocent people are wrongly executed all the time. The regulations of the justice system are not perfect.

I agree that subjectivity is a problem but that doesn't mean that scams don't exist and everything is a gray blur.

Agreed. For blatant scams, I'd suggest the same as the other poster -- just post why something is a scam in the forums. Don't use FUD, don't use giant red letters, just state the case and either people will take heed or not... up to them.

Unfortunately a lot of the larger scams aren't known scams until after the fact. A dev vanishes on a coin ... how would decreasing its price via some price manipulation plan, help the situation any? And obviously we can't post about a vanishing dev until he actually vanishes.

An exchange goes under, takes everyone's coins with them. Again, there is no way to really do much about it.

A dev promises grand things, yet just has a whitepaper. Is it a scam? Very possibly, but nobody can say for certain.

A coin runs an ipo... people cry about devs possibly running away with the funds. Scam or not? Again, very possible, but we can't say with certainty until after the fact.

My point being, there is only so much anyone can do about a lot of scammy behavior. So yeah, it could be useful to point out blatant scams, giant premines, iffy devs and potentially scammy behavior, but I'm not entirely sure how effective any course of action would be. Only so much can be done.

This idea is flawed due to several reasons; chiefly, because there is no cost associated with producing altcoins. It's a matter of tweaking codes and reusing the same infrastructure. It might even encourage them to pump out more coins with the guarantee of a ready buyer. Further, who among us is altrusitic enough to waste his/her own money to protect a community that refuses to protect itself?

The answer, actually, is quite simple. Just introduce a minimum activity count for ANN thread starters (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=687349.0). This will instantly eliminate the torrent of newbie devs and P&D coins. Most of the P&D coins are being produced by the same group of people (or the same dev-for-hire). Most of regular forum members know that by now.

You know I distinctly remember that when I first joined, I had to make something like 10 posts in a newbie area before being allowed into the general population.

I like the idea of requiring, say 25 posts and 3 months before being allowed to announce here.

With that kind of requirements it may lessen the amount of scam coins coming out very often.

Not a bad idea,.

Ultimately the market decides the creation rate, or even the existence of, scamcoins. If it prefers scamcoins, which it does, then scamcoins is what it will get.

I have a better idea that won't put your bitcoins in risk, won't make you be a wannabe baby Wolf of Wall Street and won't make you put your brain hash power into something with few to no return: just don't buy, invest or recommend people to invest in scamcoins. Once enough people follow you, there will be no more scamcoin in the market.

Simply.




As far as I know, its valid only to regulated markets that you need to have a special license to buy and sell the stuff. Since there is no need to have gov authorization to trade cryptos, there is no crime, as far I know.

But too many scamcoins and people trying to manipulate the market like the OP soon will bring regularization.

I will be very blunt -- this is a moronic idea. Even if your intention is to dump the scam-coins, the mere fact that you are buying them from the devs means that they are still making a profit from it. You would only really be hurting yourself and the victims of the scamcoin. And once you've dumped a scamcoin down to the lowest price that you could, the dev could simply pump it back up for a fraction of the profit that he/she got from you and earn even more than he/she would have otherwise. If you do that with every scamcoin that comes out, then the scam-devs will have even more incentive to keep making scamcoins because they know that they will make a huge profit from you and whoever follows your asinine idea as soon as it gets enough votes to warrant being accepted into a large exchange. Essentially, you will be invigorating the scamcoin trade, not killing it.

If you want to kill a scamcoin, then ignore it. It's that simple.

The only potential problem with such a requirement is that there could be real devs who simply don't post here a lot, and wish to create a coin. But a reasonable requirement, like 25 posts or so, may at least slow down the pace of new coins a little bit. Not sure if it'd make a big difference in the longrun, or devs will simply prepare ahead of time with dozens of puppet accounts created in advance.

What would work, but will never happen -- all the major exchanges require identification of the dev for any coin listed on their exchange, similar to Polo's new ICD rules. It won't happen because they are greedy.

Bittrex in fact just listed vastcoin, and there is pretty decent proof it's the same dev as concealcoin, who just pulled a scam by running out on the coin. Doesn't matter, it gets listed anyway.

And if you read the vastcoin thread, you see that to some people it doesn't matter if it's a scam. So long as they make money, they don't care. And that is another problem here, there is a lack of morals of course with tons of scammy devs, but also a lack of morals amongst many of the 'investors' here.
Scam or not, it doesn't matter to them. It's difficult to protect people from something they don't even want to be protected from.

And if we openly manipulate markets to crash coins we don't like, guess what will become a regulated market?

I like this idea... I wonder if the BurnerCoin 2.0 dev is up to 20 posts yet.

Please feel free to shoot this theory down as well if you will, but I mentioned coins that pay a lot to get on exchanges because, to me, this is a must for a scamcoin. It just seems to me like worthy, innovative coins get on exchanges on their own accord, without any sort of concerted movement to get them there.

Scamcoins are always trying to push their community to donate as much time and BTC as it takes to get a coin on the exchange.

Non-scamcoins are in for the long-haul, don't care too much about price fluctuation and are secure enough in their product that they don't have to pay money for votes (what a criminal concept in the first place).

MP has stopped the pay per vote thing. Not sure if Cryptsy has or not, and Polo voting doesn't take payments. That doesn't mean there aren't under the table sorts of payments going on, but not much anyone can do about that even if there is.

I am curious about one thing... how would people here define a scamcoin?

A coin that pushes a community to vote wouldn't necessarily be a scamcoin to me. It may not be the best coin in the the world, but it doesn't mean the dev is out to scam anyone.

A scamcoin to me is when a dev promises something and doesn't come close to delivering, when a dev abandons a coin, when a dev runs an ipo and doesn't even provide coins to people, hidden premines, or giant premines where the devs dump, and that sort of thing.

An iffy coin with a low number of unique features, perhaps a hired gun as a coder, and asking its community to vote wouldn't qualify as a scam to me. I mean, who is being scammed? It may not be the best investment, but it's not really hurting anyone.

Don't mining and ignore that.

SImple, right?? :D

We do think something needs to be done about scams in the crypto industry as well. Clearly made a lot of people lose money, and turned a lot of people away from Cryptos. If we want this industry and movement to succeed, then Bitcoin can't be the only real option. Keep an eye out for Greenbacks Pre-Ann soon. We have real plans, and we're pushing way past just being a coin. Whitepaper will be available on launch, take a second to read it if you run across our thread.

Operation Shit Coin Cleanup ? it's back on now LOL

Or rather everyone just stop mining and buying shit-coins?

I think you answer your question quite well. But for the last part, well, just from reading through hundreds of pages of posts over the last 6 months I can safely conclude that HUNDREDS of people have lost a LOT of money ("lot" being relative to them) in scammy altcoin investments.

Its not in human nature to be the first to admit to your mistake, so not everybody will tell you the truth about the cryptocurrency investment forays. Believe it or not.

We should just keep awareness high, and while I don't know how such a thing is done, yes perhaps better vet ALT ANN thread authors as many levels as possible.

Yeah, that's the thing. Just saying it and telling other people to do it doesn't make it happen.

I am in utter awe that people keep buying this shit, there must be a continual churn of noobs who actually believe Shitcoin 2.0 is really going to be the next bitcoin.

The community needs to be more proactive in calling out and isolating scam artists.

I'll get the list rolling.

Known Scam Artists - Stay Away from Everything They Have To Do With

#1: Iconic Expert AKA Christopher Bouzy.




Any objections so far?

How can a newbie pick good coins when they have no experience of this scene at all? They have no way to know if a coin is a scam or not until after they have been ripped off.

This, except that seems quite Ponzi.

Unfortunately, the same way that a newbie in the penny-stock wing of stock market picks 'em. Sorry, but this arena is largely learn as you go - which unfortunately means learning the hard way.

If there's any upside, I had to learn that I'm a lousy trader by losing a lot of money on the - yes, regulated - stock market. The altcoin markets are wilder, no doubt about that, but if I had been half my age I could have learned the same life lessons for a few hundred dollars.

And then, I could have taken what I learned to the stock market and saved thousands of dollars over my lifetime. Damn: even with its many faults and warts, the crypto markets are still a prize because there are no minimum commissions. You can get started by blowing ten dollars - ten dollars! - and the typical exchange is happy to take a 1.5-to-2.5-cent clip from you for each trade. In the big ol' stock market world, I pay ten dollars commission per trade - minimum. And I have an account with one of the cheaper discount brokers available to Canadians.

In that market, a round trip costs me twenty bucks minimum. If I tried to trade with twenty bucks, one single round trade would clean me out entirely if I break even on the trade itself. At Bter, with its 0.15% flat rate, I can trade $20 worth of crypto and a round trip is six cents. A nickel and a penny!

As for advice, the altcoin market is profoundly fad-driven. If you're going to make it as a trader, you have to be able to sniff out a growing fad and jump on it before most others do. And then, you have to jump off when everyone else is raving about it. (From experience, I know that the first part is difficult...and the second part is very difficult. For the likes of me, anyway.)

Here as well as in the stock market, I had to learn the hard way that I don't have what it takes to play the fads. I only thrive with poky, largely-ignored, out-of-the-way vehicles. Once I buy them, I have to cool my heels and wait a loooong time before I make a score. That's just the way I am, and I have to play within my limitations.

If you get your feet wet, one of your goals should be to find out your own limitations. Once you know them, play within them.

And start small -nothing wrong with having a goal of buying a new computer. :)  

There are simple way :
1. Don't mine it
2. Don't buy it
3. Don't join the community

That was extremely simple for me  ;D

I don't think that is necessarily it. I think there is a decent size group of people here who simply ride the waves. They follow troll boxes, see a new coin listed, see the hype, see a pump ... and jump in. They aren't looking to find the next bitcoin, they are hoping for a 2-10x increase in investment in a very short period of time.

When that new coin turns out to be a scam, they then go into cry-mode.  Or I should also add, if they lose money, they also go into cry-mode. People scream scam here for not only true scams, but sometimes coins they lose money on ... guess it's sort of human nature. The fault isn't their own by making a foolish investment decision, so it must be that shit/scam coin they jumped into, in the middle of a pump.

There are signs to look for, like the fellow you mentioned above. Large premines, devs associated with other iffy coins, and so on. But we can't control other people's behavior.

If enough people get burned, market forces should hopefully take care of things at least a little bit.

You can check out the link in my signature for info on coins. I don't get anything if you click there, nor think it'd make people great investors... just that it does provide info on a lot of coins.

When I started here, which really wasn't long ago, so I'm probably still considered a newbie, I thought everyone here was insane. I mean, they were pumping tons of money into projects based on a forum post, no real evidence that the coins would ever be used as a currency, nor in some cases that the coins would even be paid out. So I decided to not really invest real money into this... too risky.

Instead look for freebie coins, cheap ipos that look at least semi-decent, and start small. Things like Comm/Nem/ITC are examples of past coins that could be used as a stake. Just play with whatever you get for free... if you lose it, so be it, just wasted time, not money.

And the way I look at coins is that we don't invest in coins, but the developers. Unfortunately in many cases we have no idea who the developers are or if they are on the level. My first two targets when I started were Drk and Ethereum, just due to the fact their devs looked to be a cut above everyone else. Pick a coin with decent devs, and at least you have a shot.

There was already an attempt to do this. It was called Operation Cleanup or something similar. Essentially,they would buy/mine the new useless coins and would destroy them. For every so and so amount of coins destroyed,you got a coin which was then tradable on exchanges. Needless to say,creating another coin to get rid of others failed. So,no,I don;t think that you can force a coin to die. Just stick to coins that have something of value and the others will simply die out by themselves without anyone doing anything.

The shitcoin may die out, only to be replaced by another shitcoin. That's the problem. People keep buying Shitcoin 2.0. I don't know who these people are but they buy ANYTHING thats new and thats on an exchange. Its their money to lose, but still, its a total distraction from the end goal which is develop useful alternatives to bitcoin.

I see the term shitcoin used interchangeably with scamcoin, and again, am curious how people define either one. Most of the coins people have called shitcoins, coingen stuff, coins with no devs, etc just die on their own. They may add noise to the forum and exchanges, but are pretty harmless really. The marketplace should take care of that issue over time.

How do you define a shitcoin? Should the goal be to warn people about scams and hopefully reduce their frequency, or to reduce shitcoins (simply defining one is highly subjective), just to minimize what they feel is a distraction from better coins? The former should be the goal in my opinion, as the latter will vary way too much  depending on what coins people hold.

We can't prevent shitcoin/scamcoin born in this crypto world ;D
but we can contribute to harm their "business"
if you find any shitcoin launch, you can bother/disturb them by make a warning post in its thread
many people who have common sense will either ignore that coin or bother them too
only dumb people will join, and retarded people buy that shitcoin IPO
if you want manipulate that coin to damage them, it needs many resources and cost you many BTC

Sounds interesting

Without a huge amount of Bitcoins your idea is some what flawed and how would you stop all the upcoming shitcoins there's only 24 hours in a day and how many exchanges are there now?

not necessarily...
how about a coin, let's call it ShitKillerCoin that is merge-mined with any shitcoin, but with the requisite that the merge-mined blocks must have no transactions (only coinbase) on the shitcoin chain?
This way, while mining your ShitKillerCoin, you are damaging the shitcoin because you are finding blocks in their chain that don't process transactions, delaying their network.
It would be important that everyone agrees on which shitcoin to target so hashrate doesn't get diluted in the sea of shit. Also, if mining software is "smart" and you achieve 51% hashrate you can orphan blocks with any real transactions, effectively halting the shitcoin for as long as you can agree to do so. Then you would dump your shitcoin if someone still wants them (or keep them as a trophy) and move on to the next one.
Maybe some voting system could be implemented so the ShitKillerCoin protocol could enforce which is the current target...

edit: (probably almost) any idea that includes actually mining or buying the shitcoins may end up being good for them, but this could really hurt them.

Point taken. I was hoping to somehow curb the phenomena like others have attempted before me but its gone global and doesn't need this website necessarily.

Eventually there will be a saturation point, its just who knows when. I myself have realized that bitcoin is the best coin investment, finally.

I guess I just get pissed that this constant flood of new coins that aren't very innovate or long term-minded is drawing BTC away from some of my cherished pet projects / investments.

I just read this and its pretty brilliant. The one drawback is how often are there blocks with 0 transactions? (my knowledge in this particular subject is limited). It seems it would infer that the coin isn't heavily traded, and then perhaps not worth killing.

But I like the general premise of this idea. Spoetnik and a couple others would probably be on board. Shit I just ordered my first miner you can officially put me down as will have a go at it.

This is interesting, which countries and what is the minimum/maximum penalty. Also why it will be illegal to take down a scam coin?

I envy you guys. You must have no problems of your own so taking on the heroic mission of ridding the world of scamcoins once and for all is your primary concern these days :) Maybe new comic heroes might emerge one day in the future! CryptoWillie - The shitcoin terminator :D

There's no need for all this...ASIC's will end up killing a lot of crapcoins  ;D

For many, I think this is the true reason they are so against what they call shitcoins or scamcoins.

Sure, reducing scams would be nice, but whether consciously or subconsciously I think their main objective is their own profit. The mindset that some new coin is taking attention away from <whatever I am holding>, so let's try to kill it. There is no altruistic goal, although many try to hide behind it.

It's a misguided mindset in my opinion. There is no guarantee that killing a handful of new coins, whether they are innovative or not, would all of sudden make some older coin gain additional interest.

If a coin is truly useless, let's say something like taxicoin (apologies if anyone actually owns this), it'll die on its own. The market will take care of it.

Otherwise you just get people subjectively choosing coins which they think are lackluster or taking attention away from their investments... and thinking of ways to kill them. Basically what that shitcoin killing group was about, sorta. I say sorta, as they also included a ton of nuts, hypocrisy, and a shitcoin maker started the thread to begin with.

I'd much rather see people focus on stopping scams, not trying to destroy coins because they think it's a shitcoin, or somehow taking attention away from their own investments.

I don't know what country Alice is in but in mine (U.S.) its not. Not by the methods described in this thread, anyway.

Bitcoin won't even be on the radar of my state's local government for another... 5 years minimum?

We need more self-policing and less threat of government-inspired regulation.

I know, that raises the conundrum of who polices the policemen, but I sure as hell prefer our shot at handling such a task than the federal governments.

When the green light is given in their respective countries, federal governments will _immediately_ usher in at least 3 layers of bureaucracy on top of all crypto-related transactions that you will be paying for with your time and money. And in America, its mostly to fund a monstrosity of a corporatocracy, that which bitcoin is attempting to provide a conduit around.

So the best way to keep regulation out is by implementing some sort of self-policing system in an attempt to minimize losses due to outright scams, which may dissuade scamees from contacting lawyers and so forth.

The forum software admins do a pretty good job of keeping out suspicious noobs, and if they think they're doing a good enough job, then well... They're probably thinking they don't have to do shit, because from a legal standpoint they probably don't.

agree! But perhaps the mindest of shitcoin killers is more altruistic then creators of pump and dump schemes, anyway. But poor coins will die out anyway, the market is so full of them that they cannot possibly all achieve greatness and super recognition!

Yeah but therein lies the rub. What is the exact line between a shitcoin and a scamcoin?

Have you ever seen people who have obviously been fleeced (missing dev is a good indicator) still cling to their coins like the Virgin Mary was still going to come down and swoop their coin up to its rightful status of Bitcoin 2.0? I have... It happens all too often. But you can't tell them they were part of a scamcoin, they just don't want to hear it.

I still think its possible to curb people's over-enthusiasm, like what should have happened with the housing market bubble. Its just that not enough people spoke up because too many people were busy making money. (Which they later lost, likely)

I brought this up earlier in this thread and stated my definition, and asked how others define a scam or shitcoin, but don't think anyone did.

A scamcoin to me is a coin where the dev promises features and doesn't come close, when a dev bails on a coin, when a dev runs an ipo and doesn't deliver coins at all, when there is a hidden premine, or a giant premine and the dev dumps... and things like that.

A shitcoin would simply be a plain coin, no unique features necessarily, perhaps a hired gun as a coder. If there is no giant premine hidden away, they are pretty harmless. Market forces take care of most of them. A perceived shitcoin may actually end up being popular too (ie doge), based on community involvement, so it's not like they are all completely useless.

And what occurs here for many is: a shitcoin is whatever coin that a specific person isn't holding. It's too subjective. I've seen 'shitcoin killers' in this forum brag about hyping coins listed on that shitcoin killing list. Or have shitcoins in their signatures, yet still go on a rampage against other perceived 'shitcoins'. It's a mess, and again their only goal is basically what you stated -- to kill coins they think are taking attention away from their own investments.


And yes, I have seen people hold out hope that they haven't been fleeced. It just occurred in the ConcealCoin thread. People did speak up when things looked suspicious (including myself) and we pointed out how the dev of VastCoin apparently was the same person, trying to run the scam again. I pointed out the similarities in the logos, as an example.

And that is what I think people should do. Post in threads pointing out potential issues, or things that are rather blatant scams. You can't protect against scams before they always occur (again, how would you stop ConcealCoin in one day?), but you can educate and provide info as you see it. No FUD, not trolling, just point out potential problems. That may help protect against some scams.

But nope, it won't protect people's investment in some 1 year old ALT that isn't doing well, if they think newer coins are getting too much attention. That is a separate issue and really nothing to do with scams or shitcoins.

I can agree with your definitions and I liked your post all the way up to this last part. You just tossed the whole point aside if you think I am worried that "newer coins are getting too much attention."

The point of the exercise is to come up with ways to prevent scams from getting too far off the ground. Its obviously a highly subjective and delicate process and does not encompass all new coins.

What happens after implementation is anyone's guess, but if scams were made more obvious I think investors would be more inclined to try to figure out which coins actually had real world potential on their horizon and weren't just cheesy, high-risk investment vehicles.

I know thats part of my idealism coming through. Well you can't make real progress if you don't set high goals.

Your previous post gave a different impression:


It certainly reads like your concern is that newer coins are taking BTC away from your investments. If you were concerned newer or existing coins are scamming people, then that is a different issue. Although determining what coin is a scam and which isn't, can be a tad difficult. People can point out obvious stuff though without veering into fud territory.

new coins that aren't very innovate or long term-minded

If its a new coin thats innovative and long term-minded, I'm for it.

I liked the idea behind URO though I am not completely sure its not a scam. This is exactly where some sort of embodied process would kick into action. We should all be working on it.

But if a coin isn't innovative, does that mean it deserves to be called a scam? Many do, many would say it is a shitcoin and perhaps even should be killed off. If a new coin isn't innovative but has an active community + dev, why is it a problem to anyone?  Most are harmless, and if truly worthless, will die off on their own anyway.

And yet people feel such coins take attention away from their investments. It's too subjective to say what coins should live or die, just because it may not be innovative enough. That is where the marketplace comes in.

And I first assumed URO was a joke, someone making a coin as some sort of weird metaphor for shitcoins, using Urea instead of shit. Shame I didn't invest in it, as it sure went up a lot, at least for a while there.

Kudos for your common sense, but I'm afraid that the record of history speaks otherwise. To a larger extent than you realize, the Securities and Exchange Commission overlaid itself over the "self-policing" rules of the New York Stock Exchange. Same thing with Canada: in fact, there's an official terminology for a private self-policing organization that the regulators have let in as a kind of junior partner. They're called "Self-Regulatory Organizations" or SROs. Formally, an SRO is a private institution. In the case of the exchanges, they were private institutions before the regulatory agency was even born.

I know this is going to sound counterintuitive as hell - not to mention depressing as hell - but the best chance for the altcoin sector to remain regulation-free is for it to stay a "wild west jungle" until the point when radical decentralization has settled in and matured. To show why, I have to draw upon a different, more hard-bitten kind of common sense.

Just ask yourself: what part of the big city do you find the neighbourhoods where the cops just don't go? Where you find the locals openly flouting certain laws (felonies) on the streets and thinking almost nothing of it? Where the physical presence of the police is, uh, counterintuitively sparse?

And why?

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As for the decentralization - to shift from one area to a completely different one - do you know why OTC derivatives have not been regulated? Because too many of them are one-shot custom-made packages - so-called "bespoke" deals - that are put together on the assumption that they'll be held by the buyer until maturity. Once of the D.C. bigwigs (bureaucrat) said in so many words that OTC derivatives are impossible to regulate because the market is so fragmented. Bureaucrats, bless their hearts, are organized people. When they try to regulate a chaotic and disorganized system, they're actually at a loss. That top bureaucrat - I can't remember who it was; I think it was a woman - said that the first step to regulating OTC derivatives was to set up a central(ized) clearing house for them.

The original clearing houses were set up by the banks and brokerage firms in the nineteenth century, solely as a convenience. The setter-uppers had absolutely no idea that their invention would be a linchpin of later regulation (for tracking purposes, at the nuts-and-bolts level.)

Just something to think over...

It doesn't matter how often do they have blocks with 0 tx. The idea is that mining ShitKillerCoin will create blocks with 0 transactions in coin shitcoin regardless of how many transactions did people using shitcoin actually attempted to make. This way we ignore their transactions and jam their network. This is an attack on their etwork and if we achieve 51% and orphan blocks mined by others, transactions in shitcoin could halt completely. We wouldn't earn shitcoin tx fees, but who wants those anyway?

This would work for PoW only. For PoS or PoW/PoS some similar jamming could be done, but it would be necessary to first buy some shit in order to stake.

The difficulty is that there are no established, agreed operational criteria and I suspect there never will be - relative merit is a total can of worms. From an epistemological perspective, the issue is that the definition is ostensive, i.e. based on a shifting, partially-agreed set of instances that form the set. All very contentious and guaranteed to keep you occupied in endless hours of fruitless, often acrimonious, debate.

One particular difficulty is the lack of a common vocabulary or terminology - there are very few terms used with precision, it's all couched in informal language - scam, shit, crap, etc.  and there is a regrettable tendency to use a very broad brush.

If you can't produce an agreed operational definition of your target, you've no business planning an attack. Random altcoin terrorism beckons.

I found I needed to survey the domain in order to support the development of an ontology that would give me a better idea of the landscape (typically, I have to go looking before I find stuff). We're made the catalogue available as Linked Open Data (http://www.w3.org/wiki/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData#Project_Description):

DOACC Description of a Cryptocurrency an OWL ontology, rendered here in RDF/XML:
https://github.com/DOACC/doacc

Individuals:
https://github.com/DOACC/individuals

Images
https://github.com/DOACC/imprint

Because, yes it is a difficult problem and people are starting to recognise the impact of the repercussions and consequences. The ontology and associated RDF graph will support the further development of the ontology, which I hope will point the way towards the mid-level categories that are currently so obviously missing from the vocabulary e.g. “PoS scheme”, what's one of those when it's at home? I'll tell you what it translates to: “Use the source, Luke”.

Naturally, maintaining the currency of the catalogue is a resource sink and we're hoping to sustain both it and ourselves by piggybacking some artwork sales on it, hence Minkiz (see sig, enough spam for one msg) "data" section which presents the above in a Linked Open Data browser (conceptually akin to a block explorer) and, tentatively (until we assess the impact on machine resources) a SPARQL endpoint, allowing the data to be publicly interrogated.

We'll get there eventually.

Cheers

Graham

I'm really getting tired with all of these new coins on these forums. They spam the unread posts section and I really do not care about them.

I don't see how that would help. Buying huge amounts of these scam coins at the start would make a big pump, and thus would make profits for the developper, and he'd continue doing that.

Funny how Iconic Expert never went to prison. Just goes to show how truly inept our government is when it comes to catching actual thieves.

Hell, even Japan is getting ready to shove Mark Karpeles' fat ass into one of their tiny prison cells.

Not sure if it's a really good/working idea. It can work with low volume ICO/IPO/ITO coins but surely not with the really damaging high value, high volume coins. First of all you have to buy lots of coins what the devs created from thin air (profit) and with your buy you also provided legitimacy to them (more profit). Perhaps you can make some turmoil around the launch, but if you are not a real whale, then from the ICO money probably they can easily absorb your dump... plus you will make a good opportunity for them to start bragging about the strong buy support :). So, you can slow down the pump a bit but not much. If other well funded players are also involved on the other side then you do not have any chance.
The only way to success if you can persuade a bunch of rich people here, but this group will inevitably suffer some losses, and I'm afraid you are not going to find too much people here who would willing to take losses for saving the ass of a couple of greedy noobs (and therefore encouraging them to take more risk next time).
In the case of no or small premine coins this plan is even less viable.
 

We can create petition and ask top exchanges to stop listing scams without doing proper research and if scam gets listed it should provide an option to report it to proper authority (with proof offcourse) so they can investigate.


Scams go away when they have nowhere to get listed.

LOL! Thanks mate! This joke of yours made my day :).

Do you really seriously think that the exchanges going to refuse to take a nice profit on these coins? In addition there are some rumours about some "top exchanges" what maybe the real driving force behind some of these coins...

Your just as bad imHo! How do you know the dev doesn't have good intentions and you and your cronies ruined his/her coin...

well its more then just rumour, doesn't take much investigation behind the scene to know many of the top exchanges are behind many of the scamcoins.


yeah a solution to the shitcoin/scamcoin issues would be to have exchanges not list them. but many coins pay to list plus exchanges profit from pump n dump scamcoins  :(

WBB coin will have an answer soon enough, just wait and see..............

Agree, Specially when some exchange  to get  BTC for list new coins, But keep any exchange could be expensive anyway.

WBB coin?  Wich is it?   is a new coin?         

I see, I have missing it.         https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=952619.0

.

Because there are telltale signs of what is a crapcoin vs. what is a coin that is meant to have long-term potential. But this thread is over a year old and I was much more naive back then. In general, its the same group of investors that recycle the same BTC into new altcoins, and we've all more or less smartened up since then.

how is this going to kill the shitcoin? it is just making you profit, and this is what is being done right now, isn't it?

Because you'd sell at a loss, for the noble purpose of irreparably punishing the price of a shitcoin.

But like I said, I was more naive back then. I wouldn't waste my time now. Besides, you can short sell coins now. So if you truly believe they are crap, you can place a proper bet on it.

CoinMarketCap: ‘About 40% of the Coins Ever Added to the Site are Now Inactive’
http://cointelegraph.com/news/115160/coinmarketcap-about-40-of-the-coins-ever-added-to-the-site-are-now-inactive

Then why does that piece of shit admin of the site not remove these shitcoins.

The only way is to stop buying shitcoin/scamcoin ICO and stop buying them to trade even if they are going up.
Once nobody buy their coins, all these shitcoin will not flourish and only real coins will survive.

Thankfully the shitcoin market has leveled off and coins aren't being created at the same rate they were compared to this time last year. What the shitcoiners have to realize is there's not really any fresh blood coming into crypto and its always the same btc recycled over and over again, chasing the next pump.

I like your idea but you can't stop greed. You can only attempt to foil the criminals, of which there are plenty.

I hope a lot of people get into 1EX exchange (as per WBB coin dev) and see how awesome it'll be to use.  Not to mention, only vetted devs and no scamming bullcrap.

I don't blame bittrex re. the scam coins but they definitely have a hand in corrupting the market as such, disgusting.