In this thread I suggested that bitcoin is a powerful Schelling point, communicating quality & reliability, versus alts who host a lot more scammy projects, by comparing it to top level domain names:
1/ First try at drawing parallels between top level domainnames (TLDs) & cryptocurrencies. '17 Domaintools Report:
https://www.domaintools.com/content/The-DomainTools-Report-2017.pdf2/ Market learns quickly, so scammers rotate into new TLDs quickly. Here are the TLDs ranked by # of blacklisted domainnames:
3/ Same in cryptocurrency space, where scams evolved from BTC ponzis, to "national coins", to "better mining" coins, to MLM coins, to ...
4/ Namespace is quite similar: 1,528 TLDs vs 1,119 cryptocurrencies in existence. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c… coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/
5/ The trust in .com names is justified: on a relative basis, 99.5% of .coms are likely bona fide — better than .org, .net, .info.
6/ IMO Bitcoin has relatively less scams associated with it than the rest of the top 10 cryptos. Lower gullibility, higher cost of business.
7/ Scams have a tendency to concentrate in certain namespaces. While fraud in quality TLDs is >1%, some others have 10%, 20%, +50%+ scams.
8/ Suspect same pattern in crypto—some brands r scam friendlier: premine (EZ revenue), PoS (perpetual income), ERC20 (fast deployment), ...
9/ DNS privacy providers: with the exception of 1 (the largest!), most providers are associated with only about 1% of scammy domains.
10/ Struggling to infer parallel phenomena in crypto. Perhaps big fraud facilitator is BTC-E, with other exchanges having lower fraud rate?
11/ Countries with highest concentrations of illicit domains. Perhaps extra due dil is warranted when evaluating ICOs with similar origins.
12/ The end. Curious about your thoughts, and again thanks to @DomainKing for bringing this industry to my attention!
Credit: Tuur Demeester
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