It will be a VISA card but right now they are going through a VISA reseller program like a lot of other cards do.   What CEO said was that he is trying to negotiate a direct deal with VISA and that isn't finalized yet.

Thank you for remaining skeptical I think it is always a benefit for us to do so about any claim.  But as near as I can tell, it's accurate.  Protein folding research is being used for all kinds of good stuff like curing disease and cancer treatment.  Here's are some links I found to substantiate that, maybe you could have a look at them and see if that helps us find clarity on this.  If you read them through and still disagree, please let me know and I'll take a second look.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-12-protein-cancer-treatment.html

http://folding.stanford.edu/

[CURE] curecoin.net

I was digging through the exchange's selection of dirt cheap coins lately when I found this and thought I'd check it out.  Really cool stuff.

CureCoin is a distributed protein folding network used for research in solving diseases and (I think) curing cancer.  I'm a little murky on the specifics of protein folding, honestly it's pretty complex.  But it's doing good stuff, and it takes a lot of CPU horsepower, so the good folks at Stanford University came up with Folding@Home, which uses peoples home computers to collectively equal the power of multi-million dollar supercomputers.  CureCoin has partnered with them to create a crypto-currency based on letting users earn Cure coins by participating in this research.

Good stuff.  I like it.  So I'm trying it out, you can mine with either SHA256 to secure the cypto-coin network, or CPU/GPU mine to actually fold proteins.  Either way gets you Cure coins.  More info on this at the link.  It's very simple to setup, like any other mining.

Wouldn't you use all that GPU horsepower currently mining various versions of Bitcoin copycats on something actually productive?  Sounds like a winner to me.   

I'm not sure what the investment potential of [CURE] is.  The chart looks pretty healthy, volume is low but there's still enough variation going to get some good trades in.  I bought a good sized chunk of it and I'll report back with the results of that here later.

This is great news I'm so glad to hear someone is tackling this problem head on.  I program a lot in a bunch of languages, maybe I could be of some help?  Let me know if so.

Are you keeping this under wraps?  I guess not if you'd talk about it in the forum publicly.  One of the bot makers I was discussing this with earlier today basically said "you can't do anything about it, accept it, no one else cares" etc.  It would be nice to show that other options do exist, or will soon, people very clearly do care (it's their hard earned money after all), and if they don't take action to correct the problem now, they could find themselves way too far behind the curve to ever do so by the time they realize it's inevitable.

Good luck!  I look forward to progress updates on this, please let us know how it's going.

Someones manipulating the price alright, but they're doing it by buying up several pages of sells at a time to create the illusion of growth and raise the buy offer until the illusion becomes reality.  But without legs to stand on, the bears will tear it down every time, so they do, they take their profits, and the same dump truck of money comes back to prop the price back up again, and the process repeats.

I actually haven't seen much MCO fud.  I'm probably the most vocal MCO critic I'm aware of and it's not like I have a huge audience.

I wish MCO holders the best of luck, truly.  I have some myself.  But I think there's some pretty glaring issues to address.

Well he didn't work for MCO but he was a mod in their community chan.  Kicked for 'spreading FUD', which is reasonable I guess I was.  But it's not FUD if it's true, it's reality.  And I was actually being pretty restrained.  They're just upset that MCO is tanking hard when it's supposed to be mooning.  It's going to be a very sad week for them.

What part of the math looks wrong to you?

One thing I just thought of is my math is based on the idea that of the 1.9-2.0% of the CC fees, Monaco would get all of that.  Obviously, they wouldn't.  They get their Visa deal through a reseller, so I don't know what percentage of those fees they get but it's definitely not 100%  Even if it was as high as 50% (unlikely), that still doubles the volume I estimated.  More likely they get maybe 10%.  So they'd need to process 100+ Trillion per year to make that a reality.

The Monaco slack op just told me, literally, 'buy 10000 MCO and you'll never have to work again'.  

'$90,000 a year forever'.  

Let's do the math on that.  For one, currently 10000 MCO = $200,000.  That's a lot of money to wager on speculation that MCO card volume will ever reach the levels necessary for 1 MCO to return $9 USD per year.

What would it take to achieve that in terms of CC volume?

1 token of 30 million, so 1/30 millionth of 1% of the card fees.

9$ * 30 million * 100 = 270 billion in fees, per year, to make that happen.

typical CC fees = 1.9 - 2.0% of each dollar spent via CC's

270 billion times (100 / 1.9 = 52.6) = 14.2 TRILLION per year in CC transactions handled by Monaco cards to make the '1 MCO = $9 a year' statement true.

To clarify, last year the entire United States spent, on all credit cards, all transactions, roughly 3.2 Trillion.

MCO is at this point not approved for use in the US, or India.  So Europe is basically their market.  

MCO would have to be the only card used by anyone in Europe, and they would have to spend collectively 450% more than America does for MCO's estimates to be true.

But they're still pushing this concept that buying 10000 MCO means you won't need a job anymore.  More realistically, 1 MCO might get you $0.09 cents per year, so 10000 of them would get you $900 yearly from an initial investment of $200,000.

Sounds like a ponzi scheme to me.  MCO is one 'referral system' away from being the Cutco of credit cards.

I just made a suggestion to Bittrex staff on their support about identifying orders that come from bots and they were somewhere between dismissive and hostile about it in response.

"It's not a problem", "It's unavoidable", "No one cares", "It would be too expensive to fix"

All BS.  The reality is it's too profitable for them to stop.  Bots make them money, and they don't care if long term it's slow death for the coins and scamming their customers.

So I think your idea of addressing it independently is a step in the right direction.  Good luck, I look forward to any results you may come up with.

Take care with altcoins, unless it's a really major one (and even some of those), they are heavily manipulated on the exchanges, usually by automated buy/sell bots, and their actual daily value is largely meaningless, pretty much whatever they can get someone to pay for them.

Sometimes the bots push the value down so they can accumulate more of the coin, and it has nothing to do with the actual value of the coin.  And long term, many of the smaller altcoins lower in value so that's a bit of a risk.  The major altcoins generally go up, but not always.

Personally I think I'd just go with BTC.  It's too big for some little bot operator to manipulate effectively and theres a very good chance it will achieve the double-your-money goal you have in mind, as incredible as that sounds.  More realistically it might get about halfway there by then, but that's still very good and much safer.

Fantastic!  Please subscribe me to your mailing list.

I think anti-bot strategies should be a subject the BCT spec crowd discusses in depth, they are the main opponent in the way of our mutual goal of profit.  Coin devs should be in the mix too because long term these bots plunder the value of coins.

Thanks for a very informative post.

Yes I think you have a good plan, long term these little market fluctuations won't mean much.

I hope this works out great for you and that I'm 110% wrong in all my paranoid thoughts about it.

Good luck!  TO THE MOON!

Best of luck to you, really.

I am worried about buying in too much because the growth we saw over the last two days was basically the result of an MCO bot shovelling tons of money into the process.  If you look at the volume now though, and the growth/retraction pattern... that bot has been shut off.  Now the only thing holding the price up is bagholders.  And if they decide to leave in mass soon, very bad things will happen to the MCO price.

Well yeah I think MCO is shady as hell actually

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They don't have a US market yet, it's unclear if they ever will.  Not in India either, for what that's worth.

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They don't have an official Visa license yet that I know of, but they won't come right out and say one way or another if that's the case, they just mince around about it like:

User via twitter -> 'Will the app have Visa support at launch?'

Kris from Monaco -> 'We don't think it would make sense to launch the app without Visa support'

Not a yes, not a no.

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Currently circulating MCO tokens: 9 million.  Total supply 30.5 million.  The developers / "founders" have their own 'personal supply' that by terms of their ICO, they can't sell until the app launches in a few hours.  That means the supply of MCO tokens will likely triple very soon.  This will almost certainly drive the price way, way down.  Even if they don't release them all at once and just occasionally sell off a few thousand, that will still supress growth substantially over time.

When asked about this, the CEO said 'We won't sell our tokens without consulting with the MCO community'.  Again, a meaningless answer.   Giving someone the finger is technically consulting them.

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They launched their ICO with no prior notice, no one involved even had a BCT account, and they didn't make an ANN until substantially later.  But now they call them selves 'cryptologists'.

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So.... MCO seems like a scam to me.

That said, I made so much buying in dips and selling in peaks the last couple days I could afford to buy several times more than I ever originally spent on them.  So I'm buyin a little bit just to see.   I'm mostly out though, and I don't expect good things for the bit that I'm retaining, but... you gotta hodl and see right?

Since you have such high stakes on the line I think you should be very careful.  Sell most, retain some, be happy with the ridiculous returns you already got (assuming you got into MCO sometime before the latest pump fest).

Cool, thanks.  I use Coinbase and Bittrex now, but I feel Bittrex has too many bots and those bots manipulate the coin prices so I'm trying to find an exchange that either does not have bots, has less bots, or takes some action to reduce the negative influence of them.


I'll check those other ones out, thanks for the suggestions.

Thanks for the response.


Does LakeBTC have a Soap/Rest API someone could place orders with?

It's not real, it's a scam.  It may be real some day but that day is at least, minimum, a year away if not more realistically, two or three.

So sayeth the forum.

Hello, I'm considering other exchanges than Bittrex to trade on.  They are simply over-run with bots, and I don't think they care because of how profitable the bots are for them.  So that will never change.

Does anyone have any exchanges they would suggest?  Ideally ones with the least of a bot problem, maybe one of them identifies orders that come from bots?  That would be ok, or even better, one that bans them outright.

Thanks.

No worries, I tend to lurk quite a bit myself.   Yes I think selling when you can would be a good decision.  MCO is setting off a lot of red flags with me the more I look into them.  Perhaps a comfortable middle ground would be selling some/most of your holdings and then wait and see.  If it tanks, and you still like MCO, you have your capital to work with.  If it moons, then you still benefit a bit from that.

Best of luck to you!

Edit:  BTW, I passed your comments along (anonymously) to the Bittrex staff.  This was their response:


The channel I was in was 'customer-support'.   So basically the officially stance is 'go away, don't talk about the problem, if you do we will remove it from the record, your life savings don't mean much to us anyways'.

Disappointing... I expected better from the Bittrex people, they're generally pretty good about stuff.  But I guess in the end, whatever is most profitable is really what matters.  If that means conning people out of their savings to make 0.25% off the transactions, so be it. 

So I went to Bittrex's slack to discuss this a bit.  As expected, the response was dismissive at best, downright hostile from the bot developers (go figure).

I think I have a fairly easy solution, so I went to go suggest it.

Half way to fixing the problem:  Visually identify orders that originate from the API (bots).

The bot programmers in #api-developers were extremely combative about this.  I think that's a strong indicator that they know it would fix a lot of the problem, costing them scam money and so they are naturally aggressive in response.

But the bittrex support staff's response was also interesting.  My suggestion was met with instant, pre-orchestrated dismissal.  As if they are used to hearing these kind of statements, and have a script to follow when they come up.  'Customer dislikes the bots?  Say this.'

Bittrex apparently has no intention of making any efforts, no matter how trivial, to correct this issue.  As one user mentioned, bots are highly profitable for Bittrex, so why would they take any action against their behavior?  I tried to explain that long term they are toxic to the community and eventually their customer base will simply leave, but that was disregarded.  I suppose time will tell.  Fads come, fads go, if Bittrex doesn't take action to correct toxic elements of the community they are a part of and are actively condoning, there will be an inevitable response to this inaction that has nothing to do with me.  I'm just a concerned observer from the sidelines.