Quite a few users having a moan on hashtalk about it.

I was thinking this scenario.

Just supposing I wanted to rip people off.

Create scammy coin
Have my own exchange
Let users think they have thier own virtual cloud wallet. You can see your coins on line. Reality is they're all in my wallet.

So with much hype I launch coin and people buy direct from me with btc, use my cloud wallet. They can sell my scamcoin on my platform and I give a good rate in btc, of course I can afford to do this as much as I want cos I'm not actually paying btc, I'm just making it look like I've paid you.

Of course if you do make a withdrawal for btc then I will have to honour that, but providing you think your btc is in your wallet I can hold the price up without costing me very much. Of course I have to make some payouts when withdrawals are requested but so long as more people are joining my make believe world with real bitcoins I'm in the black lol.

Since my platform is controlling pretty much all of the coins in circulation the price on other exchanges will automatically follow, hell if I offer a narrower spread on my platform I'll get more people over.

I think I'm going to be very rich lol

A long time ago in Holland people bought flowers pretty much as they do now. By chance a farmer cultivated a tulip whose flowers were unusual, as such his flowers commanded a great premium and the farmer became rich. Other farmers saw this and bought his bulbs so they could cultivate their own. These farmers also became rich

A few intelligent farmers, rather then invest in the original bulb tried to create their own hybrids and many succeeded creating bulbs that were even better than the first. These farmers also became rich.

Within a couple of years, there were 500 or so different varieties and traders bought and sold bulbs and with all the excitement and publicity the price went up. These traders also became rich.

Some people realised that instead of leaving their money under the bed that if they bought a few bulbs and sold them a month later they could double their money. These people also became rich.

After 3 years the market was booming, strangely the original bulb was still worth more than the newer, improved varieties. Who knows why?

After 4 years everyone knew that bulbs were worth pretty much the same, you buy them to produce flowers in your garden.

TL;DR
The ones and zeros that programmers create are there to provide a service, a transaction. They are not for storage of wealth.

I'm not saying it is a scam, but if it is, just how much do you think he can make from it.

I don't know how many he managed to sell at $20, probably not a great amount, but how many has he sold from his pre-mine and how much longer can he go on for. I mean 12 million coins are still worth a lot of money even at 10 cents!

He's a genius. Hats off to him if it's a scam, has a lot of people convinced its still real.

There are in theory about 4 billion IPv4 addresses available (2^32), would be a great way to create a coin for an airdrop as it would be so easy to authenticate.

propose:

Total coins: 2^33 (Approx 8 billion)
50% Premine for airdrop: 2^32

I'll let someone else go out and create it, just send me lots for coming up with the idea

So at midnight GMT tonight the airdrop commences, of course it's not an airdrop, Icelanders will need to claim however, nothing has been published to say how a claim should be made.

My forecast for this scam is that the price will be manipulated up, the drop touted as a success thus tempting Joe Public in to purchase coins from the dev.

Icelandic claims will be dripped out very slowly if at all. Perhaps they might be issued into some holding account whereby Icelanders think they've got the coins but are unable to sell them pending security verification (which of course can't be done as the dev doesn't have access to government records)

Am I being too sceptical here?

Does anybody have historical information about the number of altcoins available historically. Since someone told me to look at Bitcoin over xmas I noticed that there were only 60 altcoins. 50 days later I see coinmarketcap.com is listing 175. New coins are being added at an ever increasing rate.

Would like to see this rate graphed somewhere, if this trend continues at the same rate how many altcoins will there be at the end of the year if the number of coins continues to double every 40 days or so? Will there be more than 1000 altcoins by the end of 2014? At what point are people going to realize this is a big scam?