Code & implementation: how do we know altcoin legit?

[metalbean]

How do we actually confirm if an altcoin is legit and does what it says it does? Say, for example, the premined numbers.

Do we check it on the ethereum blockchain contract or? and how do we do that?

[szfinx]

How do we actually confirm if an altcoin is legit and does what it says it does? Say, for example, the premined numbers.

Do we check it on the ethereum blockchain contract or? and how do we do that?

None of the ICOs are 'legit' projects or businesses. None of them offer anything to sort out any real world problem. Most of them just try to solve something with the blockchain which doesn't need solving in the first place.

In the real world,a startup would need to produce something workable, something profitable before serious investors come on board. That is the correct way.
In the ICO world, someone post a page here, use as many 'buzz' words as possible including 'decentralized' and 'blockchain' a few times and collect upto $200 millions. This is the same category as opening 150 MacDonald's restaurants... Is a buzz words heavy few pages long paper worth 150 MacDonald's restaurants?

If the teams and projects behind the ICOs were legit with good business plan, they didn't need to have ICO in the first place. In the reality, the team collect millions, work a bit in their 'project', cash in the collected ETH and live happily ever after.

[kumiskura]

How do we actually confirm if an altcoin is legit and does what it says it does? Say, for example, the premined numbers.

Do we check it on the ethereum blockchain contract or? and how do we do that?

From their preparation,support and their team member.
Also look at their website

[iamnewhere]

read the meta information from the documents they provide (was just a funny project few days ago, they even had the old file name in meta data from the whitepaper they just copied from another project )

[metalbean]

How do we actually confirm if an altcoin is legit and does what it says it does? Say, for example, the premined numbers.

Do we check it on the ethereum blockchain contract or? and how do we do that?

From their preparation,support and their team member.
Also look at their website

Yeah, that too.

But I actually meant technically, how do we confirm that? how can we see the ethereum contract they will execute.

[metalbean]

How do we actually confirm if an altcoin is legit and does what it says it does? Say, for example, the premined numbers.

Do we check it on the ethereum blockchain contract or? and how do we do that?

None of the ICOs are 'legit' projects or businesses. None of them offer anything to sort out any real world problem. Most of them just try to solve something with the blockchain which doesn't need solving in the first place.

In the real world,a startup would need to produce something workable, something profitable before serious investors come on board. That is the correct way.
In the ICO world, someone post a page here, use as many 'buzz' words as possible including 'decentralized' and 'blockchain' a few times and collect upto $200 millions. This is the same category as opening 150 MacDonald's restaurants... Is a buzz words heavy few pages long paper worth 150 MacDonald's restaurants?

If the teams and projects behind the ICOs were legit with good business plan, they didn't need to have ICO in the first place. In the reality, the team collect millions, work a bit in their 'project', cash in the collected ETH and live happily ever after.

That's a lot of truth, can't say i disagree.

That is why I am asking technically how do we validate the claims? There must be a way via their contracts in the blockchain.

[coin_coin]

Most of us are not programmers,you should ask technical guys,

[stoniestfool]

coinmarketcap usually show the max supply for each coin. they did not show the eth devs hidden 92 million eth though.

[YarkoL]

How do we actually confirm if an altcoin is legit and does what it says it does? Say, for example, the premined numbers.

Do we check it on the ethereum blockchain contract or? and how do we do that?

From viewing the code. If it's not open source, assume something's fishy right from the start.

As a general rule, hidden premine is found out as soon as the coin becomes
popular enough - before that premine is of no consequence, as the coin has so
little value. There's always someone who will look at the code.

[metalbean]

How do we actually confirm if an altcoin is legit and does what it says it does? Say, for example, the premined numbers.

Do we check it on the ethereum blockchain contract or? and how do we do that?

From viewing the code. If it's not open source, assume something's fishy right from the start.

As a general rule, hidden premine is found out as soon as the coin becomes
popular enough - before that premine is of no consequence, as the coin has so
little value. There's always someone who will look at the code.

I find it absurd that ico do not share the code as a proof of contract

[YarkoL]

I find it absurd that ico do not share the code as a proof of contract

Is that an Ethereum DApp? Then it ought to be viewable
in an ETH blockchain explorer.

[Chicago]

How do we actually confirm if an altcoin is legit and does what it says it does? Say, for example, the premined numbers.

Do we check it on the ethereum blockchain contract or? and how do we do that?

Hello metalbean,

    Most people doing the first glance sanity check will inspect main.cpp and evaluate how the subsidy has been calculated.
    Though, there are only an unlimited amount of ways a coin daemon's code may be modified -- and so I rely on identifying the parent coin's code and the commit or approximate commit from which the new coin was forked from the parent project.

    Knowing where in the parent repository's timeline the new project had been forked, is sometimes difficult because of the omission of a full commit history.
    With a little bit of detective work you can figure this part out for yourself.

    Then, the easiest way to find out "what was changed" between the parent project and the new coin code would be to use git's built in tools for rebasing.

    The way it works is by essentially taking the new coin's code and then merging the new coin's repository with the commit history of the parent project.
    When you do this, you then see which files had been modified, where they had been modified and you can then evaluate those changes for yourself as to whether they're acceptable to you.

    No amount of obfuscation in code will hide the new coins changes if you essentially perform a diff against old code from the parent project and the new code from the new coin.

    There will be a lot of files showing changes from Xcoin to Ycoin but there will also be revealing changes about the address prefix, network magic, subsidy function and other work performed by the developer.

    The above will be useless to you if you're running some random executable provided to you by a stranger, because unless it is a signed Gitian build you can validate on your own; there are no assurances the provided binary was built from the given sources.

Best Regards,
-Chicago

[arc45]

I think it is hard to be on the internet and have your work hidden so no one can see your track record. You should be able to evaluate old project members to guess at how new ICO project members will do.