Alt Coin Scams - Quark, Dogecoin etc.

[LevelUP]

Hi BitcoinTalk,

I'm new to Bitcointalk but not new to cryptocurrency so I wanted to point out a couple of observations Ive made regarding alt coins.

Floating point numbers in modern computers can go up to 2^53 or aprox 9.0x10^15 units... after this point the numerical system goes haywire (google it).

Bitcoin is 2.1 x 10^15 units, at 21,000,000 bitcoins divisible to 0.00000001 and Litecoin has 8.4x10^15 units (which is uncoincidentally close to the above mentioned limit)

In simple terms therefore DO NOT put money into any coin with more than 90,000,000 coins divisible to 8 decimal places (Quark, Dogecoin etc) unless you are a speculator playing the pump n dump market well as by definition its dead in the water.

Also look out for 

1. Premined coins
2. Coins with very large block reward changing at rapid intervals. These coins don't need to be premined as the early adopters reward is so skewed there's no need to pre-mine in secret when a couple days headstart will do it. 
4. Coins which bring no utility to the marketplace.

The only positive thing I will say about Dogecoin is that it demonstrates the potential to use social media to distribute and educate the masses on a cryptocurrency, and ultimately, cleaning up the image is a matter branding if the coin is useful. With that said, it upsets me to see so many people getting scammed out of money by being greedy and believing the hype. Welcome to a world market, real businesses offer real service and real return. Leave the doges and cats to the young hackers/scammers. 

[allgoodthings1]

Good points, all. Thanks for the write-up. Glad to have you in this forum.

[duravello]

Does not the coins use double integer, 2^64 instead ?
The max units is then 18,446,744,073,709,551,616
or 184,467,440,737 max coins

[Airguardian]

Nice post mate. In your last sentence you say "leave the doges and cats". I don't know if that was just a word play, but there is a Catcoin now  .
This is the thread: Catcoin. A noob as I am, I think it looks pretty good.

Would you give us your 2 cents about this coin, please?
Also, does anyone know if catpool.in is paying out or is it a honeypot?

Cheers.

[LevelUP]

Does not the coins use double integer, 2^64 instead ?
The max units is then 18,446,744,073,709,551,616
or 184,467,440,737 max coins

Check the link my friend: http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7781/satoshis-genius-unexpected-ways-in-which-bitcoin-dodged-some-cryptographic-bullet/

Floating point integers, not standard integers.

[LevelUP]

Nice post mate. In your last sentence you say "leave the doges and cats". I don't know if that was just a word play, but there is a Catcoin now  .
This is the thread: Catcoin. A noob as I am, I think it looks pretty good.

Would you give us your 2 cents about this coin, please?
Also, does anyone know if catpool.in is paying out or is it a honeypot?

Cheers.

My 2 cents regarding catcoin is that its another opportunistic coin, which will generate a following as being the "Cat" to Dogecoin's "Dog". essentially, the community is more serious than that of Dogecoin, the protocol appears at a glance to be that of Bitcoin so that's an improvement. Ultimately though, while I think its a good short term punt to pump n dump as I see no intrinsic advantage over Bitcoin, Litecoin and a handful of others.

If you're going to mine or invest in Catcoin, don't leave your seat because when the market tumbles I see no reason for it to recover. And the same goes for all the new alt coins, if it has no adoption, no distribution or means of becoming distributed and no fundamental advantage over what exists expect it to fizzle. If you want to make money from them, trade attentively and be early. 

Remember this too, Bitcoin is a protocol change away from adopting part of another coins standard that might make it superior. Think of Vine doing videos on a timeline and Instagram releasing the same features a few weeks later.

[undeadbitcoiner]

Good and welcome to you in this forum
We are waiting friends and members like you
Liked your points
Normally Not only DOGE and CAT's almost all alt coins (Rather then top 5-6) are just for trade, these coins are never going to be placed in any market like bitcoin, so those coins are for trade and latter either they will be colapsed or they will hold some bitcoin as a Value generator and stay.
One thing to remember is if there will not be any Alt coins to support Bitcoin also cant grow Up.

Good Luck

[Tim Suite]

What do you guys think about Gridcoin? Are their claims substantiated or is it a scam?

http://www.gridcoinnetwork.org/

[rcg]

What do you guys think about Gridcoin? Are their claims substantiated or is it a scam?

http://www.gridcoinnetwork.org/

It's scrypt based currency ?

[vv7]

While I agree to an extent with the initial post. As it sits their are also huge opportunists for the watchful investor/trader to jump in early, ride the hype train and dump before the inevitable decline and death of whatever particular alt coin in question. Doge for example allowed many I know to make 3x returns in a very short time period.

[tondaS]

Anybody with 100 million doge coins to test it ? 

[Kelekin]

The problem is, most people here don't care about whether or not a coin is useful or brings something new.  They want to get in on a coin early, get as much as they can, and pump it out.  Of course, most people don't understand economics, so they don't see how bad this mass alt-coin creation is for the overall crypto economy.  But hey, this is why we'll be our own downfall. 

[cryptohunter]

Hi BitcoinTalk,

I'm new to Bitcointalk but not new to cryptocurrency so I wanted to point out a couple of observations Ive made regarding alt coins.

Floating point numbers in modern computers can go up to 2^53 or aprox 9.0x10^15 units... after this point the numerical system goes haywire (google it).

Bitcoin is 2.1 x 10^15 units, at 21,000,000 bitcoins divisible to 0.00000001 and Litecoin has 8.4x10^15 units (which is uncoincidentally close to the above mentioned limit)

In simple terms therefore DO NOT put money into any coin with more than 90,000,000 coins divisible to 8 decimal places (Quark, Dogecoin etc) unless you are a speculator playing the pump n dump market well as by definition its dead in the water.

Also look out for  

1. Premined coins
2. Coins with very large block reward changing at rapid intervals. These coins don't need to be premined as the early adopters reward is so skewed there's no need to pre-mine in secret when a couple days headstart will do it.  
4. Coins which bring no utility to the marketplace.

The only positive thing I will say about Dogecoin is that it demonstrates the potential to use social media to distribute and educate the masses on a cryptocurrency, and ultimately, cleaning up the image is a matter branding if the coin is useful. With that said, it upsets me to see so many people getting scammed out of money by being greedy and believing the hype. Welcome to a world market, real businesses offer real service and real return. Leave the doges and cats to the young hackers/scammers.  

Probably means nothing in real life terms tbh.


The only important thing i notice about the various currencies is the community that gets behind them. Big solid community = solid coin. People become attached to certain coins and this is more important than possible tech issues that will probably have zero effect in real life experience.


Quick pump and dumps you can spot, those that start to get a large base of support and communities behind them are NOT pump and dump. DOGE and QRK both have this.

[scarface]

ripple is the biggest scam coin then comes quark

[Francisdoge]

Hi BitcoinTalk,

I'm new to Bitcointalk but not new to cryptocurrency so I wanted to point out a couple of observations Ive made regarding alt coins.

Floating point numbers in modern computers can go up to 2^53 or aprox 9.0x10^15 units... after this point the numerical system goes haywire (google it).

Bitcoin is 2.1 x 10^15 units, at 21,000,000 bitcoins divisible to 0.00000001 and Litecoin has 8.4x10^15 units (which is uncoincidentally close to the above mentioned limit)

In simple terms therefore DO NOT put money into any coin with more than 90,000,000 coins divisible to 8 decimal places (Quark, Dogecoin etc) unless you are a speculator playing the pump n dump market well as by definition its dead in the water.

 

Care to elaborate more on this topic ?

Why can't such coins reach the top of the foodchain in cryptocurrencies ?

I'm genuinely interested in the explanation. Quark seems to be holding quite nicely and according to you it shouldn't.

[galbros]

Hey it is really nice to see a thoughtful post on the latest flurry of alt coins!  Thank you!  I agree, unless infrastructure gets built up around a coin all it can be for is pump n dump.

[black_swan]

LevelUP thanks for your post and as others already said, welcome :-)
You are saying that it's not possible to use more than 9.0x10^15 units
Could you explain what could go wrong above that limit?
Does it introduce some errors in PoW?

[cryptohunter]

Hey it is really nice to see a thoughtful post on the latest flurry of alt coins!  Thank you!  I agree, unless infrastructure gets built up around a coin all it can be for is pump n dump.

strangely though, there is more infrastructure and community surrounding doge and qrk than most other coins with exception to btc and ltc.

[kalus]

nice thread title, complete with loaded weasel-phrasing.

[fractalbc]

In simple terms therefore DO NOT put money into any coin with more than 90,000,000 coins divisible to 8 decimal places (Quark, Dogecoin etc) unless you are a speculator playing the pump n dump market well as by definition its dead in the water.

Well put.  doge coins in particular try to put 60 tons of dung in a 53 ton bag.  The numbers CAN be stored internally with no loss of accuracy where they are stored as 64 bit fixed point numbers, but fall apart when you try to access them via the RPC interface.

One can increase the maximum number of coins if they are willing to decrease the number of decimal digits.  Otherwise they might want to understand the RPC interface's use of doubles for generating the json response.

But, I suspect that most alt-coin makers don't really care what happens after the first month or two so this becomes irrelevant.