[Analysis] Mintcoin – The rise and fallAs I am following MINT for quite a while, I want to give an analysis on this coin.
I will talk about following topics
1) Concept
2) Launch
3) Premine
4) Mintpal
5) Rise
6) Fall
7) Conclusion
Facts1) Concept
The coin has a fast distribution with 100000 – 900000 block reward at the beginning, halving each weak, until it reaches 1 block reward after 5th week. After 20 days proof of stake kicks in and you can generate coins by so called minting. You will get interests of 20% in first year, 15% 2nd year and so on. As you can see, this coin will reward the early birds with a huge amount of coins and these owners will get exponentially richer by the PoS.
2) Launch
It was not a coincidence, that the the launch was scheduled on the very same day as Maxcoin. When the whole altcoin world was focussing on Max Keiser and his struggling coin launch, people started mining MINT without any trouble and low hashrate getting tons of coins.
3) Premine
There is a 1% premine of 700 million coins, which is effectively a premine > 3%, if you consider proof of stake. The developer keeps silent about the use of the premine, even though some people promoting the coin have received a few coins. If you look it up at the block explorer, you will clearly see, that the whole (!) premine has been already moved
http://mintcoin-explorer.info/address/MpkWtkFfAUgSumHeTRP1XAW2bGMJQYQ6Ud 4) Mintpal
The Mintpal exchange was available directly after launch, it’s probably no coincidence that the name Mint is in the exchange’s name. For a new exchange Mintpal is surprisingly well designed and nice to handle.
AnalysisThese were the facts, now I will give an analysis with some guesses, which might be or might not be true.
5) Rise
This coin is designed to get hyped, fast distribution following a scarcity. I would guess, that Mintpal is owned by the very same person / team who developed MINT.
The coin was traded for 4 to 8 satoshis at the beginning, when after two weeks this coin got hyped over night. During one weekend the price shot from 8 to 60 satoshis with a trading volume of over 2000 bitcoins at Mintpal. Cryptsy decided to add it immediately, faster than any other coin I know of. But how could a coin unknown get a trading volume of over 1 million dollars? It is obvious that someone pumped this one to create a hype, everybody was following. If you assume a mean of 20 satoshis for one MINT, 2000 bitcoins equals 1 000 000 000 MINT. Who could possibly have so many mints to buy/sell?
The hype had two big effects:
- Mintcoin got famous over night and a lot of people jumped on the MINT train.
- Mintpal got big. Even though the wolong panda was traded successfully there, Mintpal had it’s breakthrough. It’s obvious that the owner is getting a lot of profit, as a lot of coins are added and traded now there.
6) Fall
A lot of people bought in when the price was 40, hoping this is the new doge reaching heights of 200 satoshis. The truth is that after the peak of 60, and a 2nd peak of 45, the value of coin was slowly decreasing. Compare this MINT graph
http://coinmarketcap.com/mint_30.htmlto this pump & dump graph
http://robertnielsen21.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/ci6rr.jpgLooks damn similar, doesn’t it?
After twenty days the so called minting kicked in, as this is a PoS coin, people are tempted to hold their coins for 20 days to get the interest. After the initial pump, some people can sell off their coins slowly, when people are sitting on their coins.
The developer of the coin mentioned here
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=450381.msg5449543#msg5449543 that he will add a MINT/USD exchange, when the community contributes 5 million MINT. But wait? Doesn’t he own a 700 million premine? Isn’t the premine considered to be for exactly these kind of things. If you consider PoS, he could have minted 5 million in no time.
This is just a guess, but as the dev refuses to tell us about the whereabouts of the premine, I wasn’t surprised, if he has already sold off all his coins during the pump. When the price was stable at 40 sat, I saw people selling of millions of coins into a 39 BTC wall. Currently this coin is already at 20 sat continuing its downward trend since peak.
ConclusionThere is no pump without a dump and people losing money. As good as MINT sounded at first, look at the graphs now and tell me, if you would consider buying mintcoins now? The people believing in this coin are people who bought in at 40 sat and people from the very start owning tons of coins. 20% PoS in one year isn’t worth anything, if the coin has no value anymore in the fast life of altcoins. A lot of people made money by selling the coins bit by bit after the pump, when others were holding for minting and better times. The developer refuses to tell us about the 1%, effectively >3% 700 million premine, begging for 5 million coins, when the premine wallet is already at 0 MINT
http://mintcoin-explorer.info/address/MpkWtkFfAUgSumHeTRP1XAW2bGMJQYQ6Ud Everytime the coin was on rise, somebody dropped a huge amount of coins to make some profit. People who bought in high are still waiting for the next pump, but truth be said, I don’t think this coin will reach these heights anymore. And if it rises it will be a mere pump of agony.
It’s hard to sell the coins now with all the losses, but I for myself sold off.
I know a lot of people are working hard for this coin and I appreciate this, but as long as the developer keeps silent about the premine’s whereabouts, this coin has no future for many investors and myself.
All this said, I still might be wrong, so good luck for anybody still believing in this coin. I wish you all the best.
Sincerely
221b
