My Best Seller Lilly
It's a nice quiet Saturday morning... I am sitting at my computer, with a cup of hot Earl Grey tea, and a QQ chat windows open. It is 10 AM my time, 10 PM Lilly's time in Shenzhen, China.
We are both wearing our Model ANT-S1 of the Proudly-Made-in-China tinfoil hats.
This particular model uses a secret QQ channel - operating on TCP port 8888 (the number 8 has a special significance in Chinese culture) - to channel our thoughts in both directions, so we read each other's mind as we chat.
Lilly is smoking her usual before-going-to-bed joint.
Me: Ni Hao Lilly...
Lilly (in her Chinese-accented English): And Ni Hao right back at you, whatsup with you?
Me: Oh, you know, I have been trolling bitcointalk.org as usual, gathering as much info as possible about creating an altcoin out of thin air, and making money doing it.
Lilly: Creating an altcoin? I thought only C developers with extensive knowledge of Bitcoin technology can do it. What do you know about development and coding in C?
Me: I know nothing. The reason I am interested in gathering this info, is that I was contacted by "Beta Publishing". They know I am a complete idiot and that I am also an old-time miner of Bitcoin. As you know, I have two 200 GH/s ASIC miners at home. I guess they think that - because I mine Bitcoin - I know something about creating an altcoin. They offered me US$ 150K to write "The Complete Idiot's Guide to creating your own Digital Currency (Altcoin)".
Lilly: Well, they made a good choice. You are a complete idiot and you know nothing about creating an altcoin.
Me: Not only that, but I had never heard of Altcoins until they mentioned it to me. Until then, I thought only BTC and LTC existed.
Lilly: So how will you come-up with content for the book?
Me: Well, I started by trolling the
Faircoin announcement thread, you have seen my posts over there, that's when and how I introduced you to the tough bitcointalk crowd. When I got tired of that, I started my own thread
"How can a new coin break-in and be a big success?".
Lilly: Yes, of course, I have been following the news about Faircoin. It looks like the DEV team of FAC screwed over an exchange for a large amount of BTCs. All the exchange could do is halt trading of FAC and remove it from the exchange offering.
Me: Well, that's what NXT-e accuses the DEV Team of doing, after the hard fork attack. Of course the DEV team denies it and they are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
Lilly: You know that I have spent a lot of time, effort and money trying to un-cover the real identity of FAC Developers. My
AgentsFriends on the ground on three continents left no stone un-turned gathering intel on that DEV team.
They obviously did a good job - and went out of their way - to hide their real identities: their coin web site is hosted by a web hosting company based in Australia that guarantees the anonymity of a domain name registrant, and they publish their Windows QT wallet through an anonymous file sharing site (
https://mega.co.nz) based in New Zealand. I am starting to think maybe they are Australian, not European, and that's even though their English (when they write something) sometimes seems to be written by someone whose native language is not English.
Me: I wonder why the extra effort to hide their real identities?. Are all creators of altcoins doing the same? I have thought of two possible explanations:
1. It's a tradition, following in the footsteps of the creator of Bitcoin himself: Grand Master Satoshi Nakamoto.
2. Just in case the DEV team decides - one day - to skip town with all profits and leave the investors holding the bag.
Lilly: Yeah Oh Well. Anyway, so back to your altcoin creation research. How is it going?
Me: Before I get into that, I want to mention a couple of posts in my thread that - in my mind - really stood-out:
One member commented:
"If you have no experience then download the source of a coin with good devs like Digibyte, Darkcoin or Next and use it for learning."
I am not sure why he considers these coins to be coming from "good devs"? Maybe he's one of the devs, or maybe he's indeed looked at the source code of these coins and found it to be well written.
Another member did some research and found a couple of "intriguing" coins: ISR, and CIN. Maybe they are intriguing to him just because he's mining them!
The general consensus though seems to be that a successful coin has to be "innovative", have good community support, and maybe even "do things completely differently" (in the words of another member).
Speaking of "innovative", I have two suggestions for a complete idiot wanting to get some help and advice from other members on the forum:
1. There is a general culture of ridicuing or ignoring newbies, instead of helping them out; so you better have a thick skin. Besides, you are - and rightfully so - expected to do some basic research before you ask a question that has already been answered a hundred times before. If you decide to post questions, insert some buzz words, such as PoS, X11, PoW, Scrypt even if you have no clue what they mean, you will sound like you know what you are talking about. As an example, look at the two following questions:
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of PoS vs. PoW?
- I am not sure what specs my new coin should have.
You are much more likely to get meaningful answers to the first question.
With the second question, you will get the inevitable "If you do not know what specs your coin should have, you shouldn't be creating one".
2. Do not discuss your "innovative" ideas for a "revolutionary" coin. You will either get ridiculed, or someone will steal your ideas and beat you to the crowded market.
In any case, back to my research. After 2 weeks of trolling the forum, sending and receiving PMs, here's the result of my research:
if you are a complete idiot and want to create your own coin, you basically have three options:
1. Easiest, fasted, and cheapest way: coingen.io. The problem with coingen is that - for the basic low price of 0.05 BTC, you get a coin loaded with coingen logo/adevrtisement and that is not supported after you receive it... you are on your own if anything breaks. There are other technical limitations of a coingen-created coin that I do not remember right now. I will find those and detail them in my book.
Other than coingen, there are some members who offer coin creation services. Their fee ranges from 0.1 to 1 BTC. Some of them even offer a one week course that'll teach you development of altcoin. To find these offerings, just search the
"Services" and the
sub-boards of the forum.
2. You can
Do It Yourself. If you want a Scrypt-based coin, check
this one out.
3. Hire a competent developer. Problem with that is that they will ask for exhorbitant fees or try hard to discourage you from doing it. I wondered about their motive in discouaging complete idiots from creating their coins. The stated reason - of course - is that they want to protect the "squeaky clean" (LOL) reputation of Altcoins from mediocre, poorly-coded coins unleashed on the market by complete idiots. But I suspect they really have other motives.
You can also try to hire a freelancer through elance.com, or freelancercom, but most of those offshore developers never heard of cryptocurrency before.
If you are determined to create your own coin, forge ahead and ignore the detractorrs. After all, Digital Currency is the Wild Wild West out there, greed drives everyone, and a good number of people are out to scam you by any means .
A side note: Take a look at
crypto-prices.com. Scroll down the list of Altcoins (column on the left): there are hundreds of them!! I still continue to be flabbergasted by why anyone would spend his hard earned cash on buying a totaly useless altcoin that he cannot even use to buy anything with. But I digress... the same was said about Bitcoin in the beginning.
Any way you decide to go, if you are in it for a quick profit, pump and dump, then altcojn is perfect for you. But if you are in it for the long haul, then you need to worry about after-launch technical support: what will you do when something breaks and you don't even understand (technically) what has happened?
(Moment of Silence).
Lilly drew a last puff from her joint.
- So when will your book be published?
Me: "Beta Publishing" paid me $50K in advance. In true altcoin fashion, I am thinking maybe I'll just skip town and leave Beta holding the bag.
Lilly: Oh Come-on, that is so unlike you!
Me: Yeah you are right. I am no
Mark Karpeles.
Lilly: Oh yeah...
The MtGox fiasco!!! We now know why the price of BTC was always much higher (by as much as US$ 100
per coin) on MtGox than other exchanges. Mark was enticing investors to withdraw their Bitcoins from other exchanges, transfer them to MtGox, where they would be locked-in with very slow bank withdrawals. Mark was trying to cover-up his BTC losses due to theft and his plain incompetence in running his business. The bankruptcy court in Japan has now removed him from the management of MtGox. He is
refusing to travel to the USA to face a hearing ordered by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, part of the US Department of TreasuryLilly and I paused for a minute.
Master Takoshi Nakatomi
I continued our conversation: By the way, my spiritual leader Master Takoshi Nakatomi has summoned me to his retreat at the top of Mount Fuji in Japan. He wants to discuss with me my plans for "
Global
Domination
Network" Coin.
Lilly: GDN? WTF? Don't tell me you are thinking about creating your own coin? And BTW... GDN ticker symbol is already taken.
(I did a quick forum search).
Me: WOW, you are right, GDN is already taken. Shoot... now I have to come-up with a different name.
And, why wouldn't I want to create my own coin? I have all the qualifications needed: I am a complete idiot with 0.1 BTC in my wallet, I am greedy, I can easily hide my real identity when the coin is launched, I can give away 50 Million of it to attract attention, and I finally can skip town after I make a few tens of BTCs in profit.
You know what... this actually gives me the idea for my next book: The Complete Idiot's Guide to untold riches in the world of Cryptocurrency.
Lilly extinguished her joint and angrily said: When will you stop mentioning my panties in your posts? You pervert old fart?
Me: I am sorry about that. I promise you I will not do it again. What color are you wearing tonight?
Lilly: I am not telling you. She briefly parted her legs and showed me black panties.
- I go sleep, good night.
And on that note, Lilly stood up and turned off her webcam.
