I brought this up earlier in this thread and stated my definition, and asked how others define a scam or shitcoin, but don't think anyone did.
A scamcoin to me is a coin where the dev promises features and doesn't come close, when a dev bails on a coin, when a dev runs an ipo and doesn't deliver coins at all, when there is a hidden premine, or a giant premine and the dev dumps... and things like that.
The difficulty is that there are no established, agreed
operational criteria and I suspect there never will be - relative merit is a total can of worms. From an epistemological perspective, the issue is that the definition is ostensive, i.e. based on a shifting, partially-agreed set of instances that form the set. All very contentious and guaranteed to keep you occupied in endless hours of fruitless, often acrimonious, debate.
One particular difficulty is the lack of a common vocabulary or terminology - there are very few terms used with precision, it's all couched in informal language - scam, shit, crap, etc. and there is a regrettable tendency to use a very broad brush.
If you can't produce an agreed operational definition of your target, you've no business planning an attack. Random altcoin terrorism beckons.
I found I needed to survey the domain in order to support the development of an ontology that would give me a better idea of the landscape (typically, I have to go looking before I find stuff). We're made the catalogue available as
Linked Open Data:
DOACC Description of a Cryptocurrency an OWL ontology, rendered here in RDF/XML:
https://github.com/DOACC/doaccIndividuals:
https://github.com/DOACC/individualsImages
https://github.com/DOACC/imprintBecause, yes it is a difficult problem and people are starting to recognise the impact of the repercussions and consequences. The ontology and associated RDF graph will support the further development of the ontology, which I hope will point the way towards the mid-level categories that are currently so obviously missing from the vocabulary e.g. “PoS scheme”, what's one of those when it's at home? I'll tell you what it translates to: “Use the source, Luke”.
Naturally, maintaining the currency of the catalogue is a resource sink and we're hoping to sustain both it and ourselves by piggybacking some artwork sales on it, hence Minkiz (see sig, enough spam for one msg) "data" section which presents the above in a Linked Open Data browser (conceptually akin to a block explorer) and, tentatively (until we assess the impact on machine resources) a SPARQL endpoint, allowing the data to be publicly interrogated.
We'll get there eventually.
Cheers
Graham
