How to stay away from scam coins (?)

[roslinpl]

This is a question to all of you. Please share your suggestions, feeling, thoughts, etc.

I must say that there is many alt coins around as you can see ...

Some say it is very bad, some say it is good, some say it is good and bad (like me).

Thing is - at the moment new coins will be created and no one can stop this as this is impossible to stop.

It might stop by it's own. When all of the altcoins will lose the value then perhaps not many new coins will be created as people will be aware of investing their money and time and fail but at the moment we have many new and old altcoins and people have to deal with it.

Some of us will never buy/get any altcoins as they want Bitcoin only - I respect that thinking.

But I think some of the altcoins are interesting and they gain great community and also great devs have a chance to became more famous and skilled.

Thing is many altcoins are scam coins.

How to be aware of not investing your founds into some scam coin or how to make sure that "wallet" is not a keylogger and other shi* in a same time when it pretend to be a wallet.
Also problem of devs dumping millions of premined coins ...
And also perhaps some other problems like bugs in the code...
Some altcoins are made from a "Create an altcoin for 1$!" and people get a code and after the bug is spotted they don't know how to fix and coin is dying.

There are few other issues perhaps which I didn't mentioned - because I forgot perhaps

So what is your way of checking the coin?

I am thinking about my methods and I am using different methods for different coins...

But you never know for 100% what will happen and this is a big problem :]

Let spot some methods:

1. Never install a wallet without an open source code - wait for the source and check it on your own or let others check it

Yes this is very very important! But this isn't a security for your founds yet at all ...
so what other points?

2. Stay away from premined coins.

Well ... maybe but we might be able say Bitcoin was ~premined too hehe... oh so many people will kill me now for saying that. But Satoshi own many wallets with 50BTC in and that's great! He should get x10000 more in my opinion! I hope he will be the reachest man in the world!  

Some altcoin makers are not wealthy - they have an idea for their coin, they need some premine to share with community, advertise the coin etc.

Is it good, is it bad ... It is good IF premined coins will be not dumped and will be shared with community and spent on development and others important for the coin things... but you never know what devs will do so how to check them? You can talk with them ... I am trying to do that always before I get in.

3. Wait a month or so ... and if no problems will be spotted by the community - then join!

Well ... but other members might get scammed ... and you will be happy, because you were waiting to see that? We need to think about the way to stop this before it happens

4. Never install any wallet, just buy coins @ exchange and keep it there ...

Very bad idea. a)online exchange is a bad wallet b)some coins are PoS ... it would be nice to stake some coins, this is all about PoS ...

5. Stay away from all of the altcoins and only in Bitcoin we trust!

Well ... why to not give a chance ... perhaps one day there will be an altcoin which will be better than Bitcoin! And Bitcoin will learn from this altcoin how to became better and stronger


6.

http://www.sandboxie.com/

I believe that's what I used around December when we had a lot of dodgy new coins popping up.

You could use an old computer exclusively to install wallets onto, and never let a wallet near your newest computer that you use for everything else.

Very good ideas - it will secure our personal important data.
But we still need to figure out how to find a coin - which is a good coin


7. Any ideas ?

[fish731]

You could use an old computer exclusively to install wallets onto, and never let a wallet near your newest computer that you use for everything else.

[Nullu]

http://www.sandboxie.com/

I believe that's what I used around December when we had a lot of dodgy new coins popping up.

[roslinpl]

http://www.sandboxie.com/

I believe that's what I used around December when we had a lot of dodgy new coins popping up.

Oh this is very good! I forgot to say about virtual machines.

http://www.sandboxie.com/ is very useful tool!

Yes - that's very good point! I will add it to the OP.

And also:

You could use an old computer exclusively to install wallets onto, and never let a wallet near your newest computer that you use for everything else.

Good idea!

[claimore]

stay with BTC 

[lemfuture]

i can't open altcoin wallets through sandboxie 

[kalus]

stay with BTC 

[DannyElfman]

One point many persons miss all the time is, that once a source code was ONCE reviewed, the people tend to trust it indefinately.

Like V0.1 is trojan free and some people check it and post the results. Now in V0.3 they introduce a wallet stealing trojan, nearly everyone currently running that software will just download the update blindly.

Really really concerning!

PS: I do the same thing

[gjhiggins]

So what is your way of checking the coin?

I posted a lengthy response to someone asking about a specific coin, I hope you'll excuse me for quoting it in full here but i) I've found that stuff-behind-links tends to stay there and play little part in the discussion, so I've adopted a strategy of transclusion and ii) I'm just a saddo:

gjhiggins, can you tell by the code in the zip if the technology he claims the coin will use actually exists?

There's no evidence of that in the contents of the zip archive. The contents are Godcoin with user-facing strings changed to read “Achilles”, with only the absolutely key parameters changed (rpcport, genesisblock, etc). The only significant functional changes to the codebase are a bigger premine and larger block rewards.

The pastebin listing that I posted contains all the differences between ZenGodcoin source code and ZenAchilles source code.

I found it notable how few differences are actually required to separate one functioning altcoin from another.

If you'd like to take a gander yourself, if only to see what I'm blithering on about, there is a technique which helps. When I put an altcoin under the microscope the first thing I do is use a little Python script I wrote to rebrand the coin as Zencoin (ZENZ). I did this with Godcoin and Achilles, giving me ZenGodcoin and ZenAchilles.

I then compare the two directories and their contents, side-by-side, using a visual diff and merge tool: http://meldmerge.org/. It gives a very clear and accessible visual presentation of differences in directory structure and between files.

What the hey, lets have some piccies ...






Here's a screenshot of ZencoinGodcoin vs ZencoinAchilles:





Meld allows me to double-click the blue-lit names to show the content side-by-side. In a moment, we'll have a look at the differences in base58.h but first I need to draw your attention to the left-and-right vertical navigation scrollers - the coloured blocks show the location of pairs of files that differ. In the directory-level presentation, one coloured block = one filepair. In the above listing, a total of eight (8!) changed files is sufficient to create a functionally distinct altcoin.

There's a similar vertical nav scroller for the file-level presentation and again, coloured bars (a single line differing in content) or coloured blocks (several contiguous lines of code differing). Not too challenging I hope but an illustration should be, er, well, illuminating ...

Here's a screenshot of the one-and-only difference between godcoin/src/base58.h and achilles/src/base58.h:




That's it.

That's the difference which shows up as a blue block in the directory-level display.


Pretty much the same goes for all but a few of the rest of the blue-lit files, e.g. here's a screenshot of the (again, one-and-only) difference between godcoin/src/net.cpp and achilles/src/net.cpp:




I re-ran diff configured to output just the minimum context (filename and line no) for clarity - these are the only differences:
http://pastebin.com/dWht3JRu

And (for eyewatering completeness) files matching the patterns below were excluded from the comparison:

Code:

$ cat notthese
*.qm
*.ts
*.png
*.jpg
*.svg
*.o
*~
*.ico
*.icns

In essence, my workflow runs as follows:

Code:

$ git clone http://github.com/foo/bazcoin.git
$ cd bazcoin
$ rm -rf .git*  # don't need it
$ ln -s bazcoin-qt.pro coin-qt.pro  # allows meld comparison
$ grep 'BTC' src/qt/bitcoinunits.cpp  # what units were actually coded?
$ grep -r BAZZA src/  # ensure no clash with source code
$ ../omm.exe BazCoin BAZZA # use XYZZY to suppress symbol replacement if it'd muck up the source code
$ cd ..
$ meld bazcoin godcoin

If you feel up to it, you can have a go yourself. We've set up a bitbucket repository that you can use:
https://bitbucket.org/minkizmates/zencoin.git

There's a small collection of zenified coins (incl godcoin and achilles) for use when comparing with fresh candidates along with the “omm.exe” Python script to create Zencoins:
https://bitbucket.org/minkizmates/zencoin/src

meld will usefully show 3 sources side-by-side, viewing recently-launched elitecoin, fusecoin and sumcoin side-by-side is quite instructive in showing how little they differ.

The immediately-prior post notes “once a source code was ONCE reviewed, the people tend to trust it indefinitely” - all too true but a simple application of meld originalwallet newwallet will highlight the changes.


Am I forgiven?

Cheers

Graham

Edit: add response to immediately-previous post rather than make yet another post

[smalltimer]

You could use an old computer exclusively to install wallets onto, and never let a wallet near your newest computer that you use for everything else.

if you do that disable netbios on the machine to be safe.

[furlong]

Never download any new wallets

[soulcity]

stay with BTC 

[bitsmichel]

You could go with the more popular coins, this forum you can sort by "Replies" and "Views". As here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0;sort=replies;desc
The idea behind this is: if there is no community behind the coin, why would you invest in it?

[giveBTCpls]

You could go with the more popular coins, this forum you can sort by "Replies" and "Views". As here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0;sort=replies;desc
The idea behind this is: if there is no community behind the coin, why would you invest in it?

Yeah but thats the thing, for it to be a community someone has to risk and start getting involved, without that nothing exists. But at this point, im scared to check any new wallets because let's be honest, most people just want to scam other people to get BTC, and god know what shit they can put into a wallet these days. So if you dont get in early to risk getting into a legitimate good coin that explodes and missing an early investors spot, but if you do get in early, you risk getting scammed and robbed.

[Amph]

1) dedicated shit coins rig

2) don't throw btc at them

3) don't mine shit coins for too much, some of them may be worthless

[Videlicet]

So what is your way of checking the coin?

I posted a lengthy response to someone asking about a specific coin, I hope you'll excuse me for quoting it in full here but i) I've found that stuff-behind-links tends to stay there and play little part in the discussion, so I've adopted a strategy of transclusion and ii) I'm just a saddo:

Great Analysis!

Viz.

[roslinpl]

So far so good - together we did pointed and spotted most important security steps which will help us and others to stay safe.

Thanks to all of you for responses and we are still waiting for some more!

So what is your way of checking the coin?

I posted a lengthy response to someone asking about a specific coin, I hope you'll excuse me for quoting it in full here but i) I've found that stuff-behind-links tends to stay there and play little part in the discussion, so I've adopted a strategy of transclusion and ii) I'm just a saddo:

Great Analysis!

Viz.

Indeed great Analysis.

Many of the altcoins are just forked - but perhaps if someone just copy other coin and change just literally few lines in the code he is not reliable and his coin wont success. Which is a good thing to know before getting any of those coins.

cheers!

[marcello2]

SCAM COIN? LIKE ULTRACOIN??

[counter]

Great minds think alike they say..  I started a thread not long ago asking the community what questions we should be asking devs of new coins to avoid falling into the same old Pump and Dump traps.  I like the way you went about it and hope that people start adding to this dissussion.  There are some great points I hadn't been doing myself mentioned by roslinpl. 

One thing I think is important is understanding what makes these coins a scam is hype.  Don't invest money unless you understand what the coin has to offer and stay updated on the development of the coin.

[Towlie]

It's pretty easy to stay away from them. Just stay away from them. Don't download or mine them or do anything. Just ignore them. 99% are pure crap.