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It’s time to expose crypto 💩

This is a post we wish we didn’t have to write.

Cryptocurrency movement started as a naive experiment in 2009. It was about a developer creating a prototype of a distrubuted digital currency. It was about a possibility of a better economic model. It was about freedom of expression.

And it was about delivering real value through new technology. Making money wasn’t the primary objective. It was a possible consequence of making something of value over the course of many years.

But in the last few years, things started to turn sour. With the advent of the ICO movement and some ICO funded projects raising massive funds, more and more people started to smell “easy” money.

When greed takes over, it opens the doors to all sorts of shady people. It’s 2018, and there is now a plethora of dubious, if not outright scammy, crypto projects.

This kind of projects contribute nothing to the ecosystem and deliver 0 value. In fact, in the long term, they give the whole crypto space and ICOs a bad reputation. The only thing we can do is talk openly about it.

The initial list of 💩 crypto projects

That’s why, from today on, we are starting to display an icon next to heavily problematic crypto projects.

Here is the initial set of 💩 projects on Coincall:

How we mark shitcoins from now on Coincall 👇

There will obviously be controversy about some of the coins that we list here. If there was no controversy and nobody stood behind them, they would already be worth $0 after all.

That said, we like to use straightforward, old-school reasoning. When multiple variables point to shady, misleading behavior - it almost always turns out - there’s a reason for it!

Or as the old duck test goes:

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

That’s why we believe informing our users about potential dangers is our right and obligation. We don’t want to keep tolerating bad behavior and suspicous business practices.

📉 The shitcoin market cap

Let's put things into perspective. If we sum up the current implied market cap of all our 💩 coins the number is a staggering [[currentMarketCap]].

Even just a year ago (April 2017) this number was "only" a bit above $100M. Obviously the giant crypto growth wave of 2017 brought with it a handful of shady characters with ulterior motives. Let's hope this trend reverses sooner than later.

Real-time chart of the current shitcoin market cap 👇

🎪 Example: Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoin Cash is a fork of Bitcoin that claims to focus on lowering transaction fees mainly through increasing the block size. There's nothing wrong about this. Bitcoin is open source and anyone can fork it and change a few of its properties. There are many well-established and regulated brokers in UK where we can buy Bitcoin. Click here to know about these best brokers based on their ease of use, fees and the services provided by them.

The problem with Bitcoin Cash is that its main supporters continuously try to usurp Bitcoin's name and thus confuse new users.

First, they've turned the Bitcoin.com website, which serves as a popular starting point for many newcomers, into a full-blown Bitcoin Cash promotion engine. Then they've purchased the @Bitcoin Twitter handle. Again, they turned it into a Bitcoin Cash propaganda tool (it has since been suspended by Twitter). The list of similar shady dealings goes all and on.

The video below features the main figure behind Bitcoin Cash, Roger Ver. You can judge for yourself if this is the kind of leader you want behind something you invest in:

💸 Real people will end up losing real money

It’s easy to forget that the crypto world isn't just a random “we-are-all-getting-rich” party. It’s not just kids playing with virtual graphs that always go up and to the right.

There are now a lot of people involved, investing real money. Scammers ultimately get caught and Ponzi schemes end up running out of powder. Pump and dumpers get out before it’s too late. And the normal people... well, they are usually left holding the bag.

🔨 The return to the value

We are not even going deep into the problem here.

Just look at various ICO whitepapers, teams and “products” that raise millions of dollars on a daily basis. We are appalled at the low-quality level of these projects. Most can't even construct a coherent website yet are raising millions of dollars. Professional early-stage investors would not give them a penny.

That’s why, as crypto investors, we need to start evaluating fundamentals and stop getting carried away by the promises of making a quick buck. We’ve talked about this in our last post.

So let’s get back to delivering value. Back to building valuable products. Tackling real problems that actually need decentralized solutions. And let’s also get back to exposing obvious bad actors whose only purpose is to mislead people.

Today is the first step.

We’ll be introducing more tools to help normal people make better crypto investments in the near future.