[Cryptography] Altcoin volume

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Sun, Sep 24, 2017 at 11:47 PM, James A. Donald <jamesd at echeque.com>
wrote:

> Every website reporting on the altcoin boom and the initial coin offering
> boom https://coinmarketcap.com/coins/ has an incentive to not look too
> closely at the claimed numbers.
>
> Crypto currency is real, and presents the opportunity to make enormous
> amounts of money.  Also, scams are real, and present the opportunity to
> lose enormous amounts of money.


​And the two are one and the same.

The cost of setting up an altcoin and generating the first million coins is
essentially nil. ​If you do it right, you can create the illusion of there
being an open mining effort. If you have a reasonable chunk of chain you
can spend time shuffling it between your accounts, buying and selling to
create a false market.

If the rubes take the bait, your million coins can be worth $100 million on
paper pretty quick. There probably isn't the liquidity to cash out direct
but you can probably swap for some Bitcoin and get out that way.

​The thing about a Ponzi scheme is that the folk caught up in the fever
will never thank you for pointing out they bought a bubble:​

* ​There is no value being created​. Electricity is turned into coins but
you can't turn the coins back into electricity (or Tesla would used it for
their cars).

* BitCoin has not demonstrated ability to function except when the value of
Bitcoin is increasing exponentially. Within 2 years, the total value of
BitCoin will exceed the value of USD in circulation. In 4 it will exceed
all currencies.

* The reason BitCoin functions at all is that it is being used to evade
China's currency controls. Which probably does not worry China overmuch in
itself. What is probably more worrying is the amount of cash moved in to
BitCoin that isn't moving out. If the bubble bursts (and it will), that
will be an instant fiscal crisis for China if they don't take steps soon.
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