
Monero Gold integer undeflow scam - dingo_bat
https://66shitcoins.com/blog/2018/2/4/monero-gold-the-story-and-tech-specs-of-a-4-million-usd-shitcoin-scam-brilliantly-executed
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crankylinuxuser
Yep, and $coin is right now a big steeming pile of..

Pretty much no matter how you shake it, there's scammers everywhere, fakecoins
abounds, and liquidity transfer from $coin to paper fiat currency is fraught
with dangers.

Look at the coinbase horror stories - it's now well established if your money
is stuck there, you __must __get the help from having a high post here on HN
if you want a reasonable response.

Long story short: some people will make a mint. A lot of people will lose
their shirts. It's a repeat of the stock market of the 10's and 20's, right
before the foundation of the SEC and the controls we now criticise.

\----------------------------

Edit: aaand here comes the -1's. I hit a nerve here from the looks of it.

1\. Coinbase:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16261136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16261136)

2\. Almost 1400 altcoins in existence.
[https://www.justcryptonews.com/120/how-many-altcoins-are-
the...](https://www.justcryptonews.com/120/how-many-altcoins-are-there)

3\. "Investors" mortgaging their house to buy bitcoin.
[http://fortune.com/2017/12/12/bitcoin-investors-
mortgages/](http://fortune.com/2017/12/12/bitcoin-investors-mortgages/)

4\. History of the SEC:
[https://www.sec.gov/Article/whatwedo.html](https://www.sec.gov/Article/whatwedo.html)
\----

Companies publicly offering securities for investment dollars must tell the
public the truth about their businesses, the securities they are selling, and
the risks involved in investing. --- WHICH ISNT BEING DONE

People who sell and trade securities – brokers, dealers, and exchanges – must
treat investors fairly and honestly, putting investors' interests first. ---
WHICH ISNT BEING DONE

~~~
aardvark291
> Long story short: some people will make a mint. A lot of people will lose
> their shirts.

Zero. Sum. Game.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Is it?

That doesn't sound correct. Bitcoin didn't exist a decade ago. The amount of
wealth it added can be measured directly.

But perhaps I'm not thinking of it in the right way.

~~~
umanwizard
Assuming Bitcoin is totally worthless in the long run (which I strongly
believe it is), the right way to think of it is that people who own it have
lost however much they paid for it. When you think of it that way, all the
sums add up to zero.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Suppose Bitcoin ends up worth a dollar. Since there will be 22 million BTC, it
seems true to say that it added at least as much wealth to the world as a
failed (acqui-hired) startup. Therefore it wasn't zero sum, correct?

It's not like we're doing anything else with our time, so we may as well have
a thought experiment.

~~~
wolco
the fiat currency required to fullfill the 22 million coins being cashed out
would be removed from other areas of society

~~~
sillysaurus3
Why is that different from a startup being acquired for $22M? In both cases,
people now have $22M to spend that they otherwise wouldn't have had.

~~~
rspeer
Startups are bought because the buying company plans to use them in a
profitable enterprise. What would you do with post-crash Bitcoins that you
paid a dollar for?

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root_axis
Seems like a pretty profitable scam that will remain viable for a while.
Creating a token is basically free and with some slick advertising and
community shilling you can create a social phenomenon that will make the
scammer rich with very little risk (until the inevitable crackdown).

~~~
oculusthrift
any idae if there is any legality issues to something like this?

~~~
root_axis
I'm not a lawyer, but I think this kind of stuff pretty clearly counts as
fraud under existing law and that these ICO scammers in general would
definitely be vulnerable to lawsuits, however:

A. The coin operators can remain anonymous. B. The coin operators could live
in any jurisdiction. C. It's nearly impossible to prove that the operators are
the ones who stole the token (which makes the scam particularly ideal).

~~~
FearNotDaniel
Surely in the case of (C), at least in the contract described in the article,
there would be a visible transaction showing that the contract owner caused
the underflow, because only the contract owner can sign a transaction burning
more tokens than there are in existence?

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CiPHPerCoder
> Monero, the most prominent fork of Bytecoin, the result of years of work of
> a very dedicated community, probably the most anonymous currency in
> circulation today - in the form of an ERC20-Token?

What about Zcash? I'm pretty sure that's a serious contender for the title of
"most anonymous".

~~~
dannyw
Zcash had a big bug that caused 400k tokens to be printed by an attacker due
to a typo of = instead of ==; so I’m not sure how serious it is if a
contender.

~~~
mrb
This was Zcoin, not Zcash.

Multiple critical bugs have been found in Monero, eg.
[https://getmonero.org/2017/05/17/disclosure-of-a-major-
bug-i...](https://getmonero.org/2017/05/17/disclosure-of-a-major-bug-in-
cryptonote-based-currencies.html)

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thisisit
So, let me get this straight this is a scam because there was $214k in volume
at the price of $0.17 and developer created tons of coins for himself? Couple
of things which comes to mind:

First, how do we know it wasn't simply rounds of wash trading which led to
this? Dev(s) selling coins to himself or friends and family to bump up the
price and volume? Because it seems people get stuck up on data like market
cap, volume etc in crypto which can be faked easily.

Second, the only exchange it is trading on is CoinExchange. What role, if any,
do exchanges play in running these scams? Because it is harder to pull of
volume and price markup without having a reference price feed.

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qertoip
"Monero GOLD" was a scam fork of the legitimate cryptocurrency "Monero" \-
just to avoid any confusion.

