Faked Deaths, Missing Billions, and Industry Disruption
Crypto Wars by Erica Stanford examines the history of cryptography, from ancient times to the present day. The book covers the ongoing battle between privacy advocates and law enforcement, and what the future of encryption holds.
If you said “no,” then you just saved yourself a lot of (hypothetical) money. PlexCoin’s pitch was full of red flags. Those outlandish claims about PlexCard holders never having to worry about exchange rates and investors being able to use PlexCoin to pay their utility bills? They sounded too good to be true because they were. And there was nothing clairvoyant about PlexCoin’s “insights” into the rising future price of PlexCoin tokens – it’s simply impossible to accurately predict what value a currency, crypto or otherwise, will hold in the coming weeks or months.
If you’d done some more digging, you’d have found more red flags. For one thing, it’s standard practice for crypto companies to release a report ahead of their ICO, outlining how they’ll allocate the funds the ICO is projected to raise. PlexCoin did that . . . about 90 minutes before their presale started. That didn’t leave eager investors much time to do their research before buying in. And if you’d looked at their website, you might have noticed there was no team photo. In fact, there was no information about who was behind PlexCoin at all. According to PlexCoin, this was for undisclosed security reasons. They could have at least mimicked the equally scammy crypto startup Benebit and copy-pasted a photo from an elite British boy’s school to use on their staff page.
PlexCoin’s ICO raised $15 million. But their tokens never really rose in value, and their investors never saw the promised ROI. PlexCoin’s founders never expected they would. They siphoned off as much of that $15 million as they could before they were arrested for fraud, fined $100,000, and given a two-month jail term. Most investors never saw their money again.
PlexCoin wasn’t an isolated case. Between 2016 and 2018, you couldn’t throw a Bitcoin without hitting a dodgy crypto startup. While legitimate currencies like Bitcoin and Etherium have proven to be solid investments – sometimes stratospherically so – the market for crypto was initially barely regulated, poorly policed, and dangerously easy to exploit. The code behind Bitcoin was open source, meaning anyone could access it to create their own company with its own currency. And ICOs offered these companies an unchecked opportunity to raise vast amounts of money by conjuring tokens out of thin air, and then selling them without offering equity or having to meet any legal requirements. For fraudulent crypto companies this was, quite literally, money for nothing.
Nevertheless, investors couldn’t get enough. At the peak of the early crypto bubble, the market cap for cryptocurrencies reached a $1.8 trillion valuation. The volatile nature of this emerging market meant that some investors saw real returns, becoming millionaires – and more – overnight.
But all bubbles eventually burst. Now, law enforcement estimates that over 98 percent of crypto ICOs are, at best, failed projects. At worst, they’re outright scams. At least some companies were upfront about this. ScamCoin promised investors a 0 percent return on 100 percent of their investments – and, unlike many ICOs, it delivered on its promise. PonziCoin, despite its unpromising name, still raised $250,000 at its ICO. And plenty of other crypto companies with names like “Rich,” “Gold,” or “Real” seemed to promise authenticity and wealth.
Unfortunately, most investors would have done just as well if they’d invested in ScamCoin.
Crypto Wars: Faked Deaths, Missing Billions, and Industry Disruption (2021) lifts the lid on some of the cryptosphere’s most audacious scams and notorious scandals. From the missing cryptoqueen, Dr. Ruja Ignatova, to the tech whiz kid who – according to his creditors, at least – faked his own death, Crypto Wars shares this secretive industry’s most compelling stories.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
