Cryptocurrency mega-thread

[maryjames]

The difference between success and failure in crypto is having patience.


ICP only getting started for mine. I’ll be holding for a long time.

 

[LongBombFromOutside50]

Jason Akermanis has launched his own cryptocurrency.

"In the 11 years since he retired from AFL, ex-Brisbane Lions star Jason Akermanis hasn’t given up on fame and has since turned his attention to cryptocurrency. Last Tuesday, he launched his own Australian cryptocurrency, Zucoin, which he expects to make in excess of $6 billion.
“It’s simply a much better product than bitcoin,” Mr Akermanis told news.com.au, expecting it to rock the crypto world in coming months.

“The biggest problem in crypto – we call them the triennial problem. You’ve got cost, speed – it could take four minutes or four hours (to mine crypto) — and then you’ve got scalability. “Zucoin solves every problem. “The cost is a text message, the speed is an instant.” Zucoin has been four years in the making and it’s cost $23 million to get up and running. Mr Akermanis, 44, says they’ve already made that money back in the week since the platform launched.

There are 1843 people who have purchased at least one Zucoin, at time of writing. A lot of them are investors who bought the coins off the market. “At least a tenth of them came through me direct,” Mr Akermanis added. “They (the coinholders) vary from buying one to 300,000 coins. “Ranged from about $400 to $1.6 million (in expenditure).” Each coin costs $60, which makes it the most expensive cryptocurrency yet in terms of it initial price.

Bitcoin launched back in 2009 for $0. A year later, it was selling for less than a cent and by 2011, was worth $1 per coin. The second biggest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, wasn’t much different, first trading for $3.76 in 2015. Now bitcoin is worth $59,095.68 while Ethereum is $3,986.58. Despite the volatility of the market, Zucoin, unlike its rivals, cannot drop below $60 per coin. “We put in the software where you can’t sell for less (than $60),” Mr Akermanis said. “It cancels the order. You can try but you won’t be able to do it."

Mr Akermanis believes his coins are far superior to the others out there. “Bitcoin has restricted itself because it’s not going to last,” the former sports player said. “It has 12 million coins, that can be broken down into 16 parts per coin. “If bitcoin was at $100,000 per coin, it doesn’t break down enough for me to do small transactions.” For the average punter, they wouldn’t be able to afford bitcoin if the price keeps going up, according to him. His coin, on the other hand, is open for anyone. Bitcoin, Ethereum and all the other coins like them go through a crypto exchange which is slow and lacks security. Zucoins go through a server and “works in a split chain, different to a blockchain” making it more secure.

Mr Akermanis started to realise the potential for cryptocurrency in 2010. He was one of the first buyers for Bitcoin, and has since expanded to include all the major players in his cryptocurrency portfolio. If he sold up all his crypto now, he estimates he’d have an extra $250,000 in his pocket or “something ridiculous” like that. But ever the savvy businessman, he has no plans to sell. “The key is to buy regularly and hold, through the highs, through the lows,” he said. “Never selling, just keep buying, only put in whatever you’re prepared to lose.”

After his football career ended, Mr Akermanis entered the world of foreign exchange. It was here where he became involved with notorious businessman Allan Endresz, who was convicted of stock market manipulation in the 1990s and is now embroiled in a racehorse scandal from last year. The two men created Zukaz, an augmented reality company inspired by watching teenagers walk down the street as part of the game Pokemon Go.
Zucoin derived its name from Zukaz. While creating Zukaz, their base of operations was Albury in regional NSW where they employed a local IT guy called Robert Novak. Novak was the one who designed the software which makes Zucoin possible. “He’s the brains of the operation,” Mr Akermanis said. “The real genius isn’t any of us, it’s the software engineer, Robert Novak.”


If Aker launching his own coin while having a limited understanding of crypto isn't a sign of a market bubble then I don't know what is. He's made half a dozen stupid statements in that article alone.

LMAO This has got to be one the funniest things I've seen in the space for a long time - probably since Paris Hilton's interview about bitcoin in around April or so.

Putting aside for a moment how much of a shtcoin this sounds like and the fact that he'll probably rug his investors.

He was one of the first buyers of bitcoin, yet he:

• Doesn't know the total supply of bitcoin or the smallest amount of btc that can be transferred
• Doesn't understand the scalability trilemma
• Has made "something ridiculous" like $250,000

Hmm.

 

[ash_1050]

He was one of the first buyers of bitcoin, yet he:

• Doesn't know the total supply of bitcoin or the smallest amount of btc that can be transferred

This is the bit that baffles me the most. If BTC gets to $100,000 then one satoshi (0.00000001) would be worth US$0.001.

By comparison Aker's shitcoin, which by his own admission "cannot drop below $60 per coin" and I presume cannot be broken down into smaller portions means you can only ever trade in $60 increments. I'm going to spend an hour or two reviewing the coin and will share my thoughts, so lengthy post to follow.

Edit: I spoke with Zucoin as part of my DD below, the Zucoin can be broken down to 17 decimal places. Still makes no sense that Aker would pitch Zucoin as doing something Bitcoin can't, when bitcoin absolutely does trade for fractions of a coin.

 

[cryptor]

Mr Akermanis started to realise the potential for cryptocurrency in 2010. He was one of the first buyers for Bitcoin, and has since expanded to include all the major players in his cryptocurrency portfolio. If he sold up all his crypto now, he estimates he’d have an extra $250,000 in his pocket or “something ridiculous” like that. But ever the savvy businessman, he has no plans to sell. “The key is to buy regularly and hold, through the highs, through the lows,” he said. “Never selling, just keep buying, only put in whatever you’re prepared to lose.”

If he's been regularly buying, holding, never selling since 2010 then surely that $250,000 figure is missing quite a few extra zeros...

 

[ash_1050]

Alright on the off chance you're someone who's contemplating throwing your money away it's Zucoin deep dive time. Firstly let's take a look at Zuzak, the overarching thing that kick started Zucoin. "Zukaz is a thoroughly modern tech company spearheading a new approach for brands to connect and advertise to their customers, in a fun and challenging AR-style real-world voucher hunting app." Sounds like an app in need of a cryptocurrency, and well done to them for getting their Zuzak project up and running.

Next let's take a look at the company as a whole, starting with it's management team.

Allan is the founder, and presumably comes with a stack of experience which he'd outline in his bio, right?


Erm, that's odd, we've got no idea who this guy, what he's done in the past, or what his credentials are. He doesn't have a LinkedIn profile either (I searched).

Not to worry, like most of his tech savvy startup founder buddies Allan has a Twitter account in which he describes himself as an "entrepreneur, litigant and thoroughbred race horse owner of (a horse called Alligator Blood)". Wait, what? Litigant? Allan is currently suing Racing Australia, Racing QLD and QLD Racing Integrity Board who apparently disqualified the horse after it's run in the 2020 Magic Millions 3yo Guineas. Never one to mix business with pleasure Allan appeared in a video in which he sports an Alligator Blood hat in the Zukaz office with a giant Zucoins logo in the background to explain why his horse, which tested positive to banned substances after the race, was the legitimate winner. Bizarrely the video is hosted on Dropbox rather than Youtube, which strikes me as odd for a guy who's playing in the tech space, as it's a very Boomer thing to do.


But enough about Allan, let's take a look at CTO Robert Novak. Robert's bio also tells us very little, but his Twitter retweets show he's a nerd, which is what you want in a CTO. According to the Zucoin's website he's been with them since 2016.



Which is odd, because his Linkedin says he joined the company in November 2019, and before that was a lowly web developer at a company called Coxtech, as Robert notes in the 'see more' section of his CTO description "This position started out as a client contract that grew into a bigger role." So Robert got poached by Zukaz in late 2019 to work for them full time to prevent them having to keep engaging a third party, and presumably to focus on Zucoin. Saying he was 'employed' in 2016 is a bit of a stretch when he was clearly working at another company who were contracted to do it among other projects for other companies.


Mate Tokay and Sam Volkering are both big names in the crypto space and very good advisors to have, though it remains to be seen in what capacity they are advising Zucoins, as once again there's very little information in their bios on the Zucoins website.

So where does Aker fit into all this? His LinkedIn outlines it in his profile where he lists himself as a "Licensee Real Estate Agent" who moonlights as a "Tech Start up Zucoins" in his spare time, after he was formerly an Accredited Corporate Manager at Zuzak. So what does Aker do at Zucoins? Fecked if I know, but saying Zucoins is the "only truly P2P crypto currency ever built" is a bit rich given literally almost every cryptocurrency is a P2P cryptocurrency.



To say Zucoin is the only true P2P cryptocurrency ever built would be misleading, and Zucoin wouldn't make any misleading statements at all, especially not in their FAQ section.


Wait, what? The Zucoin price "should be" 20% of the Bitcoin price? Are they tied as a currency pair? No, no they're not. And with BTC currently AU$62,000 at the time of writing that makes a single Zucoin worth more than $12,000 according to their FAQ section. Which is, of course, completely false and highly misleading. Especially given in the paragraph above that they're currently selling them for $60 per Zucoin. To be fair they may have written the FAQ guide prior to November 2015, and just not updated it since, back when BTC was trading at AU$451 and therefore Zucoin should have been worth a paltry $90 using their comparison guide. Not bad for a coin that wouldn't be invented for another couple of years.

Thankfully there's a crypto comparison guide that shows a more accurate reflection that as of 22/06/21 Zucoin was worth $60 and BTC was worth $41,658.98, meaning Zucoin was worth approximately 0.144% of a BTC rather than the 20% shown above. Boy I hope somebody got fired for that blunder.


Also side note, and one I love as an investing nerd, the market cap for Zucoins is listed as $6 billion, which is technically correct. Why technically? Because the 100 million Zucoins on offer are presumed to be worth the last price paid for them, in the same way a company market cap is calculated using the formula of (last trade value * shares on issue). So if someone buys a single Zucoin for $60, straight away they get a $6b market cap. Given Zucoins cannot be sold for less than $60/coin that means they have at least a $6b market cap for as long as the company exists. Which just goes to show market caps aren't worth the keyboard strokes they're written with when it comes to startup cryptocurrencies.

They also spend 3 pages showing how chad Zucoins stack up against virgin Bitcoin, which highlights a lot of the issues with Bitcoin that myself and many others have expressed as well.







The note above particularly caught my eye, as they point out that if you lose your wallet file you lose your Bitcoin. Which is correct, assuming you keep your Bitcoin on a .DAT wallet file, which I think 99.99% of people stopped doing in about 2014, but I digress. Zucoin don't have this issue, they have Splitcryption hashing technology that allows users to securely backup and restore ZKZ wallets in the event you lose your wallet file. Splitcryption hashing technology sounds pretty fancy, so what is is?


It's a private key. Splitcryption hashing technology is a private key. Which if you lose the private key you lose access to your wallet, just like Bitcoin.


Sound familiar? Now you can lose your Zucoins in exactly the same way Bitcoin has been offering for at least the last 10 years, except Bitcoin called it a private key rather than "Splitcryption hashing technology". Now I could be wrong here and Splitcryption hashing technology could have more complexity than that, but it's not a thing in the crypto space at all and only yields a total of 4 results on Google so I've got no idea what it is or what makes it so special.

I could go on but it's been a lengthly bit of due diligence already, so let's focus on the key takeaways here. The company is run by a guy who's not a tech person and is still salty he had a horse race stripped from him after his horse was found with banned substances in its blood. Their CTO looks like a smart guy, but has done a pretty poor job of articulating any real use case for Zucoin and hasn't stopped anybody from posting misleading statements about the coin (i.e. Aker and their FAQ page). The coin itself doesn't appear to be any different from the thousands of other coins out there that aim to do the same thing, offer a P2P system for cheap and efficient payments. And they're based in Albury, which isn't known for its tech expertise.

Would I buy Zucoin? Absolutely not.

 

[Freak Dodgeball Accident]

I take my hat off to you, Ash. That was absolutely brilliant! I had a quick look the other day but you've summed it all up beautifully.

Would I buy Zucoin? Absolutely not

So this is definitely a buy signal for everyone else [emoji6]

 

[ash_1050]

I take my hat off to you, Ash. That was absolutely brilliant! I had a quick look the other day but you've summed it all up beautifully.

It was a fun exercise to keep the DD skills sharp. If I was serious about possibly investing it would have been another 10-20 hours of research on top before making a decision, but in this case it's not one that's worth considering. Doing all the legwork and honing your DD skills how you find gems before other people do, and that's where you make the best returns.

So this is definitely a buy signal for everyone else [emoji6]

If you see value in it that I don't by all means go for it haha

 

[toxic]

It was a fun exercise to keep the DD skills sharp. If I was serious about possibly investing in it would have been another 10-20 hours of research on top before making a decision, but in this case it's not one that's worth considering. Doing all the legwork and honing your DD skills how you find gems before other people do, and that's where you make the best returns.



If you see value in it that I don't by all means go for it haha

Does Comedy value count?

 

[Nothing]

Would I buy Zucoin? Absolutely not.

That's exactly what a bear would say.

 

[faible]

That's exactly what a bear would say.

So you’re saying buy $600k of XRP?

I've sold my $600k of XRP and buy in to ZUCOIN.

 

[Ghost Patrol]

Does Comedy value count?

Surprised he hasn't released an Akermanis handstand NFT

 

[Nothing]

I've sold my $600k of XRP and buy in to ZUCOIN.

To the Zu!!!!

 

[faible]

Surprised he hasn't released an Akermanis handstand NFT

He's probably reading this thread, so expect it to happen soon.

 

[The Dice Man]

I listened to Aker on some podcast last week and he just doesn't shut up and says things that just aren't true multiple times. Nothing is ever his fault either.

 

[maryjames]

Hope someone reading this thread took my advice on icp

 

[The Dice Man]

Hope someone reading this thread took my advice on icp

It's treating you well. I was going to get in on it on its next 15-20% drop but it's just kept going up and up. 80% for the week.

 

[Evolved1]

Hope someone reading this thread took my advice on icp

Well played. I should have bought in when everyone was laughing at it. That's generally a reversal signal.

 

[maryjames]

Well played. I should have bought in when everyone was laughing at it. That's generally a reversal signal.

Yep seen it many times. Like ripple earlier this year when it went to 0.16. Everyone saying it’s gonna die. That’s go time. Always look for it.

Also not selling anyways. It’s a long hold for now.

 

[ash_1050]

Quick update I sent Zucoins a message via email this morning as part of my DD (as well as contacting them on Facebook).


As you can see Zucoins cares not for answering basic questions, and instead is all about promoting people giving them money in exchange for Zucoins. It should be noted that Zucoins are not currently accepted anywhere for payment in any capacity, thereby rendering them currently worthless unless you sell your Zucoin to someone who's d̶u̶m̶b̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ looking to buy more Zucoin.

 

[burge13]

thereby rendering them currently worthless unless you sell your Zucoin to someone who's d̶u̶m̶b̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ looking to buy more Zucoin.

This could be said about 99% of coins and a shitload of the spec end on the asx tbf

 

[Evolved1]

Zucoin seems no worse than most other shitcoins. List it on binance, give it a dog icon, and that shit will moon.

 

[The Dice Man]

Did ADA get a contract?

 

[BACCS]

Did ADA get a contract?

It was just late to the party

 

[The Dice Man]

It was just late to the party

Broke a big resistance level today.

 

[BACCS]

Broke a big resistance level today.

It has a very strong community, stronger than most in the crypto world. It’s the next crypto institutions are buying after BTC and ETH. Smart contracts are meant to go live in September, so this could be the run up in price as that approaches. Charles Hoskinson was also very vocal about the crypto regulation in the US yesterday and went on a massive rant about the senators behind it, so that may be gaining positive attention from the crypto community. Plenty of things going for it right now, just need to actually deliver smart contacts and it will take off.