I want to talk a bit about altcoins.
As I’m sure you know, an altcoin is any digital token or coin that is NOT Bitcoin.
So basically 99.999% of all crypto are altcoins.
Some of them, of course, are big beasts like Ethereum, Binance coin, even Tether, but some are truly miniscule. The smallest with an actual value I’ve been able to find is QWT (whatever that is and whatever it does) below $1 million. But below that (literally thousands of lines) there is no discernible value.
I don’t think anyone is exactly sure how many altcoins there are. The last time I had a handle on it there were about 22,000 altcoins that had been created, but more than 14,000 of them were completely defunct. And of course there are always the scam coins which effectively never existed (the most notorious being Onecoin) and everyday we hear about this one or that one being shut down in one country or another.
There is of course a common thread. No one started a crypto currency to lose money. It is possible to do that if you are buying and selling, but if you create it you can pretty much guarantee you won’t LOSE money. And by the way, why do we need thousands of cryptocurrencies when there are just about 200 real tradfi currencies?
I can’t even imagine how the promoters even think up what their shiny new coin is actually for – but of course a lot of them don’t bother. You may be aware at the time of the South Sea Bubble there was a company raising money on the basis that it was never going to tell anyone what it actually did. And guess what, it didn’t but it did take the money and ran.
To give you some idea of the scale involved in all this, I checked how many altcoins are created each day. At least, that’s what I thought I was looking up but it turned out I was directed to how many were being created per HOUR. And how many do you think that might be? Personally, I thought it might be one or two, but it turns out that is how many are being created per MINUTE.
So per day you are looking at around 1,500. So the numbers in existence now are massively more than 22,000, and I have seen a figure on Coinmarketcap which seems to suggest more than a million. Unbelievable.
What is even more unbelievable is that there are coins created which are actually called “scam coins” from the get go. Imagine: “I am creating a new all signing all dancing crypto which is a bona fide scam coin. BUY BUY BUY!”
I was with the listing manager of MEXC, one of the better exchanges this week and he was telling me they turned down more than 100 projects every week. That said, they do list about 20 to 30 on a going basis every week. And they only list, they don’t raise money for them.
Now you could be forgiven for thinking that there aren’t too many of those about. But, sadly, you would be completely wrong. I simply didn’t believe the numbers and had to double check and cross check before I dared to put finger to keyboard. Since I started writing this article more than thirty will have been created. That’s right. They are being foisted on the gullible public at the rate of 33 every ten minutes.
People refer to crypto as the Wild West and things are supposedly getting better. But I can only tell you I was shocked at what I found and can only reiterate that proper regulation is required for altcoins; proper oversight is required; and proper common sense from the investing public too.
Temple Melville, CEO of The Scotcoin Project CIC
