How to get scam coins out of your BitShares account.
Are you tired of a bunch of scam coins in your Bitshares account?
If so transfer them to bitshares account:
donotbuy1
or
fakecoin1
These accounts are created as a garbage can, trash can or dumping ground for fake coins. It gets it out of your view and out of your account forever. That way you do not need to waste your valuable time looking at them. You can also hit the hide asset to hide it from your view. This was created primarily because I found these coins annoying.
Where do these coins come from?
Some of these coins may be sent out as an advertisement, to get you to look at the coin. Airdrops have been around for a long time, but I do not believe these assets will ever be worth anything. If you think it will be worth something by all means hold it, but if you want it out of your view forever transfer it away.
Some of these coins are created to scam people, as Bitshares allows anyone to create an asset. As an open blockchain there is no auditing authority to stop these creations. Some people go ahead and create fake coins in order to fool people. They create coins like riple which makes people believe it is Ripple (Ripple’s real ticker is XRP and Ripple is not currently traded on the Bitshares decentralized exchange.) Then they send out these coin to a bunch of accounts to make it look like they are widely held and then they trade these coins back and forth in “wash trading” in order to drive up volume and make it look like there are a real coins trading between real accounts. It is quite a complicated setup.
Yeah, it is a big bad place out there in the real world and there is not a lot that we can all do about it. I had this crazy idea to create two accounts with a really obvious name “fakecoin1” and “donotbuy1” these can become a dumping ground.
Now some people know you can see a full list of all bitshares traded coins here.
Notice one column shows how widely a coin is distributed.
You can also see who holds an asset here.
http://cryptofresh.com/a/RIPLE
Lots of accounts with the same balance is a giveaway this was air dropped.
You can also get similar information here.
http://open-explorer.io/#/assets
http://open-explorer.io/#/assets/1.3.3191
This is a really good place to go to check out an asset. The reason I choose the two names is that I want to make these accounts top holders of fake coins so they show up near the top of the list. I do not know if it will happen, but it might help you remember that we are trying to warn people -donotbuy1.
That way, maybe we can warn some other people about them. It should be rather obvious that if an account labeled donotbuy1 is a top holder of the currency …you should ask some questions. It would also make sense that if an account called “fakecoin1” is a holder there should be some more due diligence. I am cooking up some more plans… but for now donations of fake coins are welcome. Happy spring cleaning.
I should also mention that there are a few coins I have not been able to transfer, so if you run into one don’t get frustrated. If you know how to fix those, comment below. I am also open to other suggestions on what we can do to counter these silly frauds that are devaluing BitShares as an exchange.
Edit: Success. Go to the follow up post here.
https://steemit.com/bitshares/@cryptick/fake-coins-and-wash-trading-on-bitshares
Scam coins?!?
And I though I was getting rich! (sigh)
;-)
One more point I should add, by concentrating all the bad coins in a few accounts we make the distribution of these coins narrower. The main benefit is just never seeing them again.
The problem is, the fee in BTS will exceed the value of the fake coins. Its best to just select "Hide" in front of those coins so they don't clutter your screen.
Great Point. There is a transfer fee, but it is minimal. Given that the coins are worthless, the fee is totally going to be worth more than the value of the coins. Since, you bring it up, lets run the numbers. With BTS at $0.25 and the transfer fee of 0.01662 BTS oer transfer. You get 60 transfers for one BTS or it costs about 1/2 cent per transfer. However, for the cost of a dime or a quarter you cannot have to see them and you can help warn others. You can use the coins as a very small strike back against the scammers.
True, but if you really want to strike back at the scammers, a better way is to sell the scam coins right away when the scammer is creating a fake market by both buying and selling. Creating an order fee is a lot lot less (0.00092 BTS), and the scammer will pay BTS to buy their own crappy coin. E.g. http://cryptofresh.com/a/QVANTUM
You're right. I sell the all the time.
Interesting. I am definitely open to improving the idea. In many of these cases the transfers are such small amounts that selling it back is not worth the time. I think there is more room for improvement here though.
Another idea I have would be to get a number of other smart people together and do a cypto survey and poll. One could use google survey or survey monkey and then do a 1 to 10 rating on each coin. this could be done for all coins (ie coin market cap list) and even all top bitshares coins(say top 100). Each person could rate investablity on a scale of 1 to 10. If we had say, 15 smart people take the survey we would start to have good results which could be shared on steemit. Is anyone interested in participating in something like this?