Some of you have may have seen this CNBC article making the rounds, titled Greek Island Agrees To Test Digital Currency. Now, before you rush over to Cryptsy to buy this coin, let’s take a moment to look at what’s really going on.
Shaky Origins
NautilusCoin is the creation of Brian Kelly. Actually, that’s giving him a little bit too much credit, because NautilusCoin was created using the now defunct coingen.io service, which means that his knowledge of cryptocurrency is no stronger than his ability to plug in numbers to a web form. Brief history lesson for those new to the game: coingen.io was a web-based service that automatically created an altcoin based on various parameters entered into a form (coin per block, block time, etc). These coins are inherently worthless because they lack a developer.
Note that the Greece article on CNBC is written by Mr. Kelly, and that no other news site has a mention of this news. It is a disgusting example of self promotion using a trusted platform, and should throw up major red flags for anyone considering investing in it.
Prior to this, Mr. Kelly has published several cringe-worthy articles demonstrating his lack of knowledge, here is just one of them. One need not read past the very first paragraph to see just how elementary his understanding of cryptocurrency us:
Bitcoin, the elegant elixir for our fractured financial system, is actually flawed. It’s vulnerable to attacks. There is, however, a fix — something I had installed on my own coin experiment. Here’s how it works:
Mr. Kelly seriously believes that his automatically generated cryptoabortion has fixed “problems” that Gavin and the rest of the core bitcoin developers do not see. Even more amusing is that Mr. Kelly is on the record years ago stating that Bitcoin is nothing more than “Tulipmania 2.0”, yet here he is with his inferior clone of Bitcoin and proclaiming its superiority. Incredible.
Just another scam?
Like most scamcoins, there is a premine involved here. Mr. Kelly touts that NautilusCoin is the first digital currency with a stabilization mechanism to reduce volatility. In reality, this “stabilization mechanism” is nothing more a huge chunk of premined coins that Mr. Kelly alone holds the keys to.
Moving on, let’s talk about Agistri, Greece. This is the island that has adopted NautilusCoin for this so-called test. As per wikipedia, Agistri covers a whopping 13.37 km^2 and has a population of just 1142. This is an insignificant number of people, especially compared to the total population of Greece, which is over 11 million. Why is this information not stated in the article? Could it be, possibly, an attempt to overstate the importance and magnitude of this event? You be the judge.
Traditional wisdom suggests that a competitor (altcoin) must be magnitudes better than the incumbent (bitcoin) to steal away market share. Some examples that come to mind are Myspace being replaced by Facebook, Digg being dethroned by Reddit, Blackberry being pushed into obscurity by Apple/Google. All of these companies had significant advantages that let them surpass the incumbent.
Being a spawn of coingen.io means that NautilusCoin brings absolutely nothing new to the table. It has no advantages. It’s nothing more than an awful clone that lacks everything that makes Bitcoin great – the huge network, the businesses and infrastructure built around it, and most importantly, the thousands of brilliant individuals that work on the codebase. It doesn’t stand a chance.
In the unlikely event of Greece adopting a national cryptocurrency, it would be Bitcoin, certainly not a fringe altcoin. The fact that one insignificant island is sponsoring NautilusCoin does not change that.
Conclusion
NautilusCoin is yet another slimy cryptocurrency that preys on the uninformed. Nonetheless, we can expect events like this to increase the price of the coin. As of the time of writing, it is up 80% over the past 24 hours on Cryptsy. However, the opportunity for non-holders to profit is long gone. You have already missed the train. By buying now, you will be on the receiving end of the dump. Those who currently hold the coin should sell now, before the initial hype dissipates.
Naut is not built on coingen, BK originally created a coin with coingen for fun but hired the Digibyte developers to profesionally make Naut. In fact Naut is one of the few coins that is upgraded to the latest BTC core.
Also I don’t think a multi-million dollar hedge fund manager needs to spend a year developing an alt coin just to dump on a few kids to make a few thousand dollars, I swear some people live in their own fantasy world where logic and reality doesn’t kick in.
That is just false. Digibyte modified the difficulty algorithm to Digishield. They had nothing to do with the initial creation of the coin. By his own admission, NautilusCoin was a product of coingen.
“I went back to Coigen and created another coin called Nautiluscoin, so named because a nautilus grows at a steady, stable rate.”
I agree with the second half of your statement. Mr. Kelly does not need to mess around with pump and dumps to cheat kids out of their money, and I do not believe he is doing so. However, that doesn’t mean members of the NautilusCoin community aren’t doing just that. It’s happening as we speak. That’s the “scam” here.
Final point: I don’t think Mr. Kelly is dumb by any means. Quite the opposite, actually. That being said, cryptocurrrency just isn’t his area of expertise, and as a result this project is just woefully ill-conceived. From day one, he has relied on coingen and other developers to do piecemeal mercenary type development. That’s not a formula for success. You need to have someone at the helm who understands what’s going on.
It is NOT a coingen, His first attempt was buy it was cloned of Digi-byte before it was even released.
Go look at the source code before making wild incorrect claims
Here is the link since you cant find it obviously:
https://github.com/nautiluscoin/nautiluscoin
and here is the codebase commit before you claim it was just Digi-Shield addition:
https://github.com/nautiluscoin/nautiluscoin/commit/1f8fa62114bfdf71c74786f9c27609e68829a19e
Look at the code skippy
Modification afterwards does not change the fact that nautiluscoin was initially conceived on coingen, and was in fact released to the public in that state.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101633191
“I was fortunate to meet the team at DigiByte and have them install DigiShield on Nautiluscoin. “
You are the one who can not read, my friend.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101573131
“I went back to Coigen and created another coin called Nautiluscoin, so named because a nautilus grows at a steady, stable rate.”
Maybe quoting it a second time will make you notice it?
Is this going to be auroracoin 2.0?
As others stated, i see no proof from the Greece government confirming acceptance.