TIL: Of Jormungand Bitcoin and ICOs Catnip For Scammers

There is an old Danish animated movie from 1986 called, Valhalla.

Which, tells the tale of three kids who get involved with Thor & Loki and that wild bunch of kick ass Gods.
That live in Valhalla.

In Valhalla one of the feats of Thor is to try and lift a cat.

An easy task, you would think.

Thor, a Master of the Universe.

And the cat, well, was just a cat?

But the cat is really, Jormungand a multidimensional Sea Serpent.

Also known as the, Midgard Serpent or World Serpent, the middle child of the Giantess Angrboða and Loki.

Looking like one thing in our dimension but extending in all its magnificent strength, on into another.

Of course Thor has no hope of really ever winning this contest.

But, he doesn't lose either.

(Its in Danish, but just turn of the sound and watch Thor, try and nearly succeed in lifting Jormungand)

Which brings me back nicely to Bitcoin.

Bitcoin seems to me to be displaying all the hallmarks of, Jormungand the Multidimensional Cat.

As Bankers, Master of the Universes and Economic experts battle to understand and possibly slay the,
Mathematical Mythical Blockchain Jormungand.

I was trying to explain Bitcoin to my sister and I got back the classic, "You mean the Fake Money."

So the Bitcoin World Serpent. Looks like one thing, but is extending into every dimension available.

And no, the Bankers and Economic experts, my sister or even the mighty Thor, cannot lift or even grasp it.

But in this film Valhalla, (and it is a Danish made film, check it out,) we also meet Loki.

Loki is the legendary trickster and Shapeshifter.

He exists because we exist.

You cannot have an Utopia without somehow or other, creating or becoming a Loki.

And so in the the world of, Mathematical Mythical Blockchain Beasts. Or the, Alt-Coins, as we know them.

Loki dwells.

Waiting to skim a Million$$ or three from eager investor moths, drawn to the glittering light of Crypto Pyrite Gold.

Despite being nicknamed fool's gold, Pyrite is sometimes found in association with small quantities of gold.

So it follows, Crypto Pyrite Gold, will be found hiding among the offers of genuine Cryptocurrency.

And so we enter the world of Loki, the land of Pump N Dump.

And the Crypto Scammers.

To an outsider, the whole,Cryptocurrency Transaction Business,does have a, Bernie Madoff, Ponzi whiff to it.

And good oul Bernie the ultimate Ponzi Ringmaster kept his Flying Circus, running, for around 40yrs.
Bernie Made Off with Millions$$, as the joke goes.

Modern day Alchemists, are turning Mathematical Mythical Blockchain Strings, into Crypto Gold.

But,Buyer Beware. In the Black Heart of some of these Alchemists, lies Loki.

The Trickster.

And they will take all your hard earned Dollar/Rupee/Renminbi.

And leave you, to rue the day you believed in, Mathematical Mythical Magic.

Herein lies the tale of OneCoin:

Read On:

Last month, the technology developer Gnosis sold 12.5 million worth of “GNO,” its in-house digital currency, in 12 minutes. The April 24 sale, intended to fund development of an advanced prediction market, got admiring coverage from Forbes and The Wall Street Journal.

On the same day, in an exurb of Mumbai, a company called OneCoin was in the midst of a sales pitch for its own digital currency when financial enforcement officers raided the meeting, jailing 18 OneCoin representatives and ultimately seizing more than 2 million in investor funds. Multiple national authorities have now described OneCoin, which pitched itself as the next Bitcoin, as a Ponzi scheme; by the time of the Mumbai bust, it had already moved at least $350 million in allegedly scammed funds through a payment processor in Germany.

These two projects—one trumpeted as an innovative success, the other targeted as a criminal conspiracy—claimed to be doing essentially the same thing. In the last two months alone, more than two dozen companies building on the “blockchain” technology pioneered by Bitcoin have launched what are known as Initial Coin Offerings to raise operating capital. The hype around blockchain technology is turning ICOs into the next digital gold rush: According to the research firm Smith and Crown,ICOs raised $27.6 million in the first two weeks of May alone.

Unlike IPOs, however, ICOs are catnip for scammers.

Read the Whole Article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/cryptocurrency-ponzi-schemes/528624/

Image Courtesy of Snake_Physiology