Hello Steemit!
I've been trying to reach out to the masses for quite some time now and hopefully this is where I will have my salvation. The approval took a while but I hope it will be worth it. My Medium article got reported and deleted over 8 times now, Reddit posts deleted, accounts banned...
This article is about 'Credits blockchain' and their shameless way of doing an ICO and fooling everyone. As I have already written a pretty long text about my research on this, I will paste it here (in it's original/messy form) and also give an update on current situation since it's been like 2 weeks I had written it. I will provide the links to new comments, videos and reviews. I am not a native English speaker nor a professional writer so I apologize if you find some parts harder to understand.
Before I start I would like to thank everyone who has been supporting me. Also I would like to thank some Redditors/Youtubers for pointing out valid info and hardcore facts despite being bullied and labeled as fudders. Special thanks to "Ivan on tech" from Youtube who had the guts to openly speak up about this. He actually said he saw my article on Medium and wanted to use it for his video but never had a chance because it got deleted so quickly.
I will put the latest news here on the top followed by older ones. I suggest you to read everything chronologically, starting with the original text.
*** UPDATE *** 20th March
https://np.reddit.com/r/credits/comments/85btx8/commentary_of_credits_second_alpha_test_post/
"Messenger Bank, one of the biggest players in mobile blockchain banking, with an advantage of unprecedented transaction speed, offers currency conversion, transfers and a full range of traditional banking services with appropriate licensing. They have a proven track record of being a reliable and stable online bank. By 2020, their customer base is expected to grow by more than 200 mln new users."
“The highest transaction speeds and self-executing smart contracts greatly motivate us to work with CREDITS!” says Kent Kristensen.CEO of Messenger Bank. The Messenger Bank team has recently joined the testing of unique CREDITS platform."
Okay. Firstly, they announced it like it is fucking BNP Paribas. But no, it's actually an edgy looking http site (http://www.messengerbank.io) which is selling a fucking privacy coin. Videos are unreal cringe too. The team, no comment really...
"DebitCoin is a cryptocurrency (private internet currency), based on the Ethereum structure, that has a value based on the current market valuation. In other words, DebitCoin is an entirely decentralized open source worldwide currency, without any central authority. No traditional bank or financial institution will be managing, controlling or verifying your transactions."
Under Contacts it says they are from Bosnia (what the fuck?). Moreover they linked CEOs twitter: https://twitter.com/kentkristensen1 I just can't lol... This is too much, the pinned message, tweets, fake followers, retweet and follow back. What the fuck is going on with this shit? Oh yeah, that's not the only account this scammer has, same shit in there: https://twitter.com/kentkristensen2 , https://twitter.com/kentkristensen0 , https://twitter.com/garbenfeldt (apparently a team member of Messenger bank), https://twitter.com/normajeanwomen .
It even says: "follow back 100% fun and loving page works with @kentkristensen1 @garbenfeldt @normajeanwomen @kentkristensen0"
WOW very serious and real company, a true partner for Credits! You fucking scammers.
- Many people claim they got kicked out of Telegram group for asking valid questions and doing their research. Credits team has also disabled creating threads in their official sub on Reddit.
https://np.reddit.com/r/CreditsOfficial/comments/82yod8/answers_to_latest_questions_and_desicions_to/dvmvpw1/
https://np.reddit.com/r/CreditsOfficial/comments/82yod8/answers_to_latest_questions_and_desicions_to/dvmdg5d/
https://np.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/848yfu/censorship_on_credits_subreddit/
- Github code reviewed by someone who is actually familiar with coding, instead of people mindlessly shilling this all over the place in order to create hype:
https://np.reddit.com/r/coinjudge/comments/8440es/credits_red_flags/
- Other comments about that part of the code Credits published on Github:
- Some of Credits' shillers publishing "objective reviews". Same thing on Youtube (just search by date):
- Credits publishes "Answers to latest questions and desicions to prevent possible threats" on Reddit:
- Credits published one part of their code on Github:
https://credits.com/en/Home/New_Ins/4335
- Credits claim they tested their product and it is doing 300k tps:
https://credits.com/en/Home/New_Ins/4331
- "Crypto Gurus" made a non-technical review about Credits, which of course was much more accepted by ignorant/hyped people than what "Ivan on tech"tried to explain (check comments):
- "Ivan on tech" got downvoted to hell by Suppoman's army:
- "Ivan on tech" makes a video about Credits, explaining the code and how bad everything about Credits looks (check comments):
- Reddit thread about Suppoman shilling Credits:
- Comments about Credits smart contract not working properly:
Original text:
"Hey everyone. There have been so many ICOs coming for last few months. Some good, some awful, but people have always tried to find something they liked and stick with it. Shill it maybe, or simply recommend it to someone. Some people invest only because of the hype, to flip a coin right after it hits exchanges.
Fortunately, not many scams have been performed and that’s a very positive thing. But unfortunately, there have been some very, very shady looking ICOs. People like to call them ‘high risk, high reward’, but is it really like that? Or is it just throwing your money away thinking they will do well some day, hoping that they will be a new Etherium or Ripple and making you filthy rich?
I usually like to do a very, very deep research on ICOs in which I plan to invest. Credits was one of them which I have started researching back in November. I have collected a pretty long list of facts about this, so I will try to keep things simple and easy to understand. I will not be doing a ‘review’ of this because I assume that people who are interested in the project are familiar with it. Although we all know that’s not the case and most people have been investing without even checking the website…
I will try to explain the facts which obviously nobody is talking about amongst all the shill that has been going on. Given that I have collected loads of stuff I will have to pick only the most important ones and leave the rest aside. I will skip the details about the whitelist hack performed by their ‘community helper’, pretty weird token burn with strange numbers after ICO, a mysterious ‘investor from 2016’ who holds 28 mil tokens and was never revealed but got the tokens in pre-ico https://etherscan.io/token/0x292317a267adfb97d1b4e3ffd04f9da399cf973b#balances , escrow firm that was not revealed (or was it?),… KYC was needed for contributions above 10eth, but in the end they all were given a 0.5 eth personal cap (lol). But all that did not actually matter because you could just send your eth without ever being whitelisted. And later during the day they even lifted the personal cap… Yeah it was a mess and it is a mess to type/explain all of this at once to be honest. You already might be familiar with that ICO mess anyway.
I’ve been in their telegram for a pretty long time. You could say that it was managed pretty well, in terms of answering some basic questions regarding tokens/whitepaper and so on. Although I have never seen any developer in there, just some russian teens they used to call ‘community helpers’. So there was basically no communication with the devs whatsoever. Actually it was pretty misleading because admins are not able to answer anything technical, as they are not part of the ‘dev team’. They would just say ‘it’s handled by marketing department’ or ‘devs know what they are doing don’t worry’. Also, there was at least a dozen guys aggressively defending the project if anyone would ask edgy questions (a COO’s relative as I noticed by the same surname and some other guys with russian names). Banning people for doing the research and asking legitimate questions was pretty common. Although admins and helpers really did an awesome 24hour a day job, answering token metrics and stuff like that, it sometimes seemed like a proper communism in there because of the censorship.
But what they have been doing on Reddit is pretty fu*king outstanding. They have a huge marketing team taking care of this, as you might have seen on their website. It took them quite a while to prepare the shill for Reddit because I remember asking them for weeks when the sub would be up. Finally when it was up it was completely flooded with some paid accounts, all created basically at the same time, totally random names, doing some hyped conversations and looking awkward AF. I have also noticed that they shilled some other coins, like PumaPay or Leadcoin and some others… I don’t know if they have been paying those guys or doing it all by themselves. This actually continued even until now, you can check it in their sub and there is a list of shill accounts. Only with the shear purpose of leaving an impression that everything regarding Credits is incredible. Probably over 50 of them, here are only a few:
https://np.reddit.com/user/CampConcentricity
https://np.reddit.com/user/Akkera
https://np.reddit.com/user/Kasades
https://np.reddit.com/user/Risonio
https://np.reddit.com/user/PharaonicSid
https://np.reddit.com/user/CHience
https://np.reddit.com/user/FiftiethFrey
https://np.reddit.com/user/Araax
https://np.reddit.com/user/BrokeMush
https://np.reddit.com/user/TigerForce9827
https://np.reddit.com/user/LimitedPan
https://np.reddit.com/user/deort
https://np.reddit.com/user/Superrred
https://np.reddit.com/user/Lalipamp
https://np.reddit.com/user/Gologramms
https://np.reddit.com/user/BlackAdam1212
Some screenshots, there are so many conversations like this that you can check in their sub:
Let’s say that all this mentioned is pretty strange and misleading, but it’s marketing and it has been incredibly good for attracting and fooling people. They have been pushing really, really hard to present themselves as revolutionaries, at the same time removing all the possible FUD or solid questions that have been brought up, deleting medium articles, reporting valid youtube videos, tweets, reddit posts… But here comes an important part. They are claiming to make an outstanding blockchain, far superior to any other that’s out there, better than Etherium and EOS and so on. They have published a whitepaper, which looks rather okay at first glance (some wikipedia copy/paste parts, like MD5, you can run it through plagiarism checker and see). So in order to get people hooked up on this, they decided to make an alpha version so that people could see the results before investing. Actually, their main argument on Telegram has always been ‘EOS has no product and look how much money they have made, Credits will do it for little money and so much better’. Not to mention this shameless goal from their presentation that is actually up on their website:
https://imgur.com/a/AhNGx ,also mentioned here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2401248.msg30531949#msg30531949
So you can see what their intention is, they are actually saying it pretty clearly. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2401248.msg30265567#msg30265567 . Making a test product so people would think that all the other projects are collecting huge amounts of money and still make nothing out of it (eos, cardano…). And yet they are worth billions. So this would actually make all other multi-billion projects a scam, a pretty expensive scam. But Credits will make it much better and only for $20 mil, apparently. Check our amazing alpha that’s doing 200k tps and then you can be sure that you are investing into something truly special. There has been no proof of anything they claim to this day. They did not even bother to explain the details, give answers to questions and facts like those I have mentioned… They just leave hype do the work. See this brainwashed head for example, it might as well be one of their guys: https://imgur.com/a/GfOLY
I will remind you that they are saying they have been developing this for three years. THREE YEARS. They actually had a MVP with a test video on site, which was just complete garbage (maybe it’s still on there I don’t know). It could not even do a proper transaction, it was doing negative values and so on. As it was just a web app it seemed like a simple transaction protocol and that’s it, no blockchain whatsoever.
Then they proceeded to make an alpha release, with some delays (about 3 weeks). They eventually released it, as promised, before ICO. About 5 hours before ICO had started… They made a tutorial on how to test it, which basically served only to fool people who thought they would be able to test something. You can imagine that it was not possible to test anything in the given time. Their shillers were all over the telegram and reddit screaming ‘alpha works wonders, it is so fast’. They had some unknown people making their first youtube videos about Credits alpha being awesome. Based on completely nothing, just pure shill.
Their alpha was never tested by a 3rd party, github is still completely empty https://gist.github.com/Credits-com . There were people complaining and basically laughing at this product. I will just leave the comments under here. These are comments coming from people who are developers or familiar with coding.
Video made by Sergio, an actual IT developer (first 5 minutes):
Another video:
Comments: „Take a look at their Partners — its really crappy websites — especially the aiternis site, where there is just a countdown to an ICO date (possibly another scam?) and a whitepaper that mentions Aubrey de grey as a co-founder. If you make a simple google search on aubrey de grey (who is a famous scientist) you will find NO connection to any ICO’s. Either credits havent cleared this partner at all OR they know it is a scam. Looks very fishy. They wrote yesterday on their website that they now have 90 people employed. I myself got banned from their telegram after asking about WHO the 90 people employed are. Still no Alpha code. On a sidenote — where is the best place to know about SCAM ico’s and alert others about this? It is a huge benefit for the crypto-community. There should be a telegram channel just for this. “
Comments about their CEO interview on here:
„He doesn’t even know how many transaction they actually can do, just saying numbers that not even add up and feeling they copied like Dpos and just saying features of this tech.. Saying more nodes, it will be faster, why not explaining what differences are in comparison to other blockchains, why this is a better system and how the system actually work.. Not getting any wiser here.. Only saying 1mil transaction, bountys for users who can fix problems, so already incentives for problemsolvers, so bet first problem will be: “how get so fast” … Want to face one problem: scalability, so a problem that is known and didn’t see this coming till problem was here They are not visionairy and don’t see potential future problems only current, banking background so feels like he is moneygrabber, “20million not much money” :D, it is for a non working project.. saying java is very secure, and if im correct it’s not.. The guy self is not even convinced so i’m not convinced too, i’m out “
Bitcointalk comments about the code:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2401248.msg30539582#msg30539582 (really poor part of the code which generates a private key using MD5, also explained in Sergio’s video)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2401248.msg30563265#msg30563265 (someone noticed that they might have been outsourcing their dev)
Comments on Reddit: https://np.reddit.com/r/CreditsOfficial/comments/7y9yet/real_video_of_credits_alpha_test_sends_7_credits/dufd05f/
https://np.reddit.com/r/CreditsOfficial/comments/7y8cr3/credits_is_a_scam/duegi7u/
Korean guy testing an alpha, showing that it does a completely wrong transaction. He sent 7 Credits and recieved 100. (at 7 min 53 sec)
So apparently they have a broken product made by extremely sloppy devs. This is not ‘just bugs’, this was made by someone who has no idea what he is doing. Using MD5 for the most important part of them all, private key, which is not secured at all. Then the completely messed up transactions. You can argue that it’s only an alpha, but the whole point of this being a revolutionary blockchain is pretty much ruined with what they have presented. To me, it seems like this project would look much more serious with a whitepaper only, because of all this amateur work. But others got fooled by that. People don’t realize this: the alpha they uploaded on their site for people to check out can be made in few days, like a simple transaction protocol and not a blockchain, it as well might be just a copycat using a forked wallet. Funny enough they placed their mainnet released to be up right after EOS in June. And yet they claim there are developing it for 3 years. So EOS, cardano, ETH and others are just a moneygrab, pure vapourware with all those blockchain experts drinking margaritas in Bahamas with your money? Credits dev team looks really incompetent and more importantly completely distanced from the community. It is still unclear if they actually are developing something, or is it outsourced. There is also a great doubt if those speeds are achievable on decentralized platform anyway, along with some other points in their whitepaper they claim to achieve.
Moving on to some more weird stuff. I found this also on Reddit: https://np.reddit.com/r/CreditsOfficial/comments/7ygn6q/cold_hard_facts/
I’ll just copy the text in here in case it gets deleted:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2401248.msg30559594#msg30559594
The COO is a known-to-police drug addict. https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-kolmakhidze/
http://len7.ast.msudrf.ru/modules.php?name=sud_delo&op=cs&case_id=1370991&delo_id=1500001
A quick google translate:
„INFORMATION ON THE ATRACED PERSON
Type of participant in proceedings Person in respect of whom proceedings are being conducted in the case
Party on the case (full name, name): Kolmakhidze David Grigorevich
Main article (CoAP, TC …) Art. 20.20 part 3
Type of offense 3. Consumption of narcotic drugs or psychotropic substances without prescribing a doctor or consumption of other intoxicating substances in streets, stadiums, squares, parks, in a public vehicle, and in other public places“
Also, he was a 2017 missing person, likely due to narcotics abuse (?).
http://lizaalert.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=14792
„Kolmakhidze David Grigorievich, 23, MO, Khimki, On May 4, 2017 around 12:45 he left home and did not return.“
Also other stuff from that same post, some stuff is not really relevant:
„He has no background in development and his investments come from crypto gains.
The Alpha does not work and was built by an external contractor to bring in investors (Contractor name in Manifest file).
Partners are fake or failing companies. Bee Fee Ltd is in heavy debt.
Most social media channel numbers have been artificially inflated through bots (once again, through the founders’ crypto gains).
All criticism is removed from the Telegram.
The whitelist did not exist and anyone could participate (KYC was not enforced).
The maximum contribution was raised before word got out about the scam.“
Alright, let’s explain that part about the partnerships. I really find this pretty disturbing to be honest. So they claim to have really, really many partnerships. They call them ‘users’. Their Twitter and all other social platforms are flooded with partnership announcements they make every day. If it’s not a partnership then it’s a pretty pointless article https://credits.com/en/Home/News or a conference their CEO and marketing guru Arjan (video)
have been visiting in order to present and sell the ICO (you can watch their presentations on youtube, they are quite hilarious). I mean, how cheap those articles and tweets look? When it comes to their users, they basically claim that users are already using the platform (I don’t really get that?). What are they using, an alpha that’s not a blockchain and is completely wrong on so many levels?
There was an article on medium that also got deleted, with a short list of their users. Now they probably have like 50 more new ‘users’. Here’s the list with someone’s comments on those users:
„Ties.DB — https://tiesdb.com/ — used to market themselves as “Linkedin on the blockchain”:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/tiesnetwork-promises-the-enhanced-linkedin-of-crypto-community but now claim to be “the worlds first distributed and decentralized database”. why the sudden change of heart? idk, maybe because it’s a joke?
Comskill http://comskill.com/ — an Estonian based “lead generation company, that helps online casinos and sportsbooks find and acquire new clients”. No mention of cryptocurrency, blockchian, or CREDITS found on the website.
Days exchange http://days.exchange/ — social media links of members seem to mostly not work or lead to other people, the “download whitepaper” button doesn’t even work, website has no history online earlier then October 2017. WTF?
Cq9gaming http://www.cq9gaming.com/ — this website is just a bogus website with no team, product or anything else, seems to have been given a small face-lift recently. Website used to read “GLI is a fairly credible third-party research institution in the international gaming market” but that seems to have been recently changed. I liked the “fairly credible” lol.
Aiternis http://aiternis.com/aiternis — don’t get me started…
Burntjam https://burntjam.com/product/ — “We are an enterprise development house specialized in simplyfying your complex enterprise problems with complete enterprise solutions. We do this through the use of our world leading technology and our wealth of enterprise experience”. enough said.
Dipforge http://dipforge.net/ — supposed to be a product of burntjam. what? burnt jam?
Beefee http://beefee.co.uk/ — as can be seen here (https://web.archive.org/web/20160213162142/http:/beefee.co.uk/) seems to be a website that not until too long ago served as a “CASINO AND LIVE BETTING PLATFORM”,” GAME DEVELOPMENT STUDIO”. And “WEBDEVELOPMENT”. Looks like a developers “I’m unemployed and want to make some side money” website and not a serious blockchain project“
As I said there are even more ‘users’ today, basically every single website with less than 10 views per day. Some scammy looking ICOs without a whitepaper, online casino having outstanding 2 views per day, some russian webpages that are not really working and so on. Most with no clear background, team, or totally pointless because there is no clear understanding how would the users actually use their platform. Are those paid to have them listed as users or what?
I understand that it is not possible to expect top notch partnerships this early, but cmon. All this is just part of the show, people screaming ‘look at all the partnerships they make’ and all that, look at that speed. This is all completely pointless and serves only for marketing. Nothing more. I really haven’t yet seen an ICO trying so hard to leave an impression… But I get it, some people actually think this is awesome stuff happening.
Another fact from that same post: „Furthermore we have this strange certificate from the “Columbia Blockchain Lab” reading “this project has been deemed technically viable”. what the hell is that supposed to mean? why not publish a review of the blockchain? who is this “Columbia Blockchain Lab”? just a bunch of students at the university and not an official Columbia University publication. were they paid for this review? how much? we don’t know.“
I believe that all these facts mentioned before are not just fud. People love to say ‘every ICO has fud around it’. Look at Etherium, it was fud above sane levels etc. You really have to be real here. When you look at Credits you cannot think that any good will come out of it, it is just a clever marketing executed pretty much perfectly. Although it does not seem like that at first with all the buzzwords, shills and people writing ‘credits going to moon’.
At the end I would like to mention something that is just purely my opinion and it’s based on nothing more than that. Looking at all the effort those guys are making with their marketing, I can only suspect that they reached out to Suppoman. Before and during an ICO he made 3 videos about Credits. (more here: https://np.reddit.com/r/CreditsOfficial/comments/7y6k5j/suppoman_was_allowed_to_invest_as_a_strategic/ ) Credits actually changed their token distribution percentages after the ICO (initially it was 60% tokens for ICO) to have more for ‘marketing and support’, or however they called that. I think it was 10% and later it was changed again so I don’t even know what it is now. Then, after the ICO, Suppoman shilled another ICO ‘Seele’ and made a course on Udemy that people spent $50k on, just to know about this special ICO. After their whitelist being a disaster and all the red flags around, he actually decided to pass on it lol. He eventually got back to shilling Credits for the last 3 days, I think he has made 3 videos already. Claiming that they are doing 200k tps and will get up to 10 mil. after mainnet, 100 users on the platform, far better than Zilliqa and EOS… I cannot help myself but think, how obvious is his shill? (WILL CREDITS X1000?? :o Suppoman AMA Live Stream!) Do people really understand what is happening, are they accepting it to ride the hype or are they still completely ignorant? Interesting stuff.
It has become even more ridiculous to watch how people react on this. Check his Facebook group or telegram, complete madness, the hype is unreal. No sign of fud whatsoever, it gets reported in a second. They just don’t know and don’t even care about anything, comparing credits to neo or eth and so on. That’s how things work nowadays. It’s hyped up by ignorant people as well as those who might suspect that this is a proper shitcoin. It is also hyped up by those ‘high risk, high reward’ guys. I just think there will be no reward other than this nice short term flip.
The main argument against somebody actually bringing up a proper fact about this is ‘oh you butthurt you missed an ico, spreading fud so you can get in’, which is a pretty common and infant thing you can often hear. People are usually doing that hysterical and childish type of hype ‘cry and watch us become millionares’. All this now looks worse than Bitconnect shill to be honest, even though it is not a straight up scam. It’s just a marketing campaign perfectly done.
I actually did not miss it. I invested simply knowing I can count on people’s ignorance. You can clearly see why they want to put ICOs under regulations, because this has become wrong on so many levels. Just check telegram groups (Balina’s, Suppo’s, Ohheymatty’s and other mastermind groups). There will not be a minute without mindless Credits shill. Train leaving station, don’t miss your chance! Moon!
Ignorance in crypto is actually god-given. I am not saying that this is not a good short term investment, follow the hype and all that, but I like to point out stuff that’s behind all that. Because most people are completely blinded by the sugarcoated things that are presented to them, I just refue to believe there are people so ignorant and dumb. I Would absolutely like if all this facts were just a pile of crap and we are actually looking at the most amazing blockchain ever created. But I guess that will not happen.
Just to mention that their latest article is „Why will CREDITS become cryptocurrency №1?” where they are basically describing in detail how incredible the volume is on IDEX and how the price goes to moon:
“At Tidex CREDITS reached peak at 0.00084997 eth., a 324.985% increase to the price of the token at ICO. At IDEX, the peak was 0.0007899, which was 294.995% growth. Later, the price adjusted to 0.00061999 eth. Currently the trading volume has reached approximately 4500 ETH on IDEX and 1200 ETH on Tidex. And in total, it has already exceeded $5 million per day.“
I mean seriously, who the f*ck does that? A serious company, a serious blockchain? This is the cheapest possible shill I have ever seen, and it has been like that since the beginning. Given that they clearly stated they will do x1000 in 3 years in their presentation, I actually am not too surprised to see such shameless statements. The shill has gone beyond any imaginable point now.
I apologize if some parts were rushed through, messy, or harder to understand. I just piled up my clues and facts that I have been collecting for some time. I did not manage to get all the screenshots done (telegram) and some other stuff because I was banned few weeks ago. You can find some other useful posts on Reddit or Bitcointalk, Youtube and Medium, if they haven’t deleted it already.
Nevertheless, I really hope you will find some of this helpful and interesting. Stay safe and know what you invest in."
TEXT BACKUP: http://textuploader.com/dxu2c
Thank you for reading,
Regards
Thank you for sharing your opinion about Credits :)
Thank you Sergio. Updated my post with some of the recent stuff.
Thanks for sharing and taking the time to put such a long and well thought our article together. I did invest in the ico but can see that I was a bit blinded by the promises so time to get out I reckon. You've really helped, nice one.
Thanks Simon! I have updated my post with some of the recent stuff.
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
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