Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: RandoCoin- a cryptocurrency that randomly changes price every 5 minutes

randocoin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–6 of 6 posts

Re: Show HN: RandoCoin- a cryptocurrency that randomly changes price every 5 minutes

#2

Post by justinalanbass »

In theory, RandoCoin will necessarily develop a black market based on traits other than the random generation in the long-run. If random generation were used, anyone could theoretically wait some period of time to buy at a low price, and wait more to sell at a high price for a gain, which is clearly unsustainable. The black market would include those who bought RandoCoin at, say, 4 standard-deviations below the mean (all purchases would only be made at the lowest price possible over a year-long window).

This is fairly obvious, and the "experiment" couldn't hope to turn up anything useful, so my main guess is this is nothing more than a cleverly-disguised pyramid scheme or scam. I would recommend not purchasing any, even for novelty, in order to discourage this nonsense. This could have easily just been a hypothetical post and would have been more interesting than a crappy FAQ.

Re: Show HN: RandoCoin- a cryptocurrency that randomly changes price every 5 minutes

#5

Post by FearNotDaniel »

Note to contract author: you're not using SafeMath if you just include the library at the top of your code. You have to replace all the +, -, * and / operators with the equivalent functions .add(), .sub() etc.

Also, contract appears to be throwing exceptions when trying to sell coins. This might be because it's failing one of the 'require' statements imposed in the contract code, but there's no way to tell from the UI that it's not just broken.

Really, there's no reason why this 'experiment' needs to be on the main (real currency) blockchain. If you honestly don't want people to gamble real money on this, you should have deployed it to the testnet, which anyone smart enough to install metamask would be able to figure out how to switch to just to play along.

Post reply on HN