PURE Junk Alt Coin Scam Alert!
One of the biggest problems crypto investors currently face is the amount of junk coins being peddled. Junk coins with anonymous developer teams are created overnight and peddled to novices as the new hot thing. Thanks to DASH, masternodes have become the current trend. Masternodes allow you to earn coins by just maintaining a node(server) that holds a minimum amount of coins in it. You’re essentially earning coins for holding coins. Think of it as earning interest on a bank account balance.
A week ago a friend of mine mentioned this new alternative coin called PURE. First thing I did was check out the pretty website and just loved this wonderful quote:
“PURE is a new cryptocurrency that aims to purify the blockchain, with fresh ideas and clear vision toward a fair and truly decentralized usage and a better tomorrow.”
This cute quote is pretty much the only thing the generic website has going for it. There’s no link to a GitHub repo, no white paper, and no blog. There’s also no mention of the team of people behind this project.
Once I actually found their repo, the first of many red flags was drawn. 10 total commits by an unknown developer(puredev321) who only joined GitHub in September 17, 2017. No commit/repo history besides this project, and only 2 contributors to the entire project. The second contributor(bumbacoin) has 1 bull shit commit that changes the spelling of one word. All this basically equating to almost zero open source contributions.
Since PURE has no blog, I visited their Bitcointalk thread. I went so far as reading every single one of the 28 pages worth of empty chatting. I learned that PURE is claimed to be a DASH fork, even though I honestly can’t find any evidence for this, and supports anonymous transactions, InstantSend, PrivateSend. sunny747007 is the only representative of PURE to contribute to the entire self moderated thread. The roadmap and white paper has been promised for over a month, whoever is behind this is spending more time trying to get the coin on exchanges and various masternode websites than actually spelling out what this coin is and is supposed to accomplish. Most BitcoinTalk thread comments fall into these categories:
- complaints about missing coins
- complaints about transaction failures
- wallet repair instructions show up on almost every page
- endlessly repeating how many coins are earned from staking
- complaints about problems with staking existing coins
- comments written by spam bots or seemingly illiterate individuals, seriously the spelling and grammar is awful
- a few cheerleaders keep reference the same old mantra of: “lightning fast transaction, anonymous transaction, Masternodes and much more to come” and stating “We need masternodes. Masternodes seem to be a hot trend”
The last point illustrates the problem with crypto right now, newbies fall for trends and end up getting burned. These same newbies end up complaining to authorities and then authorities end up cracking down on the entire ecosystem. Authorities cracking down stifles innovation and makes it harder for amazing people with amazing ideas to attract funding. All this because newbies want to invest in what’s hot or trendy at the moment and not what’s actually worth investing in. Moving along.
For shits and giggles I joined the PURE Slack channel hoping they would redeem themselves in some way. This was my first post.
Before my post was deleted by the moderator, 12 people were actually curious about the same question. One of them actually pinned it to the channel and asked the PURE representative to clear this up.
@Pure Dev proceeded to delete the pinned message and when I posted this screenshot right back in the channel and asked why my message was deleted, my message was deleted again! @Pure Dev decided to take matters into his/her own hands and send me this private message.
After this I obviously closed the book on this potentially fraudulent scam of a project. The only reason I went ahead to write this post was because I genuinely hope people don’t fall for this type of thing. Just because Masternodes are the new trend right now doesn’t mean you have to blindly throw money into junk. Research into the project you’re interested in. Join the forums/channels and ask honest direct questions from the representatives. Find out who’s behind the project and what have they worked on before. Damnit, do some homework before you buy crypto!
