One Coin — a fraud or investment opportunity?
While ago I learned about OneCoin — the new “cryptocoin” (2014) accompanied by its own payment system. Although, the main business of OneCoin is selling educational materials for trading which are connected with the OneCoin’ system (i.e. the educational packages that you are buying includes tokens with which you can “mine” Onecoins). There are also many incentives and promises for the investors that simply sound too good to be true but I would now dwell in the details here.
I just want to draw the attention of friends and future investors, especially from Macedonia and the Balkans, on few “red-flags” that I noticed about OneCoin. My personal opinion is that if someone is interested in investing in digital currencies, there are much better alternatives than OneCoin.
- It is not quite clear what OneCoin really is
According to its website, OneCoin is digital currency under central control of Onecoin Ltd., a company incorporated in Dubai. The Onecoins may be traded on the internal market — Xcoinx (all pages on its site are “coming soon” although it is published since 2015?)— created and run by Onecoin Ltd.
What is strange (my 1st red-flag) is that it seems that you can’t find any technical details about the technology behind OneCoin. No white-papers that are usual docs explaining the technology behind other digital currencies such as bitcoin, litecoin, ripple, etc. Personally, I could not understand how Onecoins are created / mined (I am totally confused from this “explanation”: “because the focus of OneCoin is on the coin’s usability, we have offered our miners a coin that is easy to mine…”); where its value comes from (you can’t trade it on other markets, nor it is known which companies accept it as payment method); etc.
2. Management
OneCoin is founded and run by the Bulgarian Ruja Ignatova. There aren’t any other info about the management, its organizational structure or anything that could help you understand how and who are running this company (for comparison, see the info for the management of Ripple: https://ripple.com./company/).
3. OneCoin is on the “watching” list of many authorities
Of course, at the beginning this was the case with Bitcoin and other digital-financial innovations as well. However, I don’t like that even Bulgarian authorities issued warning against OneCoin and many other authorities (ex. Finland, China, Norway…) are closely watching the activities of the local subsidiaries.
This, in combination with the OneCoin’s centralized system of operations, is a lot of risk of losing all your money if any authority decides to crack them, for any reason.
4. I don’t like how their website looks and sounds. At all
It is hardly comprehensible that a company with million users all round the world could have a such a amateurish website. Appearances on side, most of their claims are unsubstantiated. For example, “OneCoin is used by millions” but there is no any information which company is accepting Onecoins (this seems like huge potential customer-base that it is strange that in these 2 years no company showed any interest to offer it as payment method?!); “OneCoin wants to make cryptocurrency transparent” — but, its code source is closed, their ledger is private, etc. Why would anyone claim transparency and use private ledger?! Or, the claim that OneCoin “offers a coin that is easy to mine”? If you could easily create money (out of thin air?) than the value of the Onecoins is under constant threat that could evaporate at any minute. The whole point of the gold — or bitcoins — is the mining process to be hard and to get more complex with the passing time. This is how you create stable and predictable supply, while making sure that the money supply will not be easily inflated.
You can read more about other red-flags here.
And this are all obvious red-flags for anyone who is following the Bitcoin development or is at least somehow familiar with the technology behind digital currencies. But for average guys, which seems to me are the target group of OneCoin Ltd., One Coin may sound like the next big thing.
FINAL VERDICT: my personal opinion
It is nothing like any other digital currency that I am familiar with (especially, not like Bitcoin); there are too many red-flags and secrecy about the whole concept; there are too much bad publicity already …Invest your money in renovation — or in holiday on Jamaica. Invest in yourself — or in some once in a lifetime experience. But stay away from One Coin.
Update [Dec. 07 2019]: It was fraud. Obviously.
