When settlers first came to what would later become the United States of America, there was no local money. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was the first to issue, in 1690, legal tender, and that tender immediately became a target of counterfeiters and criminals. For almost a century, there were literally over 800 different types of paper currency in circulation and almost all of them had virtually no support from the general population. However, regulations were put into place that helped currency evolve and, even though it still took more than 100 years for an established U.S. dollar to be recognized globally, money eventually became less chaotic.
The world is witnessing this same activity again, but this time it’s with digital currency and the progress from thousands of currencies to just a handful is shaping the future of finance once again. Looking at projects that have already made it to the dead coin pile show how far the Bitcoin ecosystem has come in a very short time.
Deadcoins.com is a website that tracks virtually all the failed crypto projects, whether its demise came about from being identified as a scam or simply because it perished. Alpha Technology, for example, introduced a digital currency that was an exact copy of another project, even down to the whitepaper. Given the ease with which blockchain data can now be verified, it never survived scrutiny and no exchange is willing to touch it. Monero Classic is another, described by the site as “an illusion created by Bitmain.”
Deadcoins adds, “The coin was offered at $22, now the coin has slowly but steadily dropped to 34 cents. Bitmain made sure to mine as much as possible so nobody else could, and lessened it slowly when the coin price went donw [sic].”
According to another site, coinospy.com, there have been 700 projects in eight years that have made it to the crypto dump. Longhash.com points out that most of the projects that have failed did so because investors stopped trading and the volume fell to near zero or zero, resulting in their elimination from the market. Scams were next, with 29.9% of the projects on coinospy falling into this category. Not surprisingly, most of these were seen in 2017 when BTC was seeing its massive bull run.
Then there are those projects that were jokes to begin with. Things like AnalCoin, BieberCoin, TrollCoin and CryptoMeth were destined for failure from the start and these make up around 3.2% of the crypto projects that have been buried.
Deadcoins has an even larger list and states that 1,779 projects are dead. CoinMarketCap, the go-to solution for crypto data, shows more than 1,000 different digital currency projects that are now trading at less than $1,000 in daily volume. These will soon be added to the dead pile.
The maturing of the Bitcoin ecosystem is helping to get rid of all the dead weight and useless projects that never deserved to be involved, and this process is occurring at a very rapid pace. Whereas traditional financial instruments have taken centuries to mature (and some might argue that they still haven’t), crypto has evolved in just a matter of a few years.
New to blockchain? Check out CoinGeek’s Blockchain for Beginners section, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about blockchain technology.
