The devs of Coinye West have done this before... (self.coinyewest)
submitted 6 days ago by suchscam
I'm guessing this will be removed, but posting it anyway.
So I've done some digging, and I believe the people responsible for Coinye West have also been creating a number of other scamcoins, notably Electric Volt, PotatoCoin, and Earthcoin. Each of these coins was released in the past couple weeks under a psuedonym, possibly to obfuscate the fact they're all being spammed out by the same people (as evidenced somewhat by devianttwo's github). All of these are premined 2%, and seem to have no clear redeeming qualities whatsoever except for the promise of a quick buck. A quick look at those announcements and Coinye West one clearly shows similarities.
/u/devianttwo and and bitcointalk user Pythonideus also set up the hackshard.com mining pool, which they use during their "fair" releases to mine a large number of coins in addition to the premine, since they have it set up prior to anyone else having it running. This domain was registered 12/27/2013, right before the release of all the coins, and is clearly linked with devianttwo. They then tried to use the fact that devianttwo was unaffiliated with Coinye West and runs an "independent pool" to claim that there was less premine than there actually was. This is interesting, since he seems to only ever post when it's a coin he made or a site he runs. In addition, the official site also links to hackshard.com as the only "trusted pool", and they were the first pool mining it (the one an early copy was shared with), further strengthening the ties between the two sites.
The only smoking gun I don't have is a known name in the actual source. However, these guys have a habit of committing code to their github repos from their servers, and the only commit to the coinyecoin github was from "root@d1stkfactory". A quick search shows a number of results, but this pastebin account seems the most promising. Whoever it was, they were recently setting up a server, and their name shows up multiple times in BTC-E trollbox chats. I won't link to any other accounts because of Reddit rules, and the risk of pointing to an innocent person.
It's pretty clear to me that this group of people decided "fuck it, let's make a bunch of coins, premine them as hard as possible, and hope one gets added to Cryptsy so I can dump all of them." These are exactly the sorts of people the cryptocurrency community needs to rid itself of. I mean, I hate to say it, but who here really believes that the developers of "PotatoCoin" are actually going to use their premine to go to Africa to help "vegetable growers"? If you do, I have a bridge to sell you...
They came close with Coinye, and who knows, maybe they'll still pull it off. However, anyone who trusts any of these coins does so at their own sizable risk.
JUST WANT YOU TO KNOW WHO YOUR DEALING WITH HERE
RESEARCH THIS GUY IS ALL IM SAYING
The logic of the reddit post from which you quote, which, by the way, I thoroughly dismantled in the comments section
here, is essentially the following: Hackshard makes good pools + one Hackshard owner developed a coin + the other Hackshard owner is planning another coin = every altcoin was made by Hackshard. This is very unsatisfactory logic, as anyone with an education beyond the eighth grade would understand. I doubt that anyone intelligent enough to use, mine, and be engaged in cryptocurrencies is truly stupid enough to make such a ridiculous claim, so it must be that this belligerent party simply despises us for some reason or the other. If you wouldn't mind sending a private message with such details concerning said detestation, I would be very interested to discuss amicably the reasoning behind it and how Hackshard might avoid such hostilities in the future.
