NinjaCoin Loses 99.6% Of Your BitCoin Almost Instantly

Ninjas are all about unexpectedly ripping your heart out and showing it to you right before you die. NinjaCoin has followed that theme closely for intrepid altcoin traders. If you needed a reminder that trading new altcoins on Bittrex is more dangerous than driving truck on the Himalayan Highway, the load-of-crap altcoin known as NinjaCoin just issued you a very painful reminder.

One of the big problems in altcoin trading is that people who ‘invest‘ in altcoins don’t have a good enough understanding of the cryptocoin’s source code before placing their bets. It’s pretty hard to hide scams in the code, which leads me to believe people are only glancing at the code bases AFTER something goes wrong. Not only does code need to be reviewed during the initial phase of a coin launch, but reviews need to be performed every time a new fork is issued.

With the release of their latest fork NinjaCoin ended up with many more coins than initially believed. Bittrex allowed trading of the coin up until the point that everyone lost their money, but at this point won’t allow the ‘Dev’ JohnBirco to ‘make right’ with the code.

Richie from Bittrex had this to say:

This is an unfortunate case where the dev screwed up and/or screwed us all.

We will NOT be taking a fork of this coin.  The damage is already done here.  Our systems worked as designed and our balances match including checking the moneysupply.  I would like to remind everyone that Bittrex is an exchange.  Our responsibility is to ensure that when you trade xxx A for yyy B, that it happens safely.  We do not police what is being traded.

Again, we will not be taking a new wallet or fork of this coin.  The damage done is irreparable and would have been after the first trade.  The market will remain open and we will let this die its natural death like so many coins before it.

If this answers sounds flippant and not encouraging to you, you’re not alone. In the last few days we’ve seen a particularly ugly trend where altcoin exchanges have claimed the ‘Dev’ has screwed up the total coin count yet they haven’t given him a chance to fix it. This weekened, Busoni of Poloniex back-stabbed SuperCoin. Now Bittrex (along with help from the ‘Dev’) has helped run the value of NinjaCoin to just shy of completely worthless. The victims here? Those who invested in this coin in ‘good faith‘ and thought that someone other than them was performing due diligence.

Of course it’s possible for exchanges to add another check to their exchange software to freeze any deposits that go above and beyond the listed total coin supply. They could simply use the ANN thread data and then communicate with the ‘Dev’ in the event something goes wrong. In reality, though, exchanges aren’t going to go out of their way to do anything other than list the coin for trade so they can take fees. It’s up to YOU, the current, former, and future BAGHOLDERS of Earth to be on the lookout for such occurrences. The safest course of action would be to quit trading and watch the exchanges shrivel up and die just like the worthless coins that are traded on them. However, that’s not very likely to happen as long as a large number of people still believe in the fantastical Gold Rush that is ‘atcoins.’

Each day there’s a new scam that shows all of us just why ‘Caveat Emptor‘ really does apply in this vertical. JonBirco, for his part, is not taking the blame for the mishap, other than to admit he made a slight coding mistake that had huge consequences.

A Trojan, Or A Simple Coding Mistake?

“Where hav you see a trojan 

If i have make new release instead of patch on github, it’s to hide the changes i make on the UI wallet. To make it more hard for chinese copy/paster to replicate me.

The PoS bug was just a “/COIN” missing in the maths, not a trojan. If you don’t know from what you speak, please shut up !”

Now the whole ugly affair has degenerated into a he said/he said fight. The altcoin exchange and the ‘Dev‘ obviously aren’t working together in any fashion. The exchange is happy to list the coin (and just as quickly delist it) as long as trading fees can be earned, but they won’t take responsibility for anything that goes wrong. ‘JohnBirco‘ currently has no way to make things right, even if he wanted to.

In summary, exchanges would be f-ing STUPID to not institute a simple ‘reality check‘ that matches the published numbers for any altcoin. It’s realistic to say that most altcoins will come NOWHERE NEAR their published total coin supply. There’s absolutely no chance that 100% of the coins would end up on one exchange, no matter what the circumstances are. They could simply suspend trading if a certain threshold was reached, and then investigate to find out what went wrong. If they can’t prove that the coin Dev made a mistake deliberately, they really shouldn’t be allowed to be in a position to completely kill the coin.

NinjaCoin is not necessarily dead. There are plenty of other altcoin exchanges out there to be traded on. If the ‘Dev‘ is willing to work through this major screw-up, there’s some chance he could salvage some value from the coin. Regardless, it seems likely that a whole big new bunch of screwed-over altcoin traders are going to think twice before jumping on ‘the next big thing’ which at its best will likely turn out to be bullshit and its worse will end up being an outright scam!

Be careful out there people! You’re losing REAL MONEY trading imaginary cryptocurrencies on unregulated websites with absolutely ZERO chance of recourse.

Sound off below with any comments you have.