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Comment by rfd4sgmk8u | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm.... lets have a look at the tokenomics:

This token exists on Binance Smart Chain, a code fork of Ethereum that uses a Proof Of Stake system run by Binance, one of the largest exchanges in the cryptocurrency industry. It implements the same EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) as Ethereum, and uses BNB (Binance Token) for its gas coin.

We can look and interact with chain, address and contract state with bscscan, analogous to etherscan for Ethereum. https://www.bscscan.com/token/0xfed320e18caf45f53fb64301b16a...

100M tokens, mostly held by 0x1c8e38a96292134bd38752376fa8f1a5d1edd443

17417 'PirateToken' + 91.17 BNB ($38,400 USD) in PancakeSwap, an AMM (Automated Market Maker). [Approx $2.20 USD / PirateToken]

'Market Cap' of $220M USD.

View on HN

> 100M tokens, mostly held by 0x1c8e38a96292134bd38752376fa8f1a5d1edd443

This is the most fascinating thing about these crypto projects: Somehow, the artificially large "market cap" number actually works in their favor to attract more people. A coin with a $220 million market cap looks like it's popping. Yet even the slightest attention to details shows that it couldn't be further from the truth.

In this case, they hold 99.9658% of all coins.

The next largest holder is PancakeSwap with 0.0164%

After that, the next largest holder has 0.0031% of all coins with 3,060 Pirate Token.

Nobody could possibly be interested in these coins for anything other than rolling that dice and seeing what happens next. Just don't be the last person in the hype chain.

Ten years ago we defined this as a pre-mine scam, meaning run don’t just walk away.

It’s crazy how much as changed since 2012.

Any time i see anything on BSC my immediate reaction is "scam". It's actually hard to find legitimate projects there, so hard i'm surprised anyone continues to launch when there are alternatives like Fantom, Avalanche or Polygon they could be using.

Unfortunately you are right on that. Scammers probably find it easy to trick people if the gas fees are low. Many scammers are moving to Fantom, Avalanche, Polygon and other evm based chains. Also been looking into those.

Been working on a project that consumes quite a bit of gas per call and the cheaper chains look like a better alternative that Ethereum.

My immediate reaction to almost all crypto stuff is "scam".

Same. But then you look deeper and you see.. more scams.. and then a little deeper, and you see.. big things. BIG things.

https://defillama.com/ tracks how much money is floating around in the defi and token space. 2 years ago it was ~600 Megadollars USD. Today it is over 200 Gigadollars USD. Something that grew that fast in 2 years might be worth investigating.

Doesn't it work you that the fundamentals simply don't make sense? Estimates of the entire planets GDP is around $85 trillion USD.

Can you shed some light on it?

Rehypothecation, Leverage, Derivatives and Debt. Absolute Numbers are meaningless, kind of a fantasy really, and only impact most economic players locally and within the respective market. Occasionally the thing falls apart because there was too much of those 4 things at play.

Hmmm.. We can put point in time estimates of how much everything on the planet costs -- what are the desirable assets, that people will want to store wealth in, I think the three main ones in the 21st century are:

* Real Estate -- every place you can live or work, provide shelter and a place to store other physical stuff.

* Equities, Financial Derivatives, Securities, Funds, weird financial instruments that someone convinced someone else to list on a market

* Cryptocurrencies -- distributed ledgers run by computers around the world

Everything else is stuff, and is bound by the real estate. Most stuff can be made to a limit bound to the other stuff (resources, minerals). The important stuff like rocks and minerals are tracked by the financial instruments section. We do need to factor in the cost of the stuff, but often this is contingent on the labor that can harness it. Supply chain disruptions in the last 2 years have their cause from people getting sick and unable to work, or transport the stuff.

These things need to be bought with 'money', and most people earn money through employment or receive an allowance from the State.

So, i consider myself very conservative when it comes to this stuff. I'd honestly say 90% is a scam, 10% is legit innovation and valuable. It's hard to tell the difference sometimes.

And in the context of a pirate bay, I find it very funny due to the descriptive name (not for the people getting scammed).

> This token exists on Binance Smart Chain, a code fork of Ethereum that uses a Proof Of Stake system run by Binance...

You know, it not really difficult to create your own token on any of these chains?

Just go here: [0], look at the menu, click "Create Token", tweak all the fields and hit the blue "Create Token" button and you can see how easy these scammers can mint millions of tokens and list it on PancakeSwap and exit scam, rug-pull anyone.

So there you have it. This 'PirateToken' is no different.

[0] https://cointool.app/dashboard

I do realize that anyone can create an ERC20 token and publish it to BSC or any EVM chain. Hopefully folks are deriving their solidity contracts from the OpenZepplin Contracts library.

A message with that address is published on the website, and the page is delivered over HTTPS. That domain is the canonical one for the site and you can see stories on HN going back to 2007. I am reasonably confident that someone in control of that domain, and can publish documents to the root of that site is speaking for the TPB organisation. We don't know who that group is, and the original folks behind it are doing other things.

The message didn't even say the chain, and I had to check multiple sites to determine where the contract was published.

"- Member logins based on BSC address"

doh. missed that. guess i wasted 15 seconds checking on etherscan and polygon scan. :-)

> You know, it not really difficult to create your own token on any of these chains?

You know, this is explicitly a feature that been in Ethereum (and BSC since it's forked from Ethereum) since almost day one?

Not really? There’s the ERC20 standard but that doesn’t actually do anything unless you implement it. Most people barely comprehend what they’re doing on crypto, even fewer can deploy a contract.

Yes, really!

The ERC20 token standard came after a bunch of tokens already appeared on Ethereum. One of the first public tutorials for Ethereum was about creating and deploying your own token. Ethereum was initially released in 2015, take a look how ethereum.org looked back then: https://web.archive.org/web/20150905085308/https://www.ether...

> Build unstoppable applications. Here are some recipe ideas:

> Design and issue your own cryptocurrency

> Create a tradeable digital token that can be used as a currency, a representation of an asset, a virtual share, a proof of membership or anything at all. These tokens use a standard coin API, so your contract will be automatically compatible with any wallet, other contract or exchange also using this standard.

I don't think you understand what I'm saying. The Ethereum protocol and its standard implementations do all sorts of things that make it possible to build tokens, but there is no token feature. It's pedantic, but it's like saying email is a feature of TCP/IP.

Can you see in the history how they are setting the price? Are they dripping this into the market somehow?

What's the standard strategy for fundraising this way?

"In AMM, when a new pool is created, the first user who provides liquidity for a particular token pair sets the price of the token in the pool."

https://medium.com/cardwallet/providing-liquidity-what-does-...

Crypto-novice question: what's a "gas coin"?

Currency you use to pay for the execution of programs on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Whenever you use a smart contract, you pay for it using these coins. For example, swapping ETH for some random scamcoin is a smart contract function call that costs ETH to run. Binance coin works the same way, except it uses BNB instead and is a lot cheaper due to the centralized validators.

EVM based chains, like Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain require a token to meter usage of smart contract calls.This is called 'gas'. Complex calls require more gas. The gas price (acting as a price auction on transaction priority) is denominated in the token of the chain.

'gas coin' in the scope of Binance Smart Chain would be BNB.

It's the unit you use to pay for operations on the Ethereum blockchain, distinct from the eth token, to which it is related by a variable price based on supply/demand.

when was this announced ?

the contract was created may 11, 2021 [1] and there as been trading on it.

[1] https://www.bscscan.com/tx/0x1a75059929eabb3fc719ba16b4738ee...

There is a bscscan comment from 5 months ago that links to a post from 8 months ago that contains the url, https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoMarkets/comments/naktrv/the_p... so it must have been somewhat public for at least 8 months. I had not heard of it until now.

Where is the link saying that is even their token?

Anyone can launch one

The contract address is on the post. (0xfed320e18caf45f53fb64301b16ab60c3bc8c42a)

Oh I see now one small mention of bsc

Amateurish launch

They better rent liquidity with yield farming or launch a protocol owned liquidity incentive

This doesn't meet the definition of tokenomics -- which has to do with demand and supply.

See this paper for an example analysis:

https://basicattentiontoken.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/t...

Supply, like the number of tokens and the number of tokens available on an AMM, which I mentioned? Also its a made up word.

I accept that this is not a deep dive, but more of some crumbs that people might be interested in following. You are welcome to publish a more comprehensive look at the 'tokenomics'.

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