Are you sure? For each “real” website there were probably 100 throwaway phishing sites.

This seems like an unfair retort to me. The point of the website analogy was not to suggest that the percentage of malicious websites is comparable to the number of malicious coins. It was to draw an analogy to another distributed system with low barriers to entry and where people dabble semi-seriously.

I think that the parent makes a fair point. I'm willing to go so far as to agree that suddenly yanking support for a coin you created and put up for sale on a public marketplace can be described as pulling the rug on that coin. I don't think I would assume, though, that doing so necessarily constitutes a deliberate attempt to scam people.

Is it irresponsible? Perhaps. Though that's a somewhat subjective judgment, and I recognize that the crypto community's culture around these things runs in sharp contrast to how I think about public marketplaces, so perhaps it wouldn't be fair of me to make a value judgment.

Is it worrying? I suppose I can appreciate arguments that the kinds of regulation necessary to prevent such behavior are themselves harmful, and that this sort of thing is acceptable or even desirable insofar as it indicates the market's level of freedom. I can't bring myself to agree, though. I personally would not want to participate in a securities exchange where such behavior is rampant.

But not all worrying or irresponsible behavior is a scam.

97% of emails probably will though.