Topic: Is Coinmarketcap a scam/fraud? (Read 581 times)

Coinmarketcap is definitely not a scam.

I think most people answered that here.

CMC is a GREAT tool for comparing, contrasting, and tracking cryptocurrencies.

Here is an article detailing how to use coinmarketcap properly.

You'll definitely learn something of value here.

Worth the read.

I agree, CMC should've displayed this information on their website. Don't know if they were paid by whales or not, but it did create a whole lot of panic. Suddenly 25% dip in the market caused panic sell, which caused more panic sell and finally it had a snowball effect. But this seems like a dirty game, anything can happen.

This is a very serious accusation, I doubt they would have decided on it

No.

I believe that this was not and accident , how this big of a webpage could not think of possible impact of their actions? They used the situation.

Nevertheless I think that it should have been done because in the past days there was huge difference in prices and thus the average price was not showing the real situation.

If you are as influential as CMC and make a massive change to the way you calculate the average price without clearly announcing it on the frontpage then it's bordering on manipulation IMHO if not outright fraud. They could foresee the consequences and are probably trading upon those consequences.

Apparently they may do that in way to manipulate the market, we all quite know bad news causes panic and panic sell.

Most def not a scam you get quite a lot of info on coinmarketcap. If you check it properly it can actually educate you in terms of coins, Historical data , markets and circulating supply. It enables you to make good decisions if confused and you wanted to do market research or QA. It also lists new coins and links you to both the websites as well as whitepapers of various coins tech. It is dedefinately an eye opener in My opinion.

What do you think scam? CMC inform the fake price? If that happens, It could be because it is cenralized algorithme. I think CMC is not scam, the price is live time, There is a little bit diferent in the exchangers. The price of exchanger is real and coinmarketcap collect information from many exchangers in one time.

I'm surprised that coinmarketcap alone can "manipulate" the market so easily and those that are new into crypto think that they have lost lots of money and to "cover the loss" they are forced to selll their coins which causes a dump and a perfect situation for big fishes to buy. This remembers me when a big fish dumped his coins until to 1 satoshi and then started buying from 1 satoshi and up making him a huge profit and making a panic to the public to sell their coins to cover the losses.

CMC is not any of the afo mentioned.  It's neither a scam nor a fraud.  Their actions weren't professional and that should be called out. They're not fraudulent,  they haven't been any funds mismanagement levied against them as they don't even manage anyone's funds. They haven't ran away with anyone's money as well. It was just an act of incompetence that they displayed.

Why would you think that coinmarketcap is a fraud? All it did was to show you the results of all the coins that are legally released in ICOs and was put in the market of cryptocurrency. Maybe there's a glitch in it, i don't know what to call it but when you say coinmarketcap removed Korean exchanges maybe it is because it has nothing left in it and it has no value that's why they remove it automatically but such thing would not happen before. I wonder why they do that this leaves me wondering.

They show you that Bitcoin price is $5000 what would you do? you would go and open an exchange's site and sell whatever you have for $5000 even though people would pay you at least 3 times more? what ever coinmarketcap is showing you should not have any thing to do with your decision on trading.

I'm not sure, but I don't understand if China is hating on Bitcoin or they just want to regulate it? this has a big impact on the future of Cryptocurrency, maybe we should create a post on this and discuss it there

I saw that there was a lot going on with that and figured it was the reason for the price drop.  I'm new here and still pretty new with crypto trading and investing, but I've been in business for many years as well as Forex trading.  With China shutting the mining operations down wouldn't that basically mean the mining industry would have to be rebuilt? New pools, new companies, etc?

Alot of things caused the dip. I don't think they were the one

Manipulation is different from scamming people but its relatively to each other,it has big effect in the mindset of traders so its a bad thing to that thing.

There is no doubt that it had an effect, whenever you are digesting material on the internet you have to be cautious / selective in what you believe, however when you are using figures from a supposedly respected authority as coinmarket cap people tend to believe what is in front of them - to communicate retrospectively that there was a change in the calculating method is in my mind underhand & its no surprise the community are sceptical of their intentions... 

The thing that makes me worried is the influence that CMC has. I don't think it's healthy for the market that one website has such a power. At the end of the day what they do is taking average on some numbers. The whole website can be done by a first year student. They are not adding any value an yet, they have so much power over the prices.

Ofcourse a small notification on their website could be a sign of good will without taking a significant amount of the ad space. But people should understand  that the BTC price is a bit abstract. If you see the average price ( on CMC, preev or wherever you are getting the information) it doesn't mean that you will buy BTC for this price. Every user (even a newb) should clearly understand it and the main thing on CMC is not the average index but the page with diferent markets and their data.

In my honest opinion, i think it is wrong to use the word SCAM in this situation. You might need to retract the word. I do not also agree with your point on manipulation. CMC reflect to an extent the true position of prices which of course can dip or rise as a result of activities and news surrounding such coins.
However i would like to say, CMC acted unprofessionally to have removed the korean exchange without any info to that effect.
I believe they can do better information management.

in my opinion coinmarketcap is not a scam it shows average price of alts's

I have no doubt that you are right but that's not the point here. The point is that if there is any change in the calculation they should inform people beforehand so they don't panic and wales collect their money. There is no possible rational reason for not informing people beforehand. Well except scamming them.

Coinmarketcap doesnt scam people but giving misinformation to the people causes panic selling at the market,yeah they are morelikey a manipulator but the word scam doesnt even fit.

You are right, news like that are in the nature of the market. But even of CMC cause 1% of a change here I like responsible and wanna talk about it so the new people know that CMC isn't the best source to check the prices.

As it was already said coinmarketcap could not cause this dump by its single action. If  you talk about scaming then imho it is a bit dishonest to calculate the average price index with the exchanges that could not be publicly accessed, that make market less healthy. Thanks got they were not calculating the rates fron nigerian or venezuelan exchanges that sometimes can be even twice biger than the ones from the US and EU. CMC should have done it a long time ago.

I edited the post so I have explained why I used word 'scam'. but either scam, fraud or any other thing, they were dishonest about the only job they have. I feel responsible to talk about it.

Obviously money is involved, Imagine how much money you could have made if you were CMC's staff, or image a Wale pays shit tons of money to CMC to not notice people before removing the Korean exchanges. Poor people who panic sale lost lots of money and after the dip wales show up and collect the chip coins... They are tons of ways they could have made money in this.

Don't forget, this is a 700 trillion  market. 10% or even 1% dip is huge and I am pretty sure so many less informed people have lost their money in this.

This is really unfortunate. I know that this will definitely not continue like this. As a decentralized community, one sees this kind of thing from time to time. And being a new and developing industry, a lot of investors are still skeptical even after investing. So any little change in the market, whether influenced or not triggers panic.

Yes you are right, I think that the news about china make the people go on panic buying and not the CMC. I also see this news 2hours ago but I'm glad the price of the bitcoin and other alt's are already going back to it's original price.

I checked the twitter account of coinmarketcap just now and there are also some people complaining about it, they said that coinmarketcap really did removed south korean exchanges that is why the price chart of all cryptocurrency goes down especially Ripple because most of its volume comes from south korea. Most people use CMC to check the price of all cryptocurrencies (even myself) so I can say that this may be the big reason why the market are now crashing. I don't know why CMC did that, it's so disappointing. I thought it was just a price correction but its more likely a manipulation.
check out the comments on their twitter account here: https://twitter.com/CoinMarketCap/status/949694871299940352

How could something be called scam if no money is involved. 

Well I don't consider CMC to be wrong here. The basic problem is the demographic of Crypto Investors. Most of the crypto investors are just noobs and path followers. Hardly 5-6% do real TA, rest just rely on market signals and eventually lose. We have population of investors who are ready to buy any shitcoin just on one call of 'McAfee's Coin of the Week'! I mean seriously, how could people be so dumb.

Rest CMC is private site, it keep doing amendments to provide accurate estimates. It removes outlier prices regularly. This may be the same case too. If you don't like, you can stop using it.

How do you know it's the most visited site and in what manner investors in bitcoin and altcoins 'depend' on it?

Where did you get the 92% figure?

Coinmarketcap can't affect the market as you say. Korean exchanges usually have higher prices at their exchanges (some coins are traded with premium) than other exchanges - this could be a possible answer.

I understand your position, but we can admit that these accusations only happen in relation to Coinmarket, because it is the most visited site, any error is fatal, 92% of the investors of Bitcon and altcoins depend on that site, it's something to think about.

It isn't coinmarketcap that is doing this but rather some news came out in South Korea that is causing these dips today read for yourself. I think that is why we have such a big correction today, carry on as always nothing to see here. https://themerkle.com/coinmarketcap-excludes-south-korean-prices-total-market-cap-drops-by-50bn/

Well, scam is not good to tell the condition right now. Incompentently is appropriate to tell them, and why people must believe and use CMC as their standard.

We throw the word 'scam' around way to much, to the point the word has lost all meaning.  I don't believe CMC is a scam but I do think they operate incompetently sometimes.  I use their site all the time but agree that removing Korean exchange volume with no announcement or warning is just irresponsible.

You're giving too much credit to that website, it's just metrics.

Much bigger things are happening:

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/59w5eb/china-is-about-to-kill-nearly-all-bitcoin-mining-operations-in-the-world

It is easy to see the drop in their website which happened in a matter of a second. The drops are more gradual in exchanges. Also, people are talking about it everywhere:

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/01/08/ripple-market-price-korean-exchange/
https://thebitcoin.pub/t/chaos-coinmarketcap-removing-korean-exchanges-in-coinprice/22179
https://twitter.com/JoelKatz/status/950242696848842752
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7ownsm/coinmarketcapcom_no_longer_counting_korean/

Traders big enough to move the market this much aren't making their trades based on CMC; they're watching the prices on their own exchange.
Mondays are typically bloody in crypto anyway - not too surprising.

You think Coinmarketcap.com caused this dip?

Why do you think that?

I have been reading this forum for a while but I never posted here. But today's news made me say something. Today Coinmarketcap removed Korean exchanges to deduce the market cap without any clear notice in their website. This made a lot of people panic sale their bitcoins and altcoins and we experienced a huge drop. It makes me thinking why did they do that? I must be fool to think this is an honest mistake. They could have just put a notice up there in their website and avoid this but they didn't. They knew exactly what's gonna happen and they manipulated the prices.  

Yes, the price will go back up soon and we all forget about this, because we'll be happy with our profits. But I am thinking right no, how fragile is this market that a website can manipulate it like that. This makes me worried about the future. This is not the first time this happened. Any tiny news could create a panic among people. This proves that others are hesitant about the future of the market and that's why they do panic sale. I think the only solution is to talk about this and see why we panic so fast?  

Please let me know what you guys think about about Coinmarketcap and why people panic like that. This made me think for a while.  If you also think Coinmarketcap scammed people here, what is the solution and what is the alternative?

Edit:
Maybe I wasn't clear on why I used the word 'SCAM' here. Scams happen when a fraudulent scheme performed by a dishonest individual or company in an attempt obtain money or something else of value from others. For example, one possible theory is that CMC was paid by wales to inform them about this change before hand and also does not provide others a notice. Then the price drops and the wales enters and buy cheap coins and people who panic sale loose their money. This is just an example there are tons of ways you could have made money in this.

I think we should be informed and talk about scams because they are really hurting the market.