Cryptopia running an investment scam to fuel administrator’s nitrous oxide addictionAt first Crytopia seems like a utopia for cryptocurrency fanatics, with a plethora of mining pools, trading pairs, and a chat which gave you free coins of all sorts 24/7. It was the best cryptocurrency website I had seen in years. I started to mine and chat on Cryptopia, exchanging cryptocurrency knowledge and making small amounts of Bitcoin. The quiescent beginning was short lived, soon I decided to use Crytptopia for actual business. Dotcoin is the official cryptocurrency of Cryptopia and is needed to buy Cryptopia shares, vote for new cryptocurrencies to be added, and is the official tipping currency. I started selling Dotcoin for USD and it quickly became apparent that it could become a lucrative venture. The idea was that as Cryptopia becomes more popular the value of Dotcoin would rise, so holding Dotcoin would be a surefire way to make money as Cryptopia expanded. There are only ~260 million Dotcoins in the world at this time, so even a modest market cap would skyrocket the price.
My USD to Dotcoin exchange became very active during the two weeks it existed. I exchanged $1500 for roughly 20 million Dotcoins, mostly for investment purposes but also so people could use the Dot to buy shares and votes on Cryptopia. I had roughly 28 million Dotcoins in my wallet at its peak, and had no intentions of selling any. However something very worrisome came to my attention. Hex (one of the administrators) was talking alot about how he loves Nitrous Oxide. "give me all the nitrous" is a direct quote from Hex. This concerned my greatly, since Nitrous Oxide can cause even the most brilliant person to become depraved and waste their money like a common drunkard. Generally Nitrous Oxide costs $1 per 8 gram cartridge, with 30 cartridges per box and a high that lasts maybe 10 seconds per cartridge. It is easy to go through hundreds of cartridges in a few hours during a nitrous binge, so it doesn't matter how much money was invested into Cryptopia, the administrators would surely spend it if they were truly addicted to Nitrous Oxide. They talked about drugs 90% of the time and programming 10% of the time, and rarely fielded questions from their customers since they had a terrible attitude (possibly due to drug withdrawal).
The price of Dotcoin steadily rose from 18 satoshis to 33 satoshis during the time I was selling it for fiat, since there was less supply available as more investors became interested in holding it. There was 1 thing I didn't consider however: the administrators of Cryptopia did not want a higher Dotcoin price. Cryptopia sells shares of their company for 2 million Dotcoins each, and each share pays out 5000 Dotcoins per week. So far about 250 shares have been sold, so Cryptopia needs to buy ~5000000 Dotcoin per week and 25 million Dotcoin per year, worth about $2000. A rising Dotcoin price makes this share 'dividend' more and more expensive. If Cryptopia administrators were holding onto Dotcoin they would benefit from Dot price dropping, but they have admitted to selling all the Dotcoin invested for Bitcoin, which is then sold for 'server money'. Unless they have an incredibly expensive server then server money = drugs.
Every single time someone invested 2 million Dotcoins for a share it was dumped minutes later, most of the volume spikes are people purchasing Dotcoin followed by it being dumped. In late October the administrators of Cryptopia launched a coordinated effort to crash Dotcoin's price, out of fear that it would keep rising. They sold shares for half the price (1 million instead of 2 million Dotcoin) and then dumped them all at once until the price went down to 20 satoshis. This was very harmful for the people who had invested in Dotcoin, essentially the bitcoins they invested were transferred to the administrators of Cryptopia. The administrators were both desperate for drug money and in fear that a higher Dotcoin price would bankrupt them, so they harmed all of their supporters for personal gain. Dotcoin could have easily rallied over 100 satoshis, excitement was building quick, but this bright future was smashed to pieces by both dumping Dotcoin and extremely negative attitudes from the administrators. The administrators of Cryptopia are so desperate for drug money that they couldn't even let their own cryptocurrency grow for a month. If they didn't need to spend the money immediately on drugs they could have made a ton of money by holding Dotcoin, anyone in their right mind would have done that and supported my efforts instead of destroying and discouraging them.
Despite all the indications of severe drug abuse clouding the decisions of Cryptopia administrators, I kept about 15 million Dotcoins and was considering buying more. But then the administrators launched a personal vendetta against me for no apparent reason. We were talking about generating private keys for brainwallets, and someone asked me if I generated the private key for an address with 1000 Bitcoins would I keep it. I said yes, since the probability of generating a Bitcoin address with 1 satoshi is astronomically low, let alone 1000 Bitcoins. The administrators then decided to frame me as a thief, and I felt like it was a setup so they'd have an excuse to steal my money. Indeed, shortly after that the administrators both told me in no uncertain terms that they were going to rob me, and that they had access to all my passwords and wallets.
I then waited several hours for the Cryptopia administrators to fall asleep, and I dumped the last 15 million Dotcoins I had. I was very thankful to have gotten out there without getting robbed directly, although I was indirectly robbed when the administrators dumped Dotcoin to fuel their various drug addictions. If they were normal sober people they would have had lots of Dotcoin and applauded my efforts to raise its price in the long term, but instead they had no Dotcoin, since they were depending on the shares for their income and nitrous habit. Hex has publicly stated that he is dirt poor (despite owning Cryptopia), so he is 100% depending on donations in the form of Cryptopia shares.
Ultimately my account was locked for no good reason. The administrators banned me from chat simply for saying "I have so much faith in this place I withdrew 0.36 Litecoins" about 30 minutes before a scheduled maintenance. I then used a VPN to get around the ban, and they used that as an excuse to lock my account and take my money, since multiple accounts is apparently against the terms of service. It makes me wonder how many people Cryptopia has banned and stolen from in the past, and how many they will steal from in the future. There is nothing stopping the administrators from taking everyone's balance right now, they are completely anonymous and have 100% control of funds. Also be very careful using passwords on Cryptopia, since Hex has stated he has every password. This seems morally wrong to me. I had over a dozen types of cryptocurrency in my wallets which I was planning on keeping long term, but I had no opportunity to move them out. I was compensated with 0.005 Bitcoins and not even allowed to see what I had in my account.
To summarize, Cryptopia is being run by out of control drug addicts who do whatever they want regardless of how much it hurts their business. They have no intentions of building Cryptopia into a profitable business model and instead have decided to live off selling shares. The shares only pay dividends in Dotcoin, so if they drop the price of Dotcoin to zero they can do this all legally. I would not leave even $1 on Cryptopia after my experience. Never trust a nitrous junkie, your account is one box of whippets away from being locked on Cryptopia.
Cheers
