Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cryptolect 4433 days ago
Apparently they made the SafeCoin IPO (safecoin being the altcoin/blockchain that powers MaidSafe) available to purchase with both MasterCoin and Bitcoin. Based on exchange rates at the time, it was possible to get more SafeCoins if you purchased with MasterCoin, than if you used Bitcoin (since MasterCoin was so cheap).

Some people thought they could take advantage of the situation, and bought up MasterCoin to purchase SafeCoin. However it sounded like the IPO purchase cap for MasterCoin purchases was filled quickly, meaning a lot of people were left holding near-worthless MasterCoin. Thus began the cries of "Mastercoin pump and dump", which the IPO had (inadvertently?) caused.
2 comments
thisiswrong 4433 days ago
Correct. More info on this here: http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/maidsafe-embroiled-safec...

From an outsider's perspective the 'IPO' did indeed look like a planned pump on Mastercoin: People were buying up Mastercoin to take advantage of the btc-msc arbitrage. This drove the Mastercoin price up by ~100%. Meanwhile certain people could potentially have offloaded tonnes of msc purposely bought the week before (for half the price). This may not have been intentional. But either way some people lost big money when Maidsafe stopped accepting msc for their 'IPO' - thus causing the msc price to collapse.

link
resu_nimda 4433 days ago
The cryptocoin situation is an endless source of hilarity. It's so crazy. Just this wild west of speculation, massive fortunes rising and plummeting, millionaires minted overnight, all the shady characters, etc. What efforts are in progress to catalog and package these stories for posterity?
link