One thought on Airdrops

Marketplace Altcoins
1

One of the big problems with the Auroracoin airdrop is there is no AUR infrastructure at the time of launch. People must have something to do with a coin to retain national attention. Airdrops are an interesting idea but without something “to do” with the coin, how this plays out is really uncertain.

Right now there are no goods or services already priced in AUR, no payment processor to convert between AUC and local fiat to link current merchant payroll and supply chain infrastructure to the AUR network.

Let’s keep this in mind as AUR develops over the next few weeks. A large dump is possible when the citizens realize the only option available to them is to sell on exchange

2

On March 4th, I sent this PM to Cybnate who can verify it, which says the same thing you did:

I kept starting at the “Recent posts” with the subject line: Auroracoin and I began worrying that we were helping to promote Auroracoin indirectly for people who kept seeing it posted with multiple replies.

Part of the recent drop in Peercoin has been people cashing out some of BTC/PPC/LTC and buying into the Auroracoin concept.

I fully believe they are going to go through a GOX-type realization that they’ve been scammed into chasing a dream.

Right now, with Auroracoin at $50-$60/coin, and the “airdrop” giving people 31 coins each in Iceland, even if it WERE true, you’re handing $1700 worth of value to every single Islandic person.

When they walk out onto the street and look around, they realize there is nothing to use it on, and rather than hope for the future, they’ll dump it on the market or give their share to their nephew, son, brother, whomever who will buy it and give them cents on the dollar to dump it.

Auroracoin by it’s blue-printed design is destined to fail.

However, I believe Auroracoin was setup to be more sinister. The developer probably figured out that he’d sell a coin, with a great story, and a great pre-mine. Wait until the price rose up enough, dump it, and run away with the coins.

The problem is that Auroracoin became a little “too popular”, so now the original developer is probably trying to figure out some way of making it work, but since the airdrop infrastructure still isn’t really there, it’s not going to work.

So in the end Auroracoin has the option of:

a) Failing really bad
b) Failing even worse
c) Failing completely

I fully expect there to be some sort of “ok, the airdrop is delayed” or “we’re revising the blueprint” or “ok, we’re forking” or “ok, we’re doing this or doing that”… just to keep the coin alive as it coughs up its own blood.

Auroracoin is dead. But people are so busy chasing a dream, they are willing to sell their Peercoins (and another coin, with the exception of Bitcoin) to chase it.

There is a 5% chance I’m wrong here. Probably 95% chance I’m very close to what we’re going to see.

3

By the way, there can be some accountability with this tool that watch for 31.8 coin transfers in AUR:

chainz.cryptoid.info/aur/claims.dws

(But the tool is stuck at block 5277 as of the time of this post)

But people in Iceland are already complaining that their coins have been already claimed:

http://www.reddit.com/r/auroracoin/comments/21b8am/im_an_icelander_that_wanted_to_claim_my_aurora/

villa_%C3%BEegar_er_b%C3%BAi%C3%B0_a%C3%B0_s%C3%A6kja_fyrir_%C3%BEessa/

So already there are airdrop problems raining from the sky.

So this coin was announced on Feb 2, 2014, with an airdrop date of March 25, 2014

That’s 51 days from launch to airdrop. With one developer initially, and a hard chain fork on March 17th.

…I’m wondering how it could be possible for some thing of this magnitude in this short time frame not to fail?

4

A year ago most people would have said highly unlikely that Bitcoin would sell for around $500. It still did happen.

I agree that the preparation was clearly not great and critical infra is missing, but sometimes the saying build it and they will come is true. So I think it is too early to judge it as a failure, but I wouldn’t invest my money in it.

The roulette may still hit the number some people took their bets on, though.
It is selling for around $7,50 at time of writing, so it hasn’t totally plunged yet.

BTW I can confirm your PM, but story is not over yet. Let’s see where they are at in 3 months time. Will buy you 100 Auroracoins if you are right ;D

5

Between 7PM UTC and 7AM UTC their site reported 140k+ coins dropped, that’s almost 4.5k citizens, 550 ppl / hour.
http://stats.grok.se/en/latest30/Auroracoin
Judge for yourself.