Analysis of the Veritaseum Scam

in #money7 years ago (edited)

Veritaseum was founded by self proclaimed genius, Reggie Middleton. Veritas, the coin, makes me throw up in my mouth just thinking about it. But, if you bought the Veritaseum ICO, you would have made a ton of money. That's the case with a lot of ICOs these days. My vomit aside, let's dig in and try to understand what the coin is, who Reggie Middleton is, the fundamentals, and some technical analysis.

What is Veritaseum

"Imagine Having the Keys to the Internet in 1994". That is literally is all the info you will get by going to the main website. Did I already mention Reggie Middleton is a genius? What more do you need to know...just give him all your money now and skip reading the rest of this forensic evaluation.

There is very limited useful info on the main Veritaseum page. 95% fluff, 5% content. There is one snippet that says "Veritaseum enables software-driven P2p capital markets without brokerages, banks or traditional exchanges". The rest is all about how you missed the internet in 1994, a "forensic valuation for ripple", pricing for Veritas, and blogs about the economy.

What is Software-driven P2p capital markets?

Reggie is playing off people's distrust of corporations and banks. In simple terms, this idea implies that Veritaseum will allow people to trade stocks and other investment vehicles without going through banks, brokerages, etc. The veritaseum token will be able to represent many different types of investments. The idea sounds similar to bitShares...essentially the token is a derivative or representation of something else.


Why is this horse shit?

  • There is very little info available on the stock exchange idea on the Veritaseum page. Most of the info is about random economic news or predictions. By the way, if you missed investing in the internet in 1994, send me all the SBD in your Steemit account immediately. You won't regret it.
  • The website is a hodge podge mix of random stuff. There is no flow, no clear info, and looks awful in general. It actually looks like it's a website from 1994.
  • The one product that is being touted on the Veritaseum page has nothing to do with the P2P capital market trading. What is being sold is analysis on different coins. You have to pay Veritas tokens to see these magical evaluations. The only one available today is on Gnosis, this one is a free teaser.
  • The Gnosis teaser evaluation is complete garbage. It's a cut and paste job off the Gnosis website essentially. @SteemCleaners (the friendly Steem plagerism bot) would have a field day with this report. The only thing that was not cut and pasted was revenue projections. The Gnosis website is pretty nice actually, I'd much rather get my info from there than read a 30 page PDF.

Stock Market isn't coming to decentralized blockchain anytime soon

Bitcoin and Ether are the 2 most accepted coins and even they are not widely accepted by mainstream yet. The Bitcoin ETF hasn't been approved yet in the US and there are only 2 funds that are available for investors to trade BTC like a stock (one small fund in the US and one small fund in Europe). Most big investors are weary of investing in the volatile crypto currency arena. Sure, there are some big name investors...but it's a tiny percentage.

Stocks are centralized and highly regulated. Most crypto currency is not. I'm a pessimistic person, but is there really demand from crypto currency holders to trade stocks with it? All I see on Steemit are people upset about the possibility of the US asking about your crypto holdings on flights, and how we have to pay tax on every crypto transaction as if it's a stock. Those 2 are painful for me too....and whenever the time comes that we can trade stocks via crypto, there will also be 1,000 times more regulation. I really hope that isn't anytime soon!

Without that addition regulation, I have 0 trust in Reggie Middleton to make sure these trades are done appropriately. Crypto is exciting, volatile and can be very profitable. But, let's not be naive and think that people with a significant amount to invest are going to put it all in a crypto inorder to buy a stock. As a generality, people accumulate wealth as they get older. As they get older, they want less and less risk because they worked hard for that money for several years. Taking less risk means they want more regulation and safety nets. Buying a stock derivative from Reggie Middleton doesn't provide that. I buy crypto to buy crypto..not stocks or real estate or other traditional investments. Stocks are done through a regulated financial institution and fees are extremely low these days btw. $20 of fees to buy $100k of stocks...that's basically non existant.

Who is Reggie Middleton?

Reggie is an analyst and blogger. His website is called BoomBustBlog and it's actually a decent blog. He was also on CNBC as a guest a few times....CNBC has a LOT of guests on every day btw. Reggie uses the fact that he was a guest analyst to remind us in every one of his useless youtube videos. Please go watch some of his videos. I'd recommend the 4 videos Reggie recommended investors watch to better understand his ICO 2 months ago. Here is what Reggie posted on BitcoinTalk as part of the Veritaseum ICO announcement.

The first video is a random propaganda type of video about how you shouldn't trust corporations and banks. I don't...so what? The second video's link is broken. The 3rd and 4th videos are comedy gold...like many of Reggie's other videos. The intro to most of the videos is a chorus chanting "Reggie Middleton". There is a leopard (or maybe a cheetah) walking across the screen. And audio from Reggie's CNBC appearance that repeats "Contrarian Bad Ass Reggie Middleton". It's as catchy as it gets. Lots of fluff...marketing genius. I'm not sure if Reggie is selling a used car or a worthless token. I'd probably be more likely to buy a used car from him though.

Technical Evaluation

The Veritas token has a supply of 100 million with only 2 million in circulation today. Market cap is listed at $166 million. The only place to get the tokens is on EtherDelta. No offense to anyone affiliated with EtherDelta, but today that is a rinky dink exchange. There is practically no volume being traded....and Veritaseum is the largest volume coin on there.

Let's look at the volume of the top 100 coins on Coinmarketcap and what kind of volume they trade on a daily basis. The average is 4% for the past 30 days. This means that on an average day, 4% of the total coin's marketcap will be traded. If we take out the top 10 high fliers, we end up with 2.4%. Where does Veritas rank in the top 100 coins? Spoiler alert, it's 98th out of 100!

This means that the valuation is bogus. When Veritas moves to Poloniex, Bittrex, or another exchange with high volume, then we will see the true value people are willing to trade it at.

Conclusion and Announcement

The problem Reggie Middleton is trying to solve is that financial and corporate institutions are not trustworthy. The only thing his "solution" solves is how to get money in his own pocket. He is part of the problem, not the solution. Regulation exists to keep investors safe from people like Reggie. I will 100% agree with Reggie's self assessment that he is a genius. And he is successfully ripping people off with his marketing genius.

This is a free detailed analysis on Veritaseum aka scam coin. Future evaluations will cost you FinancialCritic Coins. Cue the music and the tiger. ICO coming soon...

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You actually forgot to mention the best part: The claim that the Veritaseum Wallet has already been in beta for years. Yet on the last slide of the Google Docs presentation (why no PDF? so people have a hard time to find the lies whenever the slides get deleted?), there's a link to the "Legacy Veritaseum wallet", but also a note that it's no longer available due to regulatory issues.

Soooo... if the old wallet product was shut down, because...? Then there's no need to explain the regulatory issue that could result in the new wallet to be taken offline aswell (as it's essentially the same product, only with its contracts on another blockchain), right? I'd like to hear a lot about that if I was an investor. Shouldn't we be able to find that binary somewhere anyways? Well, I had no luck, but still, hurray for the wayback machine for a tutorial for the "legacy" client to judge for yourself: https://web.archive.org/web/20170301054542/https://blog.veritaseum.com/download/veritaseum-wallet/send/3-ultracoin-clients-wallets/5-veritaseum-s-ultracoin-prototype-wallet-quick-tutorial
About the application: Looks like it's been removed in April 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20170301054507/https://blog.veritaseum.com/download/veritaseum-wallet/veritaseum-for-windows/download/3-ultracoin-clients-wallets/2-veritaseum-s-ultracoin-prototype-wallet

So our amazing CEO doesn't like to talk too much (at all, actually) about his failed project ultra-coin.com? Obviously, after the experience of creating a new coin, not getting accepted by customers and exchanges with it and killing it off and removing all traces of the software, now thanks to Ethereum tokens and a decentralized exchange, the time is ripe to try again.

If this coin is not one of the biggest scams ever, which one is? I'm so glad the exchanges don't accept the VERI token, which random twitter bots try to convince them of all the time.

Ah, and one other extremely funny thing is being pointed out on slide 33, "Under the Hood", where they explain the technology. Please let me just quote:
"Arbitrary derivatives with [SECRET SAUCE], [NOT TELLING], [NOTHING TO SEE HERE], [NOT THE DROIDS YOU'RE LOOKING FOR], [MOVE ALONG], and more..."
If that's how my car dealer would describe the inner working of my future vehicle, I'd run away as quickly as I can.
And about the patents: "COOL, TECHNICAL SOUNDING STUFF ON HOW TO DO AMAZING THINGS WITH THE BLOCKCHAIN THAT YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF BEFORE GOES HERE"

If you're still convinced Veritaseum is a good investment, I have news for you: You're lost. Please send your money to charity.

"Arbitrary derivatives with [SECRET SAUCE], [NOT TELLING], [NOTHING TO SEE HERE], [NOT THE DROIDS YOU'RE LOOKING FOR], [MOVE ALONG], and more..."

This is too good!

It's amazing that you guys get so many upvotes with so much erroneous info. We never had a coin for the ultra-coin.com venture. Ultracoin was a marketing moniker that was renamed to Veritaseum to avoid altcoin confusion. This was discernible with just a small modicum of reading, which you chose not to do or decided not to reveal.

CFTC changed their regulatory stance on bitcion which affected our client, so we pulled it to rewrite it, and we gave a detailed reason why and how. Again, just a little reading. In addition, since you are not privvy to the rewrite or how we are changing the platform, how do you come to the conclusion that nothing has changed other than the blockchain?
There's nothing wrong with not understanding the concepts or mechanics behind a venture, but you not only fail to understand it, you are filling in your knowledge gaps with lies and innuendo. Not very cool.

"...we gave a detailed reason why and how." --> Where, why and how?

"how do you come to the conclusion that nothing has changed other than the blockchain?" --> Can you elaborate on the differences? As there is no actual technical detail provided anywhere (besides the "[SECRET SAUCE], [NOT TELLING]" etc.), I wonder to which other conclusion anyone can come to.

i believe in you reggie, and am a fan of the product. But how come no one is responding to my feedback to the website. so many product questions.

I don't know if that is the real Reggie Middleton responding to you...but I started a new post with my response back to him. Link is here if you want to participate.

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How did this only raise $9.54!?! Excellent article. You, my friend, have been followed. I look forward to reading more of your stuff.

LOL. The people have spoken, they want more steemit stats, less talk about scam coins.

Because the vast majority of people in crypto have never heard of this worthless, centralized garbage Veri

It seems those who want to invest in early ICO tokens are the new target for scams these days, that and BTC investment schemes that keep your initial investment and include it in your 'interest' payments. Very suspect.

Thank you for the thorough investigation and warning, I'm sure it will save some from making a big mistake.

Clearly you have absolutely no understanding of how Veritaseum works. I agree that the valuation is a bit rich at the moment but your article is complete bullshit.

Can you give me specifics?

It seems to me like you are just attacking Veritaseum to gain popularity as you clearly made no serious research effort so I'm not going to waste my time here. All relevant information is freely available on the Veritaseum website and their social media channels. Maybe you just don't get it. You also thought that Humaniq is going to buy android smartphones with ICO proceeds and based your conclusion on that when they only mentioned the affordability of low-end android smartphones. You completely didn't get their business model. One just cannot take analysis like that seriously.

Are you kidding that I did no research? It's okay to disagree on my opinion about the coin, but it seems like you are getting personally offended.

Also, Humaniq is a completely different topic...and I didn't make up the part about $20 phones. It's speculation as to who will pay for the phones, but the info is right on the Humaniq blog: https://blog.humaniq.co/humaniq-working-with-chinese-manufacturers-on-launching-a-20-smartphone-in-africa-d8e42316e5de

You have proven the value of Steemit. I recently opened a wallet with EtherDelta with an intention of trading some Ethereum for some VERI. I've learned the hard way that personal due diligence is essential and there is simply no excuse for not availing oneself of the largely free tools available to reduce one's capital risk exposure.

I've reviewed some positive opinions regarding VERI and some not so positive. I may regret not coming aboard the Veritaseum wagon, but evaluations such as yours urge a cautionary position.

At this point, I'm wishing Reggie well and I'll try to catch the VERI Express soon after it leaves the figurative stations on Polo and Bittrex and larger volume exchanges.

Hope you stayed away. This centralized scam coin is now $15 (must've been $200+ when you posted).

Reggie get them fake news Veritaseum to the moon

The price of veri seems to be holding strong currently at 0.7 eth $170 with a position of 18th in the market cap and not listed on any of the major exchanges, these are only positive indicators and the people who bought at ICO level (including myself) must be extremely happy with how the price is moving.
This post seems to me like its a poor attempt to try and put a negative spin on veritaseum, more than likely someone who regrets not investing in one of the hottest, with the biggest potential in the crypto space to date.

Hind sight is 20/20 on any investment. I'm not writing posts because I'm butt hurt from missing an ICO. If I was to do that, I would be writing a ton of posts on the subject!

I genuinely believe this one is complete trash. And btw, you didn't give me any reasons why it isn't trash....you invested in the ICO and price is up on a rinky dink exchange? That's your reasoning? By your reasoning investing w Bernie Madoff was really smart.....until he went to jail.

$15 now. It'll never get anywhere near its previous highs again.

we will just have to wait and see, only time will tell

Yeah, we can agree on that!

Veritaseum hit #12 on Coin Market Cap holding strong over 100$ per shit token

Now $15 and out of the top 100.