Bitcoin

Viacoin Is Going Absolutely Bananas. But Is It A Good Investment?

Or is it another scam?

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Viacoin Is Going Absolutely Bananas. But Is It A Good Investment?

Viacoin is blowing up right now. Hard. At the time of writing, Viacoin is CoinSpot’s #1 gainer, and has risen 52% in the last 24 hours alone. 

As we discovered the hard way, however, in a recent cryptocurrency experiment, picking cryptos simply because they are gainers on any given day is a recipe for disaster. 

So is it too late to buy or invest in Viacoin? Does the project have legs? Or is it a scam? A random pump? More: simply: what on earth is it?

Viacoin’s stated goal is: “secure micropayments perfected.” Its biggest selling point is its speed. Viacoin transactions are confirmed every 24 seconds – much quicker than other popular cryptocurrencies like Litecoin (2.5 minutes) and Bitcoin (10 minutes).

Viacoin is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency that was built in 2014 by a Bitcoin Core developer, and it is mined using merged a merged mining technique, which allows Scrypt miners to mine viacoins for free, it is claimed.

It has exploded in price before (see: Motherboard’s 2018 article: “Hackers Jacked Up The Value Of An Obscure Cryptocurrency By Trading Other People’s Money“) causing many people to express first their amazement, then their devastation, on Twitter, as it emerged that Binance accounts accessed using stolen credentials were (most likely) the source of the pump (and dump).

This has also led people to say its current price increase must also be “fishy.”

Viacoin all time price graph. Source: CoinMarketCap

Viacoin also exploded in value in April this year, before once again falling (as you can see in the graphic above). So be wary of looking at past performance and thinking “well, there could be a whole lot more room to run,” because those previous gains were artificially inflated.

Check out the following Tweets, which show people’s reactions to previous pumps.

For those interested in ViaCoin’s history, “ViaCoin was developed in response to an update to the Bitcoin protocol that reduced the capacity of the OP-RETURN script from 80 bytes to 40 bytes,” Coindoo reports.

“ViaCoin was created to supplement this shortage and to address some of Bitcoin’s fundamental issues such as the network delays.”

It is said that mining rewards occur every six months.

Viacoin, Coindoo says, “has seen its fair share of innovations and changes over the past few years. However, there is still a lot of work to be done and, according to the official roadmap, the team recently finished working on finalizing all the details regarding the support for Trezor.”

“The next step involves work for the Lightning Network Daemon implementation in order to bring the Network Wallet to the masses.”

“Future plans include support for the VIA currency by the ATMs produced by General Bytes and various new exchange listings,” Coindoo adds.

Viacoin is not a super popular cryptocurrency, but you can buy it on most popular crypto exchanges, like Binance, Bittrex, Poloniex, Coinroom.

One Reddit thread posted 6 years ago is less than complimentary about Viacoin, with Redditor Bitcoinopoly claiming: “BTCdrak forked bitcoin and hired Peter Todd to insert some new, basically useless feature that was purely for marketing hype. ViaCoin was initially sold with a marketcap of $380,000 which is approximately how much BTCDrak made from the coin without including additional mining profits if he had any.”

“Then, like every other altcoin scam, the creator walked away holding a bag of fiat currency and laughing like a fool.”

Coindoo, for its park, reckons: “ViaCoin is an innovative project that has a lot of things going for it such as super-fast transactions, enhanced versatility, and security, plus a great team behind it.”

“Whether ViaCoin is a good investment opportunity, we can’t say. However, it might be worth investing in the coin now while prices are low. As the Lightning Network will inevitably become more mainstream, so will the coin’s popularity.”

Others very much disagree, still attributing its price jump as being “a random pump.”

The last time Viacoin’s Twitter page posted anything was August the 18th, when they tweeted: “Adding liquidity to the markets for better books on exchanges.”

Its Reddit community is also pretty quiet.

At the time of writing Viacoin is priced at US $0.3454, has a circulating supply of 23,174,754.61 and a market cap of US $8,004,924, according to CoinMarketCap.

It remains unknown what, exactly, is triggering the Viacoin price increase we’ve seen over the last 24 hours.