He introduced us to a "revolutionary" cryptocurrency called KaratGold Coin (KBC) that promised all of the benefits of gold and cryptocurrencies married into a single platform. The founder, Harald Seiz, pledged to act essentially as a central bank as this alleged billionaire would backstop the coin and peg the new cryptocurrency to gold at a specified rate. The current coin price was much lower relative to this promised rate. Essentially an arbitrage opportunity! As you can imagine, this already wasn't smelling right to me.
"The best part is that new coins are mined in a unique way! Instead of setting up mining rigs like with Bitcoin, you are rewarded coins when you recruit people to join!"
At this point it's pretty obvious that this is MLM at best and a Ponzi or actual pyramid scheme at worst. I politely declined.
Today the incident popped into my head and I decided to check out how KaratGold Coin (KBC) has progressed. Welp, turns out it wasn't just another coin tossed into the trash heap of cryptohistory. Rather, it really WAS a Ponzi scheme as it turns out Harald Seiz was simply taking all the investor dollars and spending it on his own lavish lifestyle. All the talk about gold backing and pegging was an outright lie. The various websites attached to the coin such as this one and this one are no longer operating. Furthermore, regulators are hammering down and telling the issuing company to cease operations. The coins are essentially worthless and the jig is pretty much up for Harald Seiz.
Here's a look at the KBC price chart.
- kbc.png (219.12 KiB) Viewed 6276 times
P.S. One cool thing about the guy's impromptu presentation was the physical gold note he showed me in the middle of it. It looked like a normal banknote but it had (supposedly) 0.1 grams of gold embedded in the middle of it like a kind of foil or seal. That was actually legit cool.
