Hotel Bitconnectia: You can visit, but you can never check in.
It's Day 5 of the BitconnectX ICO and all is not well in Bitconnect Land.
The main Bitconnect website has been inoperative for two days, supposedly because of a Dedicated Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. At first, it was completely down. Now, rather like The Eagles' infamous Hotel California, you reach the website but you can never log in. After solving two ReCaptchas, you get the fractured message: "We will enable login in to dashboard as soon as we realize everything under control. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."
One such inconvenience would be the inability of Bitconnect users to access their BCC tokens or Bitcoin to spend on the shiny new BitconnectX Initial Coin Offering. After brisk sales during the first four days, today it took several hours -- and not minutes -- for the daily ration of 261,333 tokens to be sold out
Or it could be that prospective buyers, worried about the disappearance of the Mother Ship from the Internet, are holding off wasting spending their money on the latest Bitconnect project, which popped out of nowhere a short times before its January 10 ICO date.
Meanwhile, one of the biggest promoters of Bitconnect has pulled all his videos off YouTube, and other prominent Bitconnect barkers have noticeably toned down their endless appeals for even more people to put money into the program. Sure, they could be toning things down because two states have begun legal action against Bitconnect, but maybe they know something that others only suspect.
Is this Bitconnect's exit scam: an unavoidable tragedy brought on by forces of evil? Or is it merely the inability of a billion-dollar enterprise to secure its own website?
Either way, the picture is not pretty.
Since its inception in late 2016, the Bitconnect project has created controversy within the cryptocurrency universe. Advertising itself as an all-in-one cryptocurrency community, Bitconnect has managed to survive at least one DDOS and to fairly reliably pay out daily rewards to people who loaned Bitconnect tokens (BCC) to a shadowy trading bot. It has created a huge army of True Believers™ whose faith in the program knows no end.
But others say the platform smacks of a pyramid scheme, with money from new investors being used to pay older investors, and a payment schedule that defies all financial sense. Such programs, the critics note, eventually fall apart, and when they do, websites go down, withdrawals slow down and then stop, support requests go unanswered, and all social media accounts disappear -- along with whatever money people still had left with the program's operators.
To its credit, though, Bitconnect has not entirely disappeared. It seems as if they are really trying to revive the website, and the Twitter account is still active, though still long on promises and short on details.
Experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by.
The BitconnectX ICO had been selling the new BCCX tokens like hotcakes, selling out within two hours the first day, and within minutes the next three days. But today, it took nearly six hours for the daily cap to be reached. Not that it makes much a difference, Considering each sell-out provides a daily maximum intake of $13 million. Fast or slow, the BCCX sale has still raked in more than $65 million so far.
Maybe they should share some of that money with their IT staff.
[This post was previously published at my blog.]
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