OPINION: This is going to be a short article because, really, I hope there are not too many people out there foolish enough to hand out their hard-earned dollars into a “Bitcoin killer” in 2021.

But just in case — there’s a new Australian “cryptocurrency” that has supposedly launched this week, that has attracted a bit of credulous local press simply because it’s being spruiked by ex-Brisbane Lions star Jason Akermanis.

“It’s simply a much better product than bitcoin,” Akermanis told news.com.au. “The biggest problem in crypto – we call them the triennial problem. You’ve got cost, speed – it could take four minutes or four hours (to mine crypto) — and then you’ve got scalability.”

Errr… A triennial problem is a problem that occurs once every three years.

He’s talking about the “blockchain trilemma,” the difficulty of offering a cryptocurrency that’s at once scalable, decentralised and secure.

Now, in fairness to Akermanis, he may have been misquoted here.

But this trilemma is a challenge that has eluded some of the smartest people working in cryptography and blockchain, brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists from famous universities and tech giants.

The brains behind Zucoin?

“A local IT guy” in regional New South Wales, according to News.com.au.

Sound legit?

‘It cancels the order’

Then there’s this: Zucoin supposedly “cannot drop below $60 per coin.”

“We put in the software where you can’t sell for less (than $60),” Akermanis told News.com.au.

“It cancels the order. You can try but you won’t be able to do it.”

This … is laughable. One of the entire points of crypto is that it’s not controlled or governed by one central party.

If it was possible to guarantee a price floor for a speculative asset like crypto, don’t you think someone would have done it before now?

Apparently, zucoins.com will be selling 100 million Zucoin, which at A$60 a pop would give it a nominal market cap of roughly US$4 billion.

Now…of the 11,000 different cryptocurrencies out there, there’s less than three dozen that have attracted that much success.

Of those, just one — Dfinity’s Internet Computer project — gained that much market capitalisation right off the bat. And that’s a project that involved five years of work by nearly 200 computing engineers, cryptographers and operational experts from around the globe.

Not just a guy from Albury.

Saying you’re a “Bitcoin killer” at launch in this day and age is a bit like a junior explorer with a bunch of promising mineral rights declaring they’re going to unseat Glencore as the world’s biggest miner.

It’s cringe, and it’s embarrassing that the Australian media has given this project the time of day.

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