I am editing this post at the top with the due diligence that I've performed on ChainCoin, I'm not FUDing what I believe is a good coin, I'm warning you guys from investing in something that has seen very little development. This update was made in response to a comment from @apollo92
There is a huge difference between organic growth of a coin, and having someone on the internet tell you "let's buy a low volume coin and hodl it and shill it so we can all make money somehow"
I'll enumerate some of those differences here.
Firstly: Coins that grow organically tend to have active developers and great communication to those who follow the coin. The last tweet on ChainCoin's twitter is talking about their live funding over 1 month ago... (Source: https://twitter.com/chain_coin)
Secondly: Coins that grow organically tend to stick to their roadmap, or update everyone when goals are not being met or are being pushed back. ChainCoin has not met several of its Q2 2017 goals and has not updated its roadmap to reflect this (Source: http://www.chaincoin.org/development-roadmap/).
Thirdly: Most great coins will have an active github. ChainCoin hasn't had any changes to their git for over 2 months now (Source: https://github.com/chaincoin/chaincoin)
Fourthly: Most alt coins have slacks in which investors can talk to the dev team and ask get updates! ChainCoin, however, does not have an open slack group (Source: Try entering your email here - https://chaincoin.herokuapp.com/invite)
I have done my due diligence, I've been investing in cryptocurrencies for years, I've seen monstrous rises and falls of other currencies. I know what a good dev team can do with an idea, and how it can positively affect my portfolio. What I can't see, is how youtubers can shill a coin, get a bunch of people to buy it, and then claim it will reach 100 dollars which would push the market cap of this coin with lackluster dev and commication to over 1.5 billion (pushing its way to the top 5 coins in existence at this point).
Pump and Dumps usually occur in micro-cap stocks
Many cryptotraders have no experience trading stocks on a stock exchange. I don't want to discredit those that do, I'm sure there are many people on this forum who are much more knowledgable than me! But I want to share with you all my earliest experience in attempting to trade stocks... I bought into something that was very similar to ChainCoin, similar in the way that it was promoted extensively by outside sources who have already bought the stock in attempts to create an extremely exaggerated price. I was young, stupid, and I wanted to get rich quick. Like ChainCoin, the promoters of the stock promised insane returns over very short time periods, and they were right, I watched as the stock rose from 8 cents, to 40 cents, to 80 cents, to 2 dollars!
That's where I bought, at 2 dollars.
Why? Because, like the organizers promoting chaincoin, I was promised that the price of the stock would EASILY rise to 10+ dollars! Of course I'm not greedy! I would sell my stock at 6 dollars for an easy 200% return instead of trying to go for 400% at 10 dollars. However, things didn't turn out that way, once the buy volume starts to decrease substantially, the organizers will dump their stocks (in this case chaincoin) on you.
I learned a valuable lesson that day, I hope steemers reading my blog can learn from this 2nd-hand, rather than losing your money in this newer, slightly more sophisticated pump and dump.
If the organizers live in the US, and plan to sell before 100 dollars, they may be committing securities fraud
Securities fraud is something I've researched quite a bit after falling victim to my first pump and dump. Securities fraud is a very serious crime in the United States and a crime that organizers have gone to prison for and a crime for which organizers will continue to go to prison for in the future. Making statements such as 'you can't really lose', touting how it's 'bitcoin resistant', 'we're not trying to manipulate the prices', and finally HighOnCoins claiming they own more than 50% of the market supply should be a HUGE red flag...
Here are some links where you can read about pump and dumps and securities fraud:
https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answerspumpdumphtm.html
http://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/federal/Securities-Fraud.htm
You've been warned... Goodluck if you 'hodl'...
ChainCoin still could go up, up, and up... But I guarantee there will be a crash after this exponential rise. Who knows, maybe I'm wrong! I wish you the best of luck if you choose to ignore everything I've said.