This was simply an explicit (although obviously not explicit enough to the people taken advantage of) scam from the start. There was no cryptocoin. No blockchain. There was just giving money to her and her associates.

> There was no cryptocoin. No blockchain. There was just giving money to her and her associates.

So why is she called "Cyryptoqueen"?

Because they claimed one coin was the new Bitcoin and that she and her associates took billions for “crypto”

Yes, good question and this is exactly why there are so many scams. There's such a hype that one can simply add crypto lingo to anything and people will buy into it. Not even the media bothers, once someone proclaims to be associated with "crypto" that's what they're labeled at.

It's quite common that crypto currencies have an almost religious following nowadays, but she was one of the first. Where bitcoin was propagated by tech savvy people, One Coin collected money from average Joes. They took the term 'crypto-queen' to the 'real-world'.

I never heard of her or her coin before everything went shit. Her product wasnt targetting actual crypto enthusiasts.

OneCoin didn’t deliver anything, there was no technology, no coin

Ironically this question is why so many people got scammed, they couldn’t tell the difference either, despite there being obvious and relevant differences

There are lots of people who 'almost made it', and desperately looking for a way to catch up.

Bitcoin is decentralised and Onecoin was centralised - enabling control and in the end abuse of the whole shebang.

It wasn't even a centralised coin. There was no coin at all - it was just a scam.

Another comment mentioned they had a spreadsheet. That would qualify as a centralised coin.

A coin with a 5% premine to a single individual isn't completely decentralized.

The pseudonymous creator of the Bitcoin blockchain made the effort to include a proof in the genesis block that the chain wasn't premined. That was before there was a word for it.

Maybe you are thinking of Ethereum? It is currently at 60% premine, the target ratio has been changed a number of times, but the ratio should be lower in the future.

I think I was mixing up sole-participant mining with pre-mining. Early sole-participant mining is still not very decentralized.

Well, that lack of interest in the project in the beginning was certainly not for a lack of trying, and interest... well let's just say it picked up after a while.

Still, hard to criticize the founder for mining when no one else had interest in it.

That cryptographical proof against premining is quite interesting however. Someone must have thought the mere suspicion would have been enough to void any interest in the project. History suggests that wasn't the case, even if we can't know for sure. It might have been different.

Anyway, for what it's worth, all evidence suggests that (almost) all of that solo mining was likely burnt. That too suggests the primary risk was thought to be people losing interest in the project.