In the end of November 2017 a rather weird altcoin saw the light in the Bitcon Era space - Monero Gold, an ERC20 Token. On November 29th, early in the morning the Smart Contract was deployed.

Now, at this point anybody that knows about Monero has to get alarmed, right? Monero, the most prominent fork of Bytecoin, the result of years of work of a very dedicated community, probably the most anonymous currency in circulation today - in the form of an ERC20-Token?

ERC20-Tokens are basically Smart Contracts deployed on the Ethereum Blockchain that enable anybody to create their own currency within an hour and no prior knowledge. Don't believe me? - I built my own "B33R"-Token with this handy tutorial and learned mostly one thing - it is shocklingly easy to do. The great advantage of the ERC20-standard is that anybody can build wallets and everything you need for your own coin ecosystem very easily, as it is - the name spoils it - standardized.

Now, the "easy"-part is actually a great feature of the ERC20-tokens nature. It's easy to create a token that anybody connected to the Ethereum blockchain can send and recieve. Building in-game currencies or local payment systems that are 100% verifiable and secure can now be deployed by anybody that knows the difference between an integer and a string.

Now back to the fact that Monero Gold came as ERC20-token. This doesnt make any sense, whatever angle you look at it. Monero itself differs vastly from any other currency, uses its own hashing algorithm, is super-private, has nifty features like ring-signatures and so on. An ERC20-token doesnt have any of these features. But wait - ERC20-tokens are an important tool for ICOs. Let's say a team wants to develop their own transaction system and lacks the funds to do so. They can have an ICO, give out ERC20-tokens and later, when their system is up and running, exchange the tokens back for the real deal. Maybe the Monero Gold makers just wanted to do that? Yes, maybe, but they probably should have mentioned that SOMEWHERE. Which they didnt.

So, just by logical thinking, immediately after the launch it is extremely obvious that this token has no value and also has no affiliation with Monero. Everything screams scam, seconds after the contract has been deployed.

But - nevertheless - on February 2nd, only two months after its birth, this coin had reached a total 24h-volume of 214.000$ and a price of 0.17$. Or in other words, a total shitcoin, nothing more than an ERC20-token with some bad, bad, BAD Marketing (this is the official "dev"-team. I am dead serious -> Monero Gold Dev Team) reached a market cap of over 4 million dollars.

Until this point, it looks like a normal shitcoin development, elegantly executed with enough gullible people backing it.

BUT WAIT.

It gets better, so much better. In short, the owner of the contract executed an integer underflow and created a couple trillion units of his own currency, and nobody saw it coming.

Let's go back to the ERC-20 tokens. So these tokens are basically smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain, right?

Let's take a look at the contract that was deployed for Monero Gold: