Internet Fury: Don’t Claim Bitcoin is Not the Best

After an American independent financial ratings agency Weiss published their long-awaited ratings of cryptocurrencies, many people were disappointed and thus taken to various forums to vent their frustration.

The reviews online are overwhelmingly negative; however, it must not be forgotten that the purpose of these ratings is to “help protect investors from risk, while leading them to the most sustainable, robust cryptocurrencies”, as it says in their statement on why Bitcoin is not an A.

The Weiss ratings placed ethereum and EOS cryptocurrencies ahead of bitcoin, as reported by Cryptonews.com today. No currency garnered a top score of A, but there were B ratings for both ethereum and EOS, with bitcoin receiving a “fair” rating of C+. Weiss claimed bitcoin “falls short in two important areas: risk and technology,” although it admitted bitcoin was strong in terms of adoption and branding.

Reddit, an American news aggregation and discussion website, user u/CrzyJek has taken to the popular r/cryptocurrency subreddit to explain why Weiss ratings “is a sham and complete utter garbage”. The user cites his sources diligently, quoting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in their prosecutions of Weiss for “fraudulent, misleading statements, as well as engaging in insider pump & dump though their listings”.

Those sources were a cease and desist letter from 2006, and an order approving distribution plan from 2009. He concludes that, “Weiss ratings is a long standing pump & dump operation who makes propitious picks based largely on which securities the owners currently hold, and who, prima facia [sic], had a few years of self-proclaimed legitimacy, yet were later exposed as shilling their own picks to pump their stocks.”

Other users on the same subreddit urge against taking the Weiss ratings seriously: “If the reports are freely available read them and analyze their findings but don’t take them as gospel. Give them a credibility level similar to a well researched blog post […] I suspect that [the reports] are mostly a PR stunt to increase the visibility of Weiss Ratings and maybe sell some subscriptions/reports.”

Reddit User u/atworkmeir proposes to “take it with several grains of salt. Maybe the whole shaker.”

As this is the first cryptocurrency rating available, it must be taken into consideration that perhaps, Weiss holds the cryptocurrency market to the same standards as the stock market, even though they are not strictly comparable, at least for the moment. Weiss said, “Ratings are not a science. They are, and always will be, a work in progress.”

In addition to the negative reviews, Weiss has been hit with a spate of cyberattacks it says came “from Korea”, also as reported by Cryptonews.com.