Fake Bitcoins?
Yes - it’s easy. Here are some simple steps of one of the methods:
item itemPrint this image on a paper
itemThen cut the logo
Finally, you can paste it to a cardboard.
That’s it! Now we can call it a Bitcoin, and it will be very fake.
If you don’t want to put so much effort, there are ready-made Bitcoins
…they’re available on Aliexpress.
some guys in Russia took it for serious - they bought “Bitcoin” like these from Aliexpress, and tried to sell them as real Bitcoin to people who had no clue about cryptocurrencies. These scammers wanted to exploit the lack of crypto-literacy and sold these for $17, telling people that soon it should increase to $4000 (Bitcoin was around $2000 at that time).
Elsewhere, someone in Russia was trying to sell “physical Bitcoin” on a popular social media site like Facebook.
Believe it or not - some people bought these thinking that they were doing the real deal.
Now if we are to be serious - Bitcoin cannot be faked because it doesn’t really exist. If you have a Bitcoin wallet, you don’t keep Bitcoin in it - you keep the keys and the address. So yeah - I know it costs beyond $7500, but it doesn’t exist as you would expect - as a MP3 or JPEG stored in your map. It is a “virtual space” on a database (blockchain) that moves here and there, depending on the transactions - so the transactions are really important here.
Yes - there is some possibility of faking Bitcoin by faking transactions. This is only possible during a so called 51% attack. If (or when?) a group of miners get access to over 50% of the total network mining power, this group may get control over the system by approving or rejecting transactions. In this case, they can permit double spending of their coins - so it would mean faking Bitcoins.
Such a scenario is not that unrealistic - the top 5 miners today have 70% of the hash power.