Lately, I’ve been struggling with a question: Is honesty a competitive disadvantage?

I’m wondering because we’re trying to build CoinAILyzer in a market where some of the most effective marketing is based on the possibility that the change in your pocket might make you rich. You know what I’m talking about.

Worse than that, they usually advertise that it’s “free” and then turn around and sign you up for a “free” 7-day trial that turns into a monthly subscription unless you remember to turn it off, and a sizable percentage of people won’t. Oh, and to get functionality like grading, which is widely regarded as not being very good in these apps, including in major numismatic articles, you have to pay a lot extra.

I’m pretty sure that neither is technically illegal. I mean, you might actually find a valuable coin in your pocket, and some functionality is “free,” but I wouldn’t call either behavior something I’d be proud of, and I’d be very disappointed in my children for doing such things.

The problem is that the penny from your pocket or coin jar is almost certainly worth a penny. In a jar, you might find a few worth $.02 in copper melt value. Perhaps a few worth a dollar or more. But honestly, your chances of finding coins valuable enough to justify paying yourself minimum wage, $15.15 in Arizona, to go through it are iffy at best. If you enjoy sorting, it’s a fun afternoon. If you are looking for a retirement supplement, not so much.

That’s a much less compelling advertisement.

We built CoinAILyzer to try to tell you what your coin actually is, what grade we think it is, what it is reasonably worth, and whether it makes sense to spend money having it professionally graded. Sometimes that produces exciting answers. Quite often it doesn’t.

In fact, one of the things I want CoinAILyzer to be really good at is disappointing you. To us, that’s better than you going into your local coin dealer thinking you have a valuable coin and that they are trying to rip you off by offering you far less than you think it’s worth.

If you think you have a $10,000 penny and you actually have a common penny worth one cent, I want us to tell you that. If your Morgan dollar isn’t worth the $50 or $100 it might cost to have it graded, shipped, and insured, I want us to tell you to keep your money.

This is, objectively, a strange way to sell things.

A company saying, “That thing you hoped would make you rich probably won’t” is competing against companies saying, “TREASURE MAY BE HIDING IN YOUR POCKET!”

I know which one gets more clicks.

And this isn’t remotely limited to coins.

Look at investing. We are living through an era where spectacular returns are constantly visible. Someone gets rich on crypto. Someone makes a fortune on options. Someone puts everything into the right stock and suddenly has millions of dollars. There are people who have made returns that would make Warren Buffett look like he isn’t trying very hard.

The winners are real. That’s important. This isn’t necessarily a scam where the success stories are invented.

But the winners are also incredibly visible, while the large numbers of people who lose money, sometimes quite a lot of it, sometimes their life savings, are never heard from again.

Nobody gets a million views on TikTok explaining how they maintained a diversified portfolio, averaged an unremarkable return, and are now comfortably on track for retirement. Somebody who turned $20,000 into $2 million has a much better story.

And then something strange happens. The extraordinary starts to feel ordinary. If people around you are doubling their money, earning 10 percent suddenly feels stupid. Caution starts looking like incompetence. The person taking enormous risks looks like the genius because, at that particular moment, the enormous risks are paying off.

This has happened over and over again throughout history.

Eventually, bubbles burst. Some of the people who got rich stay rich. Some lose everything. Businesses built on reasonable economics tend to have a better chance of surviving than businesses that require everything to continue going perfectly forever.

But there’s an inconvenient part of that story we tend to leave out: before the bubble bursts, the people playing fast and loose can make an absolute fortune.

Sometimes they make so much that even after the crash they’re still better off.

Sometimes the crash doesn’t come for a very long time.

Sometimes the responsible guy simply gets his ass kicked.

I think there is a comforting belief in business that honesty, prudence, and treating customers well inevitably win in the end. I’m not sure that’s true. I wish it were.

Apparently, bullshit can be extremely profitable.

Which brings me back to CoinAILyzer.

From the beginning, we’ve made some choices that I suspect are lousy marketing. We published a long article called “What We Got Wrong” two weeks after launch. We openly discuss where the product works and where it doesn’t. We even refused to call our largest subscription “unlimited” because it isn’t literally unlimited, despite the fact that practically nobody could use all the scans we provide.

I’ve written about mistakes in our AI development. I wrote an entire article about building a testing system because I discovered that I couldn’t trust myself to evaluate good news objectively. The system was supposed to keep the AI honest. Much of the time, it turned out to be keeping me honest.

None of this is because we have discovered the brilliant marketing strategy of Radical Corporate Transparency™.

It’s just who we want to be.

We want to work hard. We want to build something genuinely useful. We want to charge people a fair price for it. And most importantly, if you ask us what we think your coin is worth, we want to give you our best answer rather than the answer most likely to make you excited enough to subscribe.

Maybe that’s naive.

There is certainly an argument that we should play the game. Lead with the $10,000 penny. Show the rarest possible outcomes. Sell the dream. Get people through the door first and explain probabilities later.

I can’t even confidently say it wouldn’t work. It probably would. But there’s a problem: we wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. And I think it might work short term, but not long term.

If CoinAILyzer tells you twenty times that your ordinary coins are extraordinary, we’ve trained you not to believe us. Then, someday, you scan something that really is extraordinary and we have a much bigger problem. We can flash VALUE: $7,500 across the screen, but why should you believe us?

I would much rather tell you nineteen times that you have a $3 coin if it means that, on the twentieth scan, when we tell you to stop what you’re doing and take a closer look, you pay attention.

That may be our competitive advantage.

Or it may be our competitive disadvantage.

I genuinely don’t know yet.

But we know which company we want to build.

And if your penny is worth one cent, we’re going to tell you it’s worth one cent.