Greeting, this evening john-connor showed up on the Bitcoin Core github with some rather aggressively ignorant minunderstandings of basic cryptographic consensus concepts: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5634#issuecomment-69481908

Having no clue who he was I looked at his github account and googled a bit and found that he is the, seemingly pseudonymous, author of "Vanillacoin".

Vanillacoin was previously discussed on this forum, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=890388.0 but he locked the threads in order to shuffle the users (victims?) off to someplace out of the light of day-- never a good sign, (nor is his BCT newbie account, for that matter).  The "vanillacoin" software has no source code available, it is binaries only (very much not a good sign, and usually severe malware concern; and an ultimate form of centralization), there are source links but they go to a basically empty github repository. There is a whitepaper, which like the comments on github show some general software development background they show no real sign of sophisticated understanding around decenteralized systems for adversarial networks or cryptocurrencies.

I don't know anything more about it, but I figure sunlight tends to be a good disinfectant; and with the threads locked it probably wasn't fair of me to say nothing while I was privately thinking "hm, that all smells pretty fishy".  Of course, the guy was a bit rude to me and also wasted my time-- so feel free to factor that bias in however you like. I'm just reporting my impression as a regular community member. You now know what I know.

[I'm the last person to play altcoin-cops... I mostly avoid this stuff except for the rare cases that are technically interesting: The drama can sink unbounded time and usually, when it comes to the more misguided altcoin cryptography, the only sane policy seems to be "If you see something,say nothing and drink to forget": there is too much crazyness and risk of being attacked for being critical of someones latest scheme. But if it shows up in my face, I can't quite stomach saying nothing at all.]

Cheers,


[Edit: Vanillacoin changed names to V.Cash]