Masternode approached me right at the beginnings of viacoin. He was very personable and friendly, and explained he was a big gun behind Darkcoin (and others) and had lots of experience in the startup world and would like to help viacoin succeed. He said he had lots of powerful connections and could help spread adoption really quickly. Naturally, I took him as an advisor and accepted him into my confidence. He said I dont want to try to force you to do stuff, just let me give you advice as an experienced investor in startups, so it seemed like the right and beneficial thing to do.
At this point, however, I believe he did this to position himself such he would be privy to sensitive tradeable information in advance. Of course, being involved in the deals meant that he would be privy to certain information first. I was completely clear with masternode that anything we discuss for viacoin must remain confidential until we agreed to make it public.
Alarm bells began to ring for me when he started sharing privileged information with me about other projects his associates were involved in. I became concerned he might actually be using his position with viacoin to his advantage and leaking to his group. I gradually pulled back and stopped sharing details with him or asking for advice. Ultimately, he resented me for this and we had a hard falling out because I was no longer being forthcoming. This culminated in strongarm threats that things will get ugly and that he would make sure I would never work in this space again if I didnt cooperate. I thought he wanted out of viacoin so I offered to contact him with an OTC buyer. He refused.
So now, masternode is misrepresenting and casually leaking sensitive things in the works, proving that he doesn't care about viacoin or anyone else. It is a personal vendetta disguised under the pretense of informing the community, even promoting darkcoin in this forum. Hes treating our decentralized community like a startup that he can shut down at whim. As someone recently pointed out in the thread, the bitcoin protocol was designed to be robust against centralization. Once you start the network, you cant just turn it off like you turn off your phone. This is the beauty of decentralized systems - no single actor can take it down.
So moving forward, I have read the forum carefully and I take it as a positive sign that people still have passionate opinions on viacoins future success. I believe we can have a good discussion about how to move forward constructively with the project.
I understand people are not happy with the price of viacoin - thats not really under my control; even bitcoin has its ups and downs just like any market. I have yet to sell any viacoin. We could even agree Bitcoin has been bleeding for 15 months despite wide adoption and publicity. This is why I am not entirely convinced that price will be affected by promotion but I do agree adoption is the key to everything and have quietly been doing my part to get adoption, successfully and unsuccessfully.
I think we would all like to spend our time focusing on the future and how to make viacoin better. Ive been allocating most of my time in development and working out various deals. I prefer to under promise and over deliver. But now, Id like to concentrate on how to grow the community and encourage adoption because listening to everyone, it seems that is what the community wants. I understand that this bear market can be a tough time for many investors, so I will be spending more time on the forums to discuss your concerns.
Viacoin is a decentralised community, but the the core of viacoin is the network. A strong secure network is the keystone. That is why I have been concentrating on building the foundations and the viacoin network has been going from strength to strength. Viacoin is well maintained and up to date with all the new features and bug fixes from Bitcoin 0.10. We have had 5 software major releases of the viacoin in 8 months. The network runs at about ~700GH/s and is mined by some of the biggest bitcoin mining companies in the world! One of them is f2pool Discus Fish.
When choosing a blockchain, there are actually very few that could be considered remotely secure based on network hash. Viacoin is definitely one of those now.
I am also disappointed at the attempts to downplay Peter Todds achievements for viacoin or say that he gets paid for doing nothing. Peters hard work on viacoin is well documented and its unnecessary to attack him to leverage an issue with me.
CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY
http://blog.viacoin.org/2014/10/01/petertodd-dev-update.htmlhttp://blog.viacoin.org/2014/11/13/petertodd-dev-update.htmlDiscourage NOPs reserved for soft-fork upgrades
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5000#issuecomment-58889473Accept any sequence of PUSHDATAs in OP_RETURN outputs
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5079SCRIPT_VERIFY_MINIMALDATA unittests
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/cd9114e5136ecc1f60baa43fffeeb632782f2353 (also see my comments
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5065#issuecomment-59100744 on the pull-req)
Check against MANDATORY flags prior to accepting to mempool
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5253 and Fixed a DoS attack! Also see related post
http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg06466.html on the bitcoin-dev mailing list.
BIP62/STRICTENC review and tests
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5247Discourage fee sniping with nLockTime
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2340#issuecomment-58617533 http://blog.viacoin.org/2014/12/25/petertodd-dev-update.htmlmicropayment channel demo
https://github.com/petertodd/checklocktimeverify-demos/blob/master/micropayment-channel.py Near-zero fee transactions with hub-and-spoke micropayments
http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg06576.htmlSetting the record straight on Proof-of-Publication
http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg06570.htmlThe relationship between Proof-of-Publication and Anti-Replay Oracles
http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg06617.html I know some of that stuff is not very sexy. Its not fancy anon or dubious instant confirmations. But they are essential improvements and bug fixes that contribute to the robustness of the network, which is the core of the project.
So regarding CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY. I am sure most people dont understand how important this new opcode is. It might seems like an obscure technical feature. But that is exactly how P2SH (multisig) started out. It was added to bitcoin with great urgency because the developers thought it was essential for bitcoin. Well they were right, but no-one even care for 2-3 years. Then multig started to be talked about in early 2014, and now in 2015, it have been implemented in just about every major wallet for bitcoin. Adoption of technology can take time.
Who has been involved with viacoin and clearinghouse? Well Grynn San helped a lot pre-release of viacoin and for a few months afterwards. He is unfortunately a diabetic and had severe complications which mean he has been unable to work much. Grynn was paid (what masternode said about debt is completely false). Maran also worked on ClearingHouse to implement the Blockchain Notary as a paid developer. Reorder from 1GH has been instrumental to the project and works as an unpaid volunteer. We discussed this and he did not want remuneration. Peter of course is chief scientist and gives advice as a paid consultant. Esotericizm was involved in making a mobile wallet for viacoin on Android.
Ive worked very hard doing what I set out to do. Its involved lots of long hours and sleepless nights. Maintaining this sort of thing requires a lot of thought, care and discussions because consensus systems are hard and one needs to be careful about the effects on the network.
I have always just quietly worked on things without much fanfare. I prefer to under promise and over deliver. I have evangelised viacoin a lot in the background. For example, I got adoption at woodwallets; coinpayments.net, the altcoin version of bitpay; and giffoff (was pock.io) which allows purchase of 1500 variety of giftcards payable with viacoin. A friend of mine got viacoin added to Litepay, a fiat gateway in Europe for viacoin. I just went ahead and did these things. I frankly dont understand why the community isnt doing the same. If everyone made an effort to get one merchant each to adopt viacoin
our collective voice would be deafening.
So overall, just like bitcoin, it really is up to the community to band together to evangelize viacoin. A few people have contacted me with ideas on how to kick start this a bit more which I am keen on exploring. So lets discuss the nuances.
I am going to be more active on the forums, especially to facilitate the future plans. I had always envisioned crowdsourcing evangelism from the community instead of relying on a single whale early adopter and I believe that together we can make that happen.
So while I would prefer to focus on the technical stuff (stick to what Im good at), I acknowledge that that people would appreciate discussing future positive plans for viacoin during the difficult times of the bear markets.
Interesting that Drak says these things as much of it is simply not true. I have a strong reputation in crypto that speaks for itself. But I should clarify a few things, as I don't mind being totally open about my work:
I have never actively traded VIA for day trade profits nor has Otoh. We typically accumulate large positions very early and help nurture the projects, a lot like what we have done with Darkcoin. Yes there are times we sell, but it's not done on a daily basis, or even a weekly basis for that matter. Also, I want to be very clear, I've never released any priveledged information to Drak about other projects, and if he believes so I welcome him to share it here as I'm that confident he won't be able to give me an example.
"Alarm bells began to ring for me when he started sharing privileged information with me about other projects his associates were involved in. I became concerned he might actually be using his position with viacoin to his advantage and leaking to his group."
Yes, Drak was telling me priveledged information that could be advantageous. And like I said in many previous posts, we were already the largest holders of VIA and XCH and we haven't sold our VIA position. And to say there were alarm bells at this point or prior is interesting and I'll point out why. Drak had shared with me that Patrick Byrne was interested in VIA and that they wanted him to fly out to the states in February. Drak had contacted me because he knew I represent some of the largest holders, and wanted to see if we could secure a block of coins for Patrick. I told him I could ask Otoh but I was not willing to sell any, in fact I told him I was interested in purchasing more (quite the opposite of what he claims of him feeling I was looking for a way out). Also, one extremely important point here: If there were really red flags prior to this, wouldn't Drak have just told me he has found a large interested buyer and not disclose names? Drak had informed me that he didn't mind me accumulating more just not to run up the price. Drak even advised me on the trade saying if anything to place bids just below the market. I debated including this info, but I figure at this point it's best to disclose everything. Eventually he become extremely upset when I informed him that I spoke with my attorney because I had some interest in accumulating a bit more VIA (We wound up acquiring maybe 7 btc more worth over the next 4 weeks at a price of 10-12k satoshi, hardly increasing our already sizable position of millions of coins). And to be honest I was quite surprised that he expected me not to consult with an attorney regarding anything, especially this as the last thing I wanted to do was put my self in any sort of legal problems. Fwiw, my attorney had informed me that as long as I was not manupaliting prices, since it's an unregulated market, that it was ok to accumulate more without any legal risk. Drak was not happy about the fact that I spoke to my attorney regarding this issue (but he was totally fine with my buying) and then decided to stop communicating with me over me obtaining legal consultation. This was definitely interesting as it seemed extremely irrational, not to mention as a trader wouldn't Drak want to know where legal lines are? February came and went and Drak had become even more silent on the forums as well as with others that he normally communicates with whom I am close with as well. I began to wonder what was happening behind the scenes, and began to question if a lot of what he's represented to this point was really as it seemed.
Prior to this incident I had done everything I could to help Drak push this project forward. I had brought on the largest base of investors (as a group we still hold over 3M VIA and around 12M XCH), I had converted 200k VIA for XCH even though I was not excited about the surprise second raise, I had introduced Drak to other companies in the crypto space in an effort to get him and his coin support. However, continuously since the beginning of VIA, I've seen him systematically shut down interest in this project as he has turned it into one of the smallest communities I've seen for a cryptocoin. Again, my actions in my projects speak for themselves. I've been active in helping other coins and investments succeed, and Drak has spawned practically zero adoption of VIA. These are simply facts.
If Drak thinks I'm trying to kill his coin he is wrong. The truth is I have lost faith in it, more specifically his ability to create any sort of adoption or community behind it, enough so that I think the best course of path is for him to shut it down and return remaining funds to coin holders. However I'm open to other possibilities.
I point out that I do question if he is being totally honest with the community. Otoh checked out long ago, because he is convinced that Drak is not.
However, if the community wants to move forward with the project, then so be it. If that is the case I propose that we have a trusted finance officer put in place to administrate the funds (which is why i've been trying to get an idea of where finances are). If he is truly as straightfoward as he tries to appear this should be a total non-issue right? If he is opposed to this, well, then we have to ask ourselves why?