Quote from: masternode on March 22, 2015, 03:39:43 AM

Unless Drak can a.) show he is willing to use the remaining ICO funds to advance the coin, b.) give us some transperency on what funds have previously been spent on, and c.) have someone the community trusts handle finances moving forward, then you should see him as nothing more than a con man / theif. Sigh.

This line of complaint is rich coming from someone who supports the DashcoinDark instamine.

Compared to Duffman's 2 million free DashcoinDarks, VIA's ICO is a shining example of transparency.

Drak has already explained how he's been spending lots of money to keep VIA's technology state-of-the-art, and that you are a pursuing a vendetta:

Quote from: btcdrak on March 10, 2015, 10:39:28 AM

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.html

http://blog.viacoin.org/2014/11/13/petertodd-dev-update.html

Discourage NOPs reserved for soft-fork upgrades https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5000#issuecomment-58889473

Accept any sequence of PUSHDATAs in OP_RETURN outputs https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5079
SCRIPT_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/5247

Discourage fee sniping with nLockTime

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2340#issuecomment-58617533

http://blog.viacoin.org/2014/12/25/petertodd-dev-update.html

micropayment 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.html

Setting the record straight on Proof-of-Publication http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg06570.html

The 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.

The problem is that things like CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY are over your head, so leave the legitimate coins alone, go back to the DashcoinDark thread, and play with your Masternodes.