Quote from: solid12345 on August 27, 2015, 03:53:04 PM

I'll speak to this as someone who spent a year in IRC with the developer of Urocoin and one could say "duped" by him, but i'll give it my best to explain the method to the madness.

What Urocoin was meant to do was speed up the process of business transactions. When commodity importers buy Urea or any other commodity, they don't usually just send someone a check for 2 million dollars for a million tons of Urea. Letters of Credit are used and typical a bank in India that represents the Indian government will talk to a bank in China that represents the Urea manufacturers. This letter of credit proves the two parties credit is in good standing and will satisfy the wiring of money between the two entities. This is a long process that can sometimes take months and the industry is rampant with fake letters of credit and fly-by-night commodity dealers who offer to sell you the goods but never deliver.

The idea behind Urocoin was that by "backing" the coins on Urea, you can bypass all this bureaucratic BS and ensure that each coin is redeemable for fertilizer from all the companies that sign to the charter. This would greatly speed up commerce by allowing entities to go on an exchange, purchase Uro like one would do purchasing paper gold on Forex and be able to hold onto it, sell it or swap it for real fertilizer quickly.

This would also allow many farmers and fertilizer companies to bypass middle-men commodity dealers directly. Instead of having to go hunting on Linkedin, Alibaba or wherever for a good rate (yes seriously, million dollar commodity deals are done on Linkedin thru email! Bizarre world), they could go on an exchange, buy Uro and then exchange it for fertilizer from a respectable NIER. Boom, 3-6 months of negotiations and banking red tape avoided.

Another use case for this is by "backing" the coin on Urea, it would act almost as a sort of futures contract so that speculators or farmers who are concerned fertilizer might go up in price next year for example could buy it now at the cheap rate, hold onto it for a year, and when the price of fertilizer goes up, you can exchange it at 1:1 rate hence making a significant profit or acting as insurance for a farmer who was concerned he might not be able to afford it the next growing season.

Finally by backing the coin on Urea, you avoid alot of the extreme volatility of Bitcoin. Yes Urea is volatile too but not as much as Bitcoin and wild price movements generally aren't see day to day like Bitcoin. So it would be a crypto currency that would be very valuable for day to day commerce as well.

Now as to Urocoin being a scam, after a year of knowing Bohan and his quirks and having investigated Green Earth Systems as much as I could, my conclusion about whether it was a scam or not, I do believe the INTENT was there to actually make Uro work. The fact is GES DOES engage in commodity transactions and DOES have access to high net individuals. The CEO did do business in Fiji and met with the President there, they do have offices in Egypt, Hong Kong, Australia, etc., their business partner Vinny Pillay does work at Capricorn investments which is a legit commodities dealer and is verifiable on bloomberg and other websites. Also I can tell you, they DID go to Iran and I can verify the infamous video of the Iranian meeting which everyone was clamoring actually DID exist but for some bizarre reason Bohan would never release it, which I never understood why as it would've increased the credibility of the project. I can also testify Bohan didn't really make any money from the whole thing and actually got into debt with the whole project and he personally paid for supporters plane tickets to go to Hong Kong at Urose. How many scam developers in Bitcoin would do such a thing?

However the "scam" was that while they have connections to make it happen, they didn't have the raw capital I believe to risk giving away a ship filled with 12,500 tons of Urea with a market value of several million dollars to bring the price of Uro up to $300 USD+/-. Hence all the endless arguments for "proof" everyone demanded could never be given as they couldn't afford to get the initial "backing" off the ground. I believe the hope was thru Urose and the opening of the Uroex exchange they could find other ways to bring the price up, the vibe I got from Bohan is they were hoping to find some high roller investors willing to pump the price and once the price is settled then they could start actually trading fertilizer for real. However while some rich individuals DID go to Urose, for whatever reason the deals fell through. It's the classic "need money to make money" problem.

The tragedy of Uro is that it was actually a pretty good idea and if put into practice could've revolutionized the business world. The sad part is it was killed by a combination of GES's greed and shady tactics, but also a mix of venomous vile from the crypto community which is made up of kids and idiots who usually have never interacted in the real world of 2nd and 3rd world business practices which may seem foreign or outright scammy to them but is actually done everyday with billions of dollars changing hands. Yes people there ARE multi-million dollar companies out there that don't even have a website, get over it. The FUD last summer that killed the pump was some of the most bizarre shit i've ever read, accusations of photoshopped people, companies and people that didn't exist, this was all nonsense. So while I still hold Bohan responsible for his behavior I also think the community could have been more fair about analyzing the whole thing as well. Afterall, if URO had made some people millionaires overnight, would you bitch whether some questionable tactics were used to get it off the ground? Afterall no one gives a damn 30 years later that Microsoft practically lied to IBM before acquiring DOS or that Steve Jobs stole money from Woz behind his back at Atari. Unfortunately this is the real world and to get ahead sometimes people do dirty things. Hell look at Dashcoin and the instamine controversy, frankly alot of people just don't give a shit.

And call me crazy, while I sold most of the coins off, I still hold some Urocoin "just in case" as it is a rather cheap lottery ticket right now with the price so much in the dumps. I wouldn't be shocked if GES is quietly accumulating the bulk of their coins back to one day pump it themselves if they can secure that one big investor. Is that shady? Probably, but again if they do make it happen i'm not going to complain.

Everything Mike Geister has written here is false. It's actually so false, that it's funny as it's quite unbelievable that he doesn't understand that Urocoin is a scam.