Quote from: m3ndi3 on October 01, 2015, 05:41:25 PM

Quote from: tempus on October 01, 2015, 02:16:52 PM

Quote from: Neucoininvestor on October 01, 2015, 12:26:57 PM

Neucoin’s work is impressive and it's just a beginning. Many critics were writing that Neucoin will never launch, they will never be listed on exchanges, were is their wallet and etc.

One question is: Was the ICO really sold to the public and was it really a legit launch?

The problem is, if you look at the distribution:

Top 10.......2,967,553,562.06368923 NEU   96.72 %
Top 100.....3,062,105,550.67083359 NEU   99.8 %
Top 1000...3,068,146,816.34814405 NEU   100 %

Where are the 100 Mio sold in the ICO? It's not in Top100-1000. There are only about 6 Mio Coins. That's the staking of 20 hours.

They say:

Hi @takla : approximately 1000 people took part in the presale: https://blockchain.info/address/3MrNuksZ1VePU3dGiSQFiouWerJUJgDkfH
http://forum.neucoin.org/t/investors-in-neucoin/1341

And yes, there are > 1000 transactions. But I looked into it and it's nearly always the same... the BTC went a long way over multiple addresses, and often very fast. There were some big transactions but also very small transactions had a long way before, were splitted before etc.... it's hard to figure out where they came from. And: Why did so many Investors believe it's necessary to send their money through the entire Blockchain instead of sending them directly?

And: If there were about 1000 people who bought the pre-sale, how can it be that they're all in the Top100?

Did they all transact their NEU to the exchanges? If you take a look on Bittrex (Distribution) the answer seems to be no. There isn't much, I would say < 10 Mio, maybe < 7 Mio. And on the sellside are only 498,372 NEU.

If so many would have transacted their NEU to Bittrex I would expect a lot more on the sellside. It's very unusual that there isn't even 1 Mio.

I doubt that there is a lot more on Cryptsy.

And if we look at the official forum. It doesn't seem that there are so much User, right? There are a lot of links and it's visible how often they were clicked. And it also counts clicks of those who are not registered as User. One example, the Thread about the presale:

Hi there!

As promised, here are all the important details about our presale:

It will begin on April 28
100 million NEU to be offered in exchange for BTC
Price starts at $0.01 per NEU and increases by 1% per day
Presale ends after 60 days or when the 100 million tokens have been sold
The presale will happen at www.neucoin.org 69
http://forum.neucoin.org/t/neucoin-presale-to-start-april-28-and-earn-free-neucoins-now/467

Until now there are just 69 clicks on the link to the pre-sale.

If there were about 1000 User who bought the pre-sale I would expect some more clicks than just 69.

And if there were about 1000 User who bought the pre-sale I wouldn't expect to find all the Coins in the Top100...

If I think about all that, self-buying would be my guess. But if that should be right, there is the question "why?". Possible answers:

1. Because otherwise it would have failed
2. To have full control - also about the 100 Mio. And that's just about 3% of the initial supply (3 billion).

My guess is: They saw that there isn't much demand. They recognized that there are not many Users on their forum, not many views on the Mainpage or the Wiki, not many action on Twitter and so on. It wasn't the hype they had expected. So they bought it themselves in three days to let it seem as if there would be much demand, as if it would have been possible to sell more than just 100 Mio.

And than, most likely the plan was to distribute it over the exchanges... with control about supply and price.

But it doesn't seem as if there is a lot more demand now, right? It doesn't seem as if there is more action on their forum... Somebody starts a topic "Serious question" and after 12 hours it has 61 views and 3 replies... that's not very much if there are at least 1000 Investors and after the launch it should be much more... now it's on the exchanges and visible for all.

Or their official Twitter-Account: https://twitter.com/neucoin
The first tweet is over a year ago, but just 819 follower.

Sandrine (CM): https://twitter.com/SandrineAy
joined in 2012, but just 1083 follower

Just for example: https://twitter.com/NeosCoin

It's a high-quality and honest project but without much marketing/PR, still under the radar... more like an Insider-Tip. But it started in August 14 and has more follower than this Mainstream-Neucoin-project?

Weird, right?

So, if I should be right with my guess, that there wasn't enough demand to reach the ICO-terms and that there was selfbuying of those who already owned 97% of the total supply (now more because of staking)... it was a failed ICO.

And what's a fact: Now the Top100 are sitting on 99.8 % of the total supply, staking the hell out of it and everybody who sees that, steps back. And the group behind it, including those they call "angel-investors" and "initial-seed-investors", are in summary 50 people. Not that hard to figure out who is in the Top100. Not many public-investors I would guess. ;-)

And if you think about that... maybe you'll also find an answer to the questions: Why isn't there an official Block-Explorer? Why isn't there much communication? What are the 12 people of the core-team doing? And they started working on that 1 1/2 year ago? What's there? A badly designed forum? A peercoin-fork? A Homepage and a Wiki? That's nothing... Every little 100 Dollar - marketcap-Coin has that.

The only innovation I see is the incredibly high staking-rate and zero distribution. If that's what they've wanted --> mission accomplished.

Thank you so much Tempus for all your great calculations and making it easy for us to understand exactly why there is a problem with this project. I admit I was very much enamored with the "investor" list and the big names that supposedly supported NeuCoin. I joined the community and was very much active and enthusiastic. I bought in the presale and even came up with the Squirrel name- Tippy. They made me moderator and all was good and exciting. Then they started pushing back the release and then investors in the community started asking questions. Priemievalsoup was a big investor and he started asking some serious questions. Being a game developer and having some experience with releasing products, his question on why there was no testnet really struck a chord for me. I asked Sandrine and the other moderators about this, and Sandrine told me the team was doing extensive testing already, and a testnet was not needed.

Fast forward a month later to the supposed launch- they come and say they are pushing back the launch because they need more testing and are releasing a testnet to the presale investors by the end of the month. I was really set off and finally had to leave when the end of the month came, the testnet was not released to us, but they claimed they held their promise because they released to "angel investors."

I never really understood the problem with inflation, and I was impartial to Dan Kaufman's shady past, but I just couldn't get behind a team that I could not trust. Now with all the calculations being clear I finally understand the inflation problem and I understand the silence and dodging of questions. I think like what you said, they don't know what to do now and it's just easier to not say anything. I feel so grateful I was able to sell all my NeuCoin and I was able to break even before it was too late.

Regarding your question on why there isn't much action on the forum... I think back then there was some excitement but that just all faded, and people became disenchanted (at least for me). I ended up just staying quiet because I knew I would never get a real genuine answer :/ It's sad, but I really hope those that did buy from the presale were able to get their BTC back. Thanks again Tempus for breaking everything down and bringing light where there was always shadow.

I got out of this too.

The kicker is that the most technical guy on the project, based on forum messages, Kourosh, left the project in June. https://www.linkedin.com/pub/kourosh-davarpanah/2a/842/147

Quote

Cryptocurrency design
NeuCoin
June 2014 – June 2015 (1 year 1 month)Paris

• Conducted extensive research on decentralized consensus algorithms
• Designed a secure, cost-efficient, decentralized consensus algorithm
• Wrote a 40-page white paper detailing the shortcomings of Bitcoin's proof-of-work algorithm and demonstrating the robustness of NeuCoin's proof-of-stake algorithm against a broad range of attacks

Look at the resume of their CTO, two years out of college, doing work as a Sys Admin the whole time, and then, poof, joins Neucoin and gets promoted to CTO.

https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=AAEAAAt7wBIBQ1TkFZzal15xlJopExonN6sGcbY&authType=name&authToken=gPc-&trk=prof-sb-browse_map-name

Quote

Co-Founder And Cto
NeuCoin
April 2014 – Present (1 year 7 months)Paris
System and network administrator
Online, Iliad
July 2013 – January 2014 (7 months)
System and Network Administrator
Typhon
April 2013 – July 2013 (4 months)
System and Network Administrator
Stockho Hosting
December 2012 – March 2013 (4 months)
Internship
Sogeti
May 2012 – September 2012 (5 months)Paris Area, France
Internship
IONIS Institute of Technology
June 2010 – March 2011 (10 months)Paris Area, France

I tried asking her a technical question about the whitepaper, and got a "She's too busy, right now" from Sandrine, here: http://forum.neucoin.org/t/penalize-nodes-that-dont-mine-continously-by-capping-coinstake/1357/9

Then, she posts to this forum a few days later. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=373683;sa=showPosts
(see the 3rd post). If she has enough time to engage with people here, then it's pretty obvious she was just avoiding answering my question. And if you look at here entire history on forum.neucoin.org, you can see that she really hasn't said anything very technical at all.

I even gave them a fork that would solve one of the biggest issues for anyone using the client, that no one can see whether they are minting or not, how long it will take to mint, and the reward they'd lose if they transfer their coins. But the Neucoin team hasn't done anything with it. I can only guess that they just don't have the expertise and the knowledge of how Peercoin works to be able to even figure out if my code works.

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My point is that they just don't have enough technical experts on staff, probably zero I would guess. The ones they did have, one of them was Kourosh, probably all left months ago.

That's why they can't execute, why all the delays, all the missing features and rushed out stuff, such as simple getneucoin.org quiz which can't even link the winnings directly to their online wallet.

I used to work in the bay area, and have seen several cases like this during my career. It doesn't matter how good an idea seems to be. If the team doing it isn't up to snuff, it always fails.

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Anyway, I'm done with my rant. I would suggest to anyone not to invest in this.