Quote from: child_harold on February 13, 2016, 08:30:33 AM

-- snip --

-It is you The Team who have wholesale copied technologies like Bitmessage and Cryptonote and produced plagiaristic whitepapers whithout proper attribution.
-It is you The Team who failed to deliver on the peer review paid for by this community over a year ago.
-It is you The Team who reduced the total supply without consensus and continued thereafter to make decisions without community consensus.

So please, do not speak of ethics.

I appreciate the more constructive tone of your posts now Child_Harold, but your frustration over the way the peer review was handled is causing you to wrongly attribute things to maliciousness or bad faith. The below is just my personal response to some of your points and the current situation. I don't presume to speak for the team or anyone else here.

SHADOWCHAT

Unfortunately I don't have the technical know-how to speak authoritatively on this, but from my understanding the code is substantially different from Bitmessage's because there was no C++ implementation of it. It wasn't converted from Java/Python, but written from scratch based on an overview of their system.

Part of the problem with Ryno withdrawing from public forums such as Bitcointalk (a decision I can understand) is that these debates have predominantly been conducted on a superficial level, with the focus on hastily put together marketing materials such as the whitepaper rather than on analysis of the code itself. But if the intention was to hide the fact that ShadowChat drew upon Bitmessage's system it wouldn't have been referenced in the whitepaper or, more importantly, unambiguously in the code comments. Cries of "plagiarism" are nonsensical.

TECNOVERT

Tecnovert is real but isn't actively contributing to development at present.

ZEUNER REVIEW

From what I know of the situation, with each fresh request for further documentation the suspicion grew that Isidor Zeuner simply wasn't properly qualified to carry out the kind of peer review Shadow required. Had he been, we surely would have known about this issue sooner. There was real clamour for some kind of review at the time, presumably because some hoped that it would remedy what was seen as the market's lukewarm response to the ShadowSend v2 release. However, you're re-writing history by suggesting he was hired to carry out the review. Zeuner was suggested and afterwards there was a donation drive to raise 5 BTC as a token of gratitude. Obviously in hindsight he should have been properly vetted first and the BTC shouldn't have been transferred to him until it was reasonably certain that he'd deliver. But like I said, there was a real clamour for some kind of review to be done. I think it could have been dealt with better - it seems that for some time it was believed the review could be salvaged but too much of the discussion was held behind closed doors. Had it all been conducted publicly it would have saved a lot of trouble and wouldn't have left room for baseless conspiracies to take root.

As an aside, it's pretty sad seeing the way some people (on both sides of the fence) have reacted to the current situation. I can't imagine anywhere else in the open source world where people from different projects would take so much satisfaction in, and would be so keen to gloat about, a vulnerability being found in another project's code. This behaviour seems to be considered reasonable because it's so common here, but in most other situations it'd be considered completely beyond the pale. At best they look like children. At worst like troops of warring monkeys. There's probably a pretty interesting sociological/zoological study there for anyone with the stomach to sift through the crapflood of invective. The project's goal is to allow people to transact online privately because we believe they have a right to do so. It's hard to reconcile other purported advocates of a right to privacy taking such sadistic pleasure in a bug being found.

Anyway, several good things have come out of this. Firstly, the conversation is now actually about the code. Obviously it's regrettable that there's a vulnerability, but this is exactly how open source software is supposed to work. A vulnerability was found, it was reported and it will be fixed. Shadow is no more irreparably damaged by this than Bitcoin was by the bug that allowed someone to create several billion BTC in a single transaction. It's experimental software and once fixed, the SDC codebase will be strengthened and will hopefully receive further scrutiny.

While we await a full formal response to it, I'd like to thank Shen for his contribution (regardless of how it was reported). Perhaps since he's likely to be receiving a significant amount of Shadow he'd consider contributing to the project in other ways going forward given that our aims our pretty well-aligned.