Trying to keep the criticism constructive.
So,
dear Authorship, for your next ICO (you will need it after this disaster) a few hints, if you want to run a bounty program:
- use a professional referral/affiliate software or 3rd party provider. People have been weeding out fake sign-ups for over a decade. They know how to do it. You obviously did not.
- Make up your mind. Do not keep changing the rules. Pisses people off, and rightfully so.
- If you want to discriminate against whole countries, VPN users, the TOR community, etc. - say so, upfront. Be aware that you would kick Kim Dotcom, Julian Assange, Ed Snowden and probably every digital nomad living in Bali (or Paraguay, like me) as well. Dumb.
- If you want to work for the world, learn how the world works... E.g. there are whole countries where 90% of users are behind forced proxies.
- As I wrote in my earlier endorsement for this ICO: the biggest challenge will be to make blockchain usable and painless for people outside the blockchain nerd community. We do not need another nerd circle jerk. You allegedly wanted readers and authors from the real world. But now you scold, blame and insult every 'normal' person who just thought 10 bucks for an email address would be interesting. How many potential users and publishers were among them?
I still think that the basic idea behind Authorship.com is great.
Re-gaining trust and countering all the bad press all over the web will be hard.
If there was/is an honest project behind this ICO, I wish you luck to fix the mess...
Thank you for the advice. It is fully noted.
In the future we'll probably use private funding as we initially intended for this project. This is how we always worked before, with private funding. This was our first meeting with ICOs and the community here, so you can say it was a trial and error and we used to rely on a lot of advice we received here. Not trying to find excuses, just pointing that there are always 2 sides of a story. I realize our mistakes and once again I apologize for this.
Our project development continues as this was our reason of raising funds. I'm positive that this entire situation will be long forgotten once everyone sees us and running and with thousands of authors selling the books through our platform.
Thank you