Hey, jbg came back with a new nice set of excuses! Let's analyze them together.
First of all: judge on his decision to not reply publicly to my thread. Was that a good decision? Price was at ~30k sats at the time of my review. Today it reached ~5k sat.
Secondly: judge on his decision of continuing not to reply to 3 threads with 3 independent reviews of the code (this thread you are reading, but also
here and
here). Will this be a good decision?
But let's dig into his excuses, it's fun.
1) Few weeks ago jbg comes on chat to reassure the community that "it's looking good to hit our target of end of Feb". So you assume he knows what he is doing, the release will happen and he is aware of what is missing to develop. He basically did an estimate that the work needed to be done could be completed by the end of the month. 3 days ago jbg comes back and says the he needs 24/48 hours to give another release date, as he's late. What? So he doesn't know anymore how much work is left? Why can't he give a new release date straightaway? Ok, let's wait for these 48 hours. Now after more than 48 hours he comes back saying he is not going to give a new late release date. So he's basically saying he has no idea about how much work is left. He now says "it's not imminent".
2) Thankfully someone asked him why he has not made 1.4 public yet. After more than a month when he failed to do so, he now said that "unfortunately things that can't go public yet (stealth staking) are a bit mixed up with things that should already be public". This is now becoming ridiculous. 2 experienced developers have mixed up the code of 2 separate features, one feature due (end of) Q2 and the other due (end of) February, and also implemented by 2 different developers. The most embarrassing thing to me is that he does not even realise that he is basically saying he is an amateur programmer. 40 years of experience in 2 developers and they did this. Also this is worrying because this means that he is trying to manipulate the github commit history, like I said a few posts before, what else is he manipulating? But now I think that is pretty sure that there is no stealth staking and he is just late because he has not done much work. This will be proved when (and if) he will release 1.4, when everyone will be able to see that he has not done all he promised. And new excuses will come.
3) After being absent for a month, after all these threads saying he has not done much, one of the first thing he asked on Discord today is more money. Now the new line is that he need to hire a new developer, and of course the money are not enough. Wouldn't it be better if he started working instead? Or maybe he is not able to do the work? Don't take me wrong, decentralise development is definitely a good idea, as he has proved he cannot deliver multiple times. But asking for more money after all of this.. unfortunately he deleted the message saying money are not enough (ah!).
4) He repeated that he is working full time, this goes against 3 independent reviews by 3 different developers (this thread you are reading, but also
here and
here)
5) The brand new excuse for the lack of core changes is that he is building the foundation for the future and he is learning the code base. 9 months to do a few library updates, UI changes and learn a code base? Guess what it would happen if you had this record of achievements after 9 months in a real software company working full time. I personally would not pass the probation period even for a junior developer with these results. To not forget that there is supposedly also another dev working on this project.
And now some other stuff I researched:
1) I was digging into some more code to check effective core changes. In the official release notes for 1.3.5, jbg wrote he implemented "Automatic ring size determination for stealth transactions". Very good candidate to check! Guess what? There is no code change for this. All the code for this is ShadowCash code. He only renamed a few javascript functions, but the logic is the same as ShadowCash. And he wrote about this change on the official release notes for 1.3.5, even though the code has always been there.
2) I have read some people saying that jbg integrated Tor in SpectreCoin. That's not true. Again the code has the truth: the first TOR integration has been done by lulworm in January 2017.
3) On this I am not completely sure but I'll leave it here so someone else can double check. jbg stated on chat that he had to withdraw money from the donation address SgGmhnxnf6x93PJo5Nj3tty4diPNwEEiQb, so I had a look. Firstly the donation address has received ~100k XSPEC so far, which is not bad at all for 9 months without doing much, and for someone who claims he has not got much coins, and asks for more to hire another developer. Then I followed all the outgoing transactions, and most of them go through this address: SdsaXSYCksJcW18AJ6HcG1ZwgFKcU7WYrr which has 233k XSPECs received so far. I also followed a few other outgoing transactions and reached other few addresses, one in particular has 34k XSPECs and 110k received (SaKHqXU67HdP5NsatVXwb6DSSDdRYRKyrr through transaction cd40a8c93b7526255bb36dd3982ae4eee0b345da0fbae2aa9a1d3c5e82d33635). In this one stuff start to get interesting, as if you track what's happening into this address you can quickly arrive to addresses with a lot of XSPECs: SWNSHaAXLcehx3bXAdZSTD9CKpEwCJLtjT with 50k XSPECs, if you track the most recent ingoing transaction of +49,999.9992 XSPEC (fc48d7b0ab3c590e921a439fc6bcbca13ae3339b72d2212b9d074f8b54783d5a) you reach an address with a million coins received: SdyjGEmgroK2vxBhkHE1MBUVRbUWpRAdVG.
Anyway to conclude, the only thing that jbg is producing so far is excuses, still have to see any proper development on XSPEC.
We yet have to see 1.4 code on github after more than a month. Now he has another excuse. Let's see what's the next one.
We yet have to see any of the XSPEC shillers to post some github commits of his hard work done in the past also.