I have studied information technologies and telecommunications, in something similar to the university of applied science, and we had much more programming hours in different coirses compared to regular uni computer science student, but I met no person who learned to code there. Many students, almost all who didn't already have a job as software developers, or at least did it as a hobby remained unskilled coders.
What you said about ShadowCashe and ring signatures doesn't make sense. How do you know it worked for them? Ring signatures as technology require enough participants using them. Monero never had issues with it because all wallets are using it. This is the reason XSPEC has announced that stealth trx are becoming default with version 2.
Tor, could you point me to the Tor implementation/code of the ShadowCashe? I wasn't aware ShadowCash has implemented Tor? Not that I would mind it, but everything I saw points to the XSPEC developers, not necessarily jbg.
Tor pluggable transports is Tor pluggable transport. Everyone who heard about these obfuscation methods knew what to expect here, and was aware jbg didn't develop obfs4. Making Tor, and xspec wallet to work with obfs4 was the point, not demonstration of coding skills.
He could have automate/make it better, but this is also working. Despite his or project's shortcomings, there is a solid base, worth maintaining IMO, and it looks like some steps in the right direction are being made by the community (hiring new developers E.G.), so I don't think this is how scam necessarily looks like.
Most people exaggerate, or lie if you will. I met like two persons in my life who didn't lie in their CVs, yet that doesn't mean companies where these people who lied work are scam.
Things are not always black and white. One can in theory delude community in some things (like most of anon crypto currencies did at some point.) yet still deliver, with intentions to maintain the project long term. Basically as long as people are using, buying xspec, and are ready to support its development, project should be ok and prosper. I think that you have actually helped xspec as a project, because awareness that project needs more development and developers had been raised.
While I think you had some nice observations regarding the amount of work, I can just repeat that I consider ShadowCash code solid even nowadays and worth maintaining. With more and more developers interested in code, probability that new bugs/issues will be discovered is increasing, and as I already mentioned, it looks like xspec community decided to hire new developers.
I'm not sure what country you're from but where I'm from a bachelors degree = you can code, I've worked with developers who have as little as a 2 year diploma, bachelors degree, people with masters and people with purely self education, they can all code out of their studies but aren't overly efficient compared to some one with a bit of commercial experience, in saying that all of these people would still better the work done on XSPEC in the time frame given, so I don't agree with this at all.
If you look on page 1 where I've got a screen shot of Umbra, the Shadow Cash wallet vs the XSPEC wallet, you can see the TOR button in the exact same spot, the difference is it was optional in SC and it's mandatory in XSPEC, as a developer I'm sure you realise how easy it is to remove a bunch of If statement around the on/off for TOR, so this isn't anything to brag about over SC.
Also this idea of SC is fine, he's just maintaining it isn't accurate either, he's promising advancements over it, in year that XSPEC has existed, I wouldn't even call this basic maintenance.
Yes SC supported ring signatures, you can go right back to the earliest change relating to the line of code I've stated on page 1 where the ring signature went just from 2 to 1, the line of code where you see it being 2 is from Shadow Cash, the line where it allows for 1 is the XSPEC change over SC.
Your next argument will probably be "does it matter if it's an easy change", sort of like your argument around the obfs4 executable, it doesn't matter so much but if you are doing small jobs you would expect to see A LOT more work done than what we see looking back in time, instead what we have are tiny changes and these same items being claimed as key development points for each release.
So I'll say it again, in 1 year the biggest body of work is the donation system, this work would be well over 10x the time taken compared to everything else combined.
And if you still still factored this in, doesn't justify the little amount done in that time.
The only person who has had any argument to justify this amount of time is jbg himself, he has admitted now that little has been done and his excuse is he's had to learn the code base, if it takes him that long to learn the code base then it shows his skill level and doesn't change my initial argument one bit, to give an example a person working full time out of university on projects 5x+ the size of this will not make it past a 3 month probation if they can't adapt to the code base.
And your argument on resumes is just silly, I've been coding since a very young age but my resume only contains commercial work I've done, do you see a university graduate claiming his hobby and degree as commercial experience? If I seen a 25-30 year old claiming 20+ years on his resume it would get laughed at and would go straight in the bin, if I seen some one who had done 3 1 year projects over a 10 year window, it would get the same response, his claims are a project in his teens, a POS system for a bar and an ecommerce website which probably uses a CMS, so between all of this, his age and claim of 20+ years is more than just a small resume exaggeration, it's a huge lie.
I've put in a bit of effort with these findings, if you're going to argue things like SC didn't have TOR, please do a bit more research before trying again, I'm not sure what else I have to add on top of what's been said already and I'm not up for repeating myself more than I have already.