I haven't replied here in a while because the signal-to-noise ratio is really low in here (where "noise" includes things like trash talking me and speculation on the price). If you said something addressed at me here, I probably didn't read it. PM me if it's important.
Yes, estimating the time to complete software is not my strong suit, but that is a difficult problem in any case. The fact remains that I have worked hard on this and will continue to do so. I am not aware of any other developers who have made nearly as much progress (judging by public commits) in adding zero-knowledge cryptography to cryptocurrency. As for ShadowCoin, I looked at their code briefly and did not see a single commit related to this; sure, they might be keeping all the development secret, but "talk is cheap". If you look at Github, you'll see that I did more than talk.
Anyway, I am now thinking it is better to have a series of testnets with gradually increasing Zerocoin functionality, rather than a single one with all the functionality as I originally planned. I'll set a date for the first one when I am actually code complete. You can think of these as "milestones" for completion.
As for the wild oscillations in difficulty, I am working with two other people on our IRC to get this resolved.
Yes, estimating the time to complete software is not my strong suit, but that is a difficult problem in any case. The fact remains that I have worked hard on this and will continue to do so. I am not aware of any other developers who have made nearly as much progress (judging by public commits) in adding zero-knowledge cryptography to cryptocurrency. As for ShadowCoin, I looked at their code briefly and did not see a single commit related to this; sure, they might be keeping all the development secret, but "talk is cheap". If you look at Github, you'll see that I did more than talk.
Anyway, I am now thinking it is better to have a series of testnets with gradually increasing Zerocoin functionality, rather than a single one with all the functionality as I originally planned. I'll set a date for the first one when I am actually code complete. You can think of these as "milestones" for completion.
As for the wild oscillations in difficulty, I am working with two other people on our IRC to get this resolved.
Do you have any reason why only 2 days before a release date you had to extend it 2-3 months? It's hard to understand why that announcement couldn't have happened earlier rather than misleading investors.
First, let me say that software estimation is a notoriously hard problem. I'm not saying I couldn't have done better -- I could have.
Basically up until a few weeks ago, I was working mostly with libzerocoin, which is code I understood really well. I was giving completion estimates based on my (relatively fast) progress with that. Then, I had to switch to working with the wallet's code itself, and that is far more complicated. By the time I became aware of how much more time it would take, it was only a few days before the testnet release deadline. There may have been some wishful thinking going on too, which I didn't catch because all my thoughts were taken up with how to solve the problems at hand.