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.
2-3 days to 2-3 months is a very "problematic" miscalculation, no matter how you see it.
Investment wise? "This is ridiculous" -> DUMP
Confidence wise? "If the dev can't tell if it takes 2-3 days or 2-3 months, then he is either a liar/scammer/pumper or totally incompetent"
I have ANCs from back in the day when ANC and DRK were the only players around in the anon industry (DRK as main, ANC as hedge) and I'm loosely following ANC for this reason throughout the months, but, seriously, the "I miscalculated" angle can't be digested
