I'm still waiting to see any quote of him saying what OP has repeated after the Coinfire's article, which is "they had partnerships with big companies like Target, Amazon, and Walmart...".
Here's some direct quotes from the virtual hashking himself:
We're working on getting hashlets in to mainstream stores.
It wont be long before you'll walk in to target and see hashlets. It won't long before you go on walmart.com. We're acting(?) with the largest retailers in the country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVXPFVl0r0M#t=22044I have seen a few posts asking about our coin being accepted at larger merchants. Everything is still on track. I have had to change some of my wording as to not create issues with the MNDAs we have in place.
Short summary:
We said a few things before our partners were ready for folks to hear it.https://hashtalk.org/topic/17485/large-merchantsIt's funny how there were absolutely zero fanboys who doubted the amazon/target/walmart partnerships before the coinfire article was published.
Now they've all either taken the stance that coinfires reporting is inaccurate or that josh never directly mentioned a partnership. The amount of mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance people are willing to go through to whitewash this is astounding.