There actually is no THE dev; it's a team. I stop by here and answer some questions from time to time because I personally use bitcointalk and feel people deserver some answers sometimes, but I'm definitely not here in any sort of official capacity. So I guess this is another one of those posts. We're still around and the company is doing well. The coin hasn't been abandoned and is still part of the plan. It's just that other stuff has to come first now.

I'll try to answer a few things.

I know the communication hasn't been great. I complain about that myself. When things are announced, we prefer it to be substantial and real, so no announcements of upcoming announcements and no announcements of things we're thinking about maybe doing. It also should be noted that bitcointalk forums aren't really a primary communication source for the company. You're much more likely to get info from the subreddit or twiiter accounts, or any of the methods listed on our websites.

What we're working on at the moment is merging the shopping checkout/payment tech so that there is one solution for customers to use with the best features of both.

The giveaway coins, to my knowledge, are in cold storage (as in paper wallets in a safe), except for a small chunk of them which are used for promotions and giveaways (for example we did a thing with crypto art where there are ziftrcoins behind the paintings). They're still going to be given away eventually. Everything is just delayed by a few months due to the merger. I've heard that merchants want to be part of/involved in the giveaway process. For hypothetical example giving them away to attendees at a movie launch/premier/opening night. So I'm assuming we'll be moving some to them in the future. I also believe we're still planning on giveaways of our own.

For the record, we've never sold (or bought aka pumped) any coins on any exchange. The 800k number that gets thrown around was total media overhype. The total sold counter was based on an average. The value of Bitcoins at the end of the sale was less than half what it was at the beginning.

This is true and I'd say this sums it up fairly well.
I had nothing to do with the press release but I believe it's worded the way it is for both branding and legal reasons.

Also, I don't want to go into too much detail responding to comments that are likely on a few ignore lists anyway, but how can one company be legit and the other be a scam? From the press releases one can see that the merger took over 6 months. You'd think that would be enough time for the companies to vet each other, investigate finances, tech, etc, wouldn't you think?

I wanted to post here and give some small updates, since I know Black Friday is only a few days away and some people are hoping we'll have something for it.

I'll get right to it then. Unfortunately, there aren't going to be any big shopping related announcements or surprises for black Friday or cyber Monday. There is a simple explanation for that though. Merchants don't want to risk implementing new tech during or just before the holiday shopping season. There is too much risk that something could go wrong and their tech resources are also usually very busy just keeping their existing platforms and websites functional due to the heavy loads. Companies in general also don't like making sweeping changes during Q4 due to balancing yearly budgets and stuff like that. Even if the merger was completed months ago, it would be unlikely we'd have seen anything this holiday shopping season.

On to some good news. Many of GoCoin's existing merchants are very interested in Ziftrcoin. I've heard it's even been a deciding factor for some of them. I think it's safe for me to say that early next year people will start to see traction as merchants begin the integration process. It's worth mentioning that the coin is a large part of the merger and not something that will just be abandoned as the two payment platforms merge. I can't really say anything about them, but there are some big plans for the coins (of course plans can change too).

Regarding the merger itself, it's supposed to happen literally any day now. From what I've heard everything is done and agreed on, it's just a matter of getting the exact legal wording done with. I know there are some press releases and announcements waiting to go out, but that can't happen until this final step is done with.

Finally, regarding the give-away, there's still decisions being made about this, but we aren't just going to turn on a giant faucet and post a link on bitcointalk. Again, plans may change, but from what I've heard, the give-away will actually be done through a variety of different methods. For example, we've had some merchants that are interested in taking part in it themselves, such as giving them away to attendees at launch events and things of that nature.

I have this complaint too. Due to the Ziftr/GoCoin merger and some funding happening around it, we're all told basically to not say anything about it, or what's currently being worked on, until everything is in place.

I think I can say that, in my opinion, things are going great. There is always the chance of failure, but there are a lot of interesting things going on in the industry right now and we seem to be in a great place to be a part of it all. Of course, this forum being what it is, that statement essentially means nothing, since I have nothing I can back it up with.

GoCoin, ironically, isn't a coin (nor do they have one yet). It's a Bitcoin (and Litecoin and Dogecoin) payment gateway. They're the third largest, behind BitPay and Coinbase, and provide crypto payment processing for quite a number of merchants. The most recent and newsworthy being movietickets.com.

At this point there are probably as many alt coins as there are words in the english language, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there's a similarly named coin. However, this is two companies that are merging (one of which happens to have a coin).

It's been announced, but it's not fully integrated yet. I believe the timeline is "summer 2015", which I realize isn't very specific.

When it does go live, I expect it will be part of their checkout experience. Paying with crypto will just be an option when choosing how you pay.

I wasn't aware that it was, but I'll look into it. My guess is that it's an issue with low trade volume. There are a lot of people holding the coins and, due to our rather unique distribution curve, not very many coins are mined each day.

It's not dead at all. We've been keeping our heads down and focusing on development.

Last update to the coin itself was April 10. We've also been hard at work on other projects around ZiftrCoin. You can see some of our work on the public repos at the ZiftrCoin github https://github.com/ziftrcoin. There's also tons of work being done in private repos that can't be seen.


We announced our first big (50 million in annual sales) merchant recently.
http://blog.ziftr.com/2015/04/27/apparel-manufacturing-company-the-mountain-creator-of-the-iconic-three-wolf-moon-shirt-to-accept-cryptocurrency-via-ziftrpay/

Our mobile wallet has entered public open beta. We haven't even officially announced this yet, but since it's publicly available in the play store I suppose I can mention it.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ziftr.android.ziftrwallet


In the next week or so we're also planning on having some smaller merchants actually up and running with ZiftrPay. I don't know which merchants it will be, so it might not be anything super exciting, but it will be great to see some places where ZiftrCoins can be used. This will let us get some feedback on the process and let users see the first pieces of the payment platform we're rolling out.

In a perfect world I agree. In practice, however, it's not that simple. I touched on this a bit before with the "chicken or the egg" thing, but there's a few reasons things had to happen in the order they did (timing, social obligations, manpower, etc).

The good news is we've actually had the payment platform running in a sandbox mode since a few days after coin launch. Unofficially, I suspect we'll actually have it out inside the 2 month window mentioned.

I saw this question and I know I answered it in my head at some point. It apparently never made it to the computer though, so I apologize for that.

That rich list is technically correct, though it's a bit misleading, to say the least. The top 90 addresses hold/held the pre-mined coins. As mentioned, many of these cannot be spent (peers will reject any transaction that spends them and any block that contains such a transaction), so they aren't really available coins yet.

The coins reserved for the big give-away we're doing later this year are also included in that batch. Those aren't locked up technically but require (I believe) 3 company execs to gain access to them.

There are also quite a few coins from the pre-sale that participants have not collected yet. We didn't feel the need to artificially break these up, so any time a user withdraws some of their pre-sale coins it creates a a funny looking transaction with huge amounts of change. Those change addresses will likely make it to the top of the rich list as well.

So the short version (TLDR) is that yes those addresses do have those coins, but they are either multiple people's coins that haven't been distributed yet or they are locked up such that they don't really exist.

GPU Info here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/ziftrCOIN/comments/30l9oh/gpu_mining_release/

This is a fair question.
Our CEO provides some insight into price and our plans with ZiftrCoin in his reddit response here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/ziftrCOIN/comments/2y0f98/i_hope_this_is_not_another_paycoin_scenario/cp54fvy

Regarding current merchant adoption, it's a bit of a "chicken or the egg" problem, on a couple levels. Merchants take forever to adopt and implement things, depending on their size (look how many still have terrible mobile websites in this age of smart phones). They also want test environments, proof of concept examples and all sorts of statistics. Essentially, the coin has to be out before you can really get too far with them.

I don't dare give anyone financial advice, but if you do cash out, I hope you at least hold on to a few so you have an excuse to check out our shopping site at the end of the year.

We held a pre-sale throughout December through January (give or take a few days).
There aren't any merchants that accept ZiftrCoin, yet. The next few months is dedicated to further developing our payment platform and onboarding merchants.


Wolf did a good job explaining PoK. Our plans (dreams maybe) for PoK is to have it integrated into pool and mining software such that the miners are responsible for what goes into a block. The goal there is to both incentivize many nodes and mitigate 51% attacks (and other pool shenanigans). Users are then rewarded with 5% more coins for their troubles.

Off the top of my head, these are some of the features we've added from a technical standpoint.
A unique distribution curve that doesn't heavily reward early miners.
An addition to mining we call Proof of Knowledge that rewards miners for running full nodes.
The ability to "lock up" coins so they can't be spent for a certain period of time (like our premine).
A scalable block size limit.
A "tie-breaker" system that de-incentivizes mining empty blocks and mitigates block chain branching.


Not related to the technology we also a few other advantages.
ZiftrCoin is from a real US based company with public verifiable profiles for all its employees.
We have full time developers working on the coin.
Once we have our merchant integration and shopping site fully setup, we will value the coin at $1 for 5% of the price of any purchases made.

I think it's obvious to most, but just in case, I'd strongly advise against buying any GPU mining code for ZiftrCoin.

Our plan is to release all the GPU stuff tonight, including Qt Wallet integration and source. It will also include kernel binaries optimized by Wolf0 (which get around 2.8 MH/s on AMD 280).

Even if we don't release tonight, which though unlikely is still possible, it won't be much longer. If someone wants ZiftrCoin (we hope you do) and has a bitcoin to spare, there are better ways to use it.

That is a really good point. We've been trying to maintain a list on reddit, so not sure how we overlooked updating the OP here (bit of a pace-palm on our part). I'll try and have someone correct that tomorrow (I don't have access to that account myself).





Agreed. We need a fully featured block explorer.
Last week was one of those weeks where everything is a priority, but your point about users needing to make sure the pools are playing fair is huge. I'll make sure and bring that up tomorrow morning.

Even the official (experimental) Ziftr CPU Miner will be flagged at least twice on that website. There's been a trend lately to hide bitcoin miners in viruses, so the mining software will often get flagged since it contains mining code.

We made the source for stratum pools public this morning (I think). We just haven't announced it.

Have at it:
https://github.com/ziftrcoin

That actually made me LOL.

Anyway, in the event anyone is actually wading through that, I want to make something perfectly clear. The coin market cap does NOT include the premine. We very specifically and intentionally did this because we believe that doing otherwise would be very misleading. It would have put our coin somewhere around the number 3 position on coinmarketcap.com, which is obviously false. What it does include are the coins sold during the pre-sale. Those coins are "in the wild" now and can be traded just like mined coins, so the "available supply" statistic is correct.