I think that it was valuable that someone did do a code audit on how far viacoin has diverged from bitcoin and the pros and cons of the changes. At least this sticks to the principle of investing in the tech you know and believe in.

I definitely think that being a 1 man dev team here with kinda lacking(bad but in this case good) marketing, this coin is not positioning itself to be a pump and dump coin still.

The work romano has done also can't be said to be trivial since not just any dev can jump into a project like this and be able to segwit it on their own and get other protocols working.

The harder question is how much this type of work is valued at and is any of the crypto currencies out there really worth any of the market cap that they have. This is almost all speculation at this point still and there is no right and wrong here.

I really do think that any community (especially crypto) these days should at least be open for people with strong opinions (especially willingness to be wrong) to come in and say their opinions and ask some questions. I love the excitement and love for viacoin but being overly defensible and sensitive to negative opinion would also hurt the coin's image.

To be fair, I see and understand a lot of your arguments but they aren't convincing enough to label viacoin as a pump and dump scheme (at least by intention). Development might be a lot of implementing other people's protocol and algorithms but I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing. It depends on if you believe that there should only be btc and litecoin/dash/via shouldn't exist at all as an alternative to the btc. I don't think this is a winner take all market, and I think there is a lot of merit to certain industries and business to have a slightly adjusted btc that could be easier to conform to their business needs later.

I think keeping it close to Bitcoin core gives it a lot of validity in terms of security and btc has shown viability as a currency. I also think that being able to implement certain protocols without having a community argue about it and threatening with forks is also a plus. At this price point, I think it's just a bet on how fast it can implement all the latest crypto standard(segwit, which it has now, lightning network, atomic swap, etc) and then after those, it's seeing how it'll try to differentiate itself. I don't think just anyone could fork btc now, add segwit, lightning network, ledger support just at will. I also don't think it's easy to get into polo, bittrex and hopefully into some mobile wallet like coinomi by making your own fork. thus I see a lot of merit in a relatively low market cap coin that is as secure as btc and flexible enough to adapt to future potential opportunities. At this point it's all speculation anyways, I rather via then say an oversold ICO like the 150 mill tezos imo.

I've diversified myself with coins at each stage of the market cap and via is at least stable, active, active community and so far hasn't had any real pump and dump trends like parkbyte(consistently seeing it + 60%, - 40%).

Maybe I've been lucky and so far got good returns from via and it might not keep going, but that could be said the same about most coins. I could also have gotten more gains with other coins, but hindsight is 20/20.

* on a side note, I agree with having just 1 main mining pool is bad and we're too dependant on f2pool.
** Also otoh seems cool but following the rich doesn't always get you richer.

Awesome! Finally I'm in haha. Still don't get why I couldn't add the group manually. Thanks a bunch, I'll hopefully be able to participate and learn more about viacoin now.

Would really love to join but for some reason the link keeps telling me that I can't find user. If someone can add my username into the group that'll be awesome. My username is @jhysum

I'm joining telegram for viacoin only and I'm fine with that but I agree that I would rather see this on slack if possible.

I just tried that and I found the viacoinbot but nothing else in the global search. I'm thinking it's maybe because I'm in vietnam or that the channel might be full? I'll google around, just was hoping for a fast answer here.

My username is jhysum. if someone can add me into telegram's channel that would be awesome

Already tried, it says can't find user super odd. I'm new to telegram so maybe I'm doing something wrong?

Hey guys,

I just got a bunch of viacoin myself and I want to get more involved in the community. I can't seem to add the viacoin telegram account, it keeps telling me that the user doesn't exist when I try to add from the telegram link.

Also would love to download the mac wallet, the link on github is also down currently.

Does anyone else also have these issues?