I just read a little further back in this thread and saw the accusation that I "exhumed" Mandica's account. It should be very easy for anyone who's been around bitcointalk for a while to verify that the Mandica that started XSPEC (long before I got involved), who has been very active on BCT here for quite some time, is the same Mandica that has come back to the project recently and is on our Discord. I'd appreciate if someone would take the effort to independently verify this somehow since I really don't need more wild accusations directed at me...

Thanks for the summary. I think the first three questions are pretty similar, or at least my answer to them will be pretty much the same, so I'm going to answer them together.


Throughout my association with XSPEC I've been pretty bad at deadlines, time estimation and project management. I think this is pretty well-known in the community. It's not just a case of cherry-picking commits, as I haven't been committing nice small units of work like I should have been. I'm working on tidying things up, though for various reasons I'm not at full output right at this moment. As you may have seen on Discord, we're moving to bring people with better skills in these areas (project management, planning release dates, etc) into the core team.



Automatic ring size for stealth transactions was not working prior to v1.3.5. As of v1.3.5 it works. The release notes indicate the new (working) functionality. I don't see the problem here. Release notes are not supposed to be a work log; they describe the changes vs. the previous version.



I am not aware of the community member you refer to nor do I recall having the conversation you claim that they relayed to you, so I can't really respond in a meaningful way to this. We've already gone over my exaggeration of my experience, which is something that I stupidly did in an ad-hoc conversation on Slack, and have never done since. I regret it. What more is there to say?



Yes. The codebase is large, quite complex, and changes to it involve people's money so need to be done carefully. The library updates were not minor. All the changes required testing and debugging. Lines of code are not a good measure of time spent.

And then there's the changes that aren't public yet. Sure, I can't prove their existence yet, like anything that hasn't been made public yet, but I don't understand the impatience. I frankly am not concerned if people don't believe I've been working on v1.4 all this time, because when it's released their disbelief will be moot...



It will be released when it's ready, like the rest of our work. See above.



You know as well as I do that proving something like this is virtually impossible. These "reviews" all minimise the work I've done using phrases like "a few library updates" as if this work does not require careful implementation, testing and debugging. Lines of code is not a good measure of time spent. See my response to "Do you think..." above.



As others have pointed out but you tend to conveniently ignore, the price of XSPEC has varied a lot over time. The actual amount of fiat money that I've received from XSPEC is small, and certainly doesn't do much to justify the stress of trying to get work done in this environment, being constantly being accused of having some bad motivations. Since I don't have access to any "stash" of XSPEC (yes, I know I can't prove this), the price is not much motivation for me. I'm working on this because it's an interesting tech project that I took stewardship of, which I would like to see through, not because I expect to get some financial reward.

Please also refer to recent Discord announcements; I am going to relinquish control of incoming donations and the decisions about how they are spent. For the reasons described in last sentence of the previous paragraph, I would work on this project even without the donations (which are small anyway) so they might as well be used to bring more people on board and try to drive the project forward faster.



That address is an exchange deposit address. Once I send coins there, the XSPEC on the blockchain is now in the hands of the exchange. So any coins leaving it are being moved around internally by the exchange or withdrawn to other exchange users. I don't see how you can infer anything from the addresses that it's "linked" to, they will just be other addresses of the exchange or addresses of other exchange users. Saying they are "clearly not exchange addresses" is just lying, I'm sure you understand things well enough to know that you can't easily make inferences like this.



No, I am not. I've put a huge amount of work into this coin and I would like to see it through to some kind of stability and progress. Like any developer I don't expect to be around one project forever, but I also don't like unfinished business. Before moving on I'd like to have v1.4 and v2.0 released, a stable core team in place to continue development, and solid governance that prevents one person from having to bear the brunt of constant accusations while trying to get work done. Once these things are in place it's possible that I would consider leaving. I prefer not to use the word "exit" since it's generally associated with leaving *with* something, and that's not likely to be the case here.



I have no idea. She has claimed to me, several months ago, that she holds "very little" XSPEC. I asked for a clearer indication of how much, and it was not forthcoming. She may hold a lot, or she may genuinely hold almost none. My suspicion is that she still has some significant holdings.

The tone of this is such that I don't think rational discussion is likely, but I'd like to respond to one or two specific things.


I have not asked for more money. As a matter of fact, upon learning that some people were talking about a new "donation drive" based on the misguided idea that more money can somehow increase my output, I asked them to either call it off, or direct any raised money towards either finding more developers or marketing or other efforts. At no point have I made any request for more money, and in fact I have in the last days suggested that we should reduce the staking donations I'm receiving and use some of that to fund bounties to get more people working on the project. Many people have witnessed these discussions in Discord in the last days so I don't think there is much ambiguity here.

I can think of only a few explanations for your comment above. (1) you legitimately misunderstood something I said (though I don't think I said anything that could be intepreted this way). (2) somebody impersonating me on Discord is trying to get some donations for themselves (I didn't find any evidence for this so I don't think it's the case). (3) you are making this up, or willfully misrepresenting something I said.


I've never claimed this, and I have no control over claims made by random anonymous Internet strangers that I've probably never even spoken to.


I've checked, and none of the addresses you have mentioned (other than the donation address) are in my control. They are almost certainly exchanges' addresses which obviously receive many coins from many people.

Working on this project is becoming increasingly demoralising and difficult considering that there is almost zero reward, and constant accusations that even if ignored cause significant stress, but I hope that the tone will improve once I am able to show some results.

Not sure what "genius" has to do with being able to stop idiots from shilling, but suit yourself. I'm out. See you in a few months

off the topic of the thread, but as I mentioned already (and as a tiny bit of research could have told you) xspec has both private and public balances. the largest wallets are definitely not accurate, as for any blockchain, and the richlist isn't either as it's impossible to determine private balances to take them into account. just because an (unofficial) block explorer decides to display something, doesn't make it accurate.

We're not going to remove a major feature that we're working on from the roadmap just because it makes people ask questions. It would be hard to explain to people what we're spending all our time doing, for one thing. The questions are no problem, neither are the eyes watching. They can keep watching for a few months and then have their questions answered; I don't see any problem with that.

Incidentally, when did I ever say I wanted the investors without the scrutiny? If I were in your position, I'd certainly wait until I read the whitepaper before investing. But I wouldn't go around swinging wild accusations of "scam" at a coin that I know very little about.

By talking about proof and claiming that I "won't" explain as if it's a permanent state.


Yes.


Not yet, but it will be released just before launch, when we can safely do it without losing the advantage to better-funded coins.


Sure, no problem. I have no problem with being asked how it works, and calmly explaining the (pretty understandable IMO) reason why we're not discussing that yet.

What I do have a problem with is accusations, claims that you have some "proof" that the coin we're working hard on is a "scam", and being held responsible for the actions of idiot shills that don't even understand the coin they're shilling about. These people care about nothing but price, whereas us two developers don't even hold much XSPEC, are funded by donations, and gain very little if the price goes up. Our interests (developing good technology) are not aligned with the shills at all, and we wish they would STFU, but there's not much we can do.

I guess we have different definitions of "proof". Once again you are casually claiming that I said things that I didn't. People only need to read the thread above to see me saying that not only will a paper be released describing the method, but the source code will be open just like the rest of XSPEC's source code, allowing anybody to see the implementation of the method. Until then, feel free to have all the skepticism you want, but talking about "proof" is a bit extreme.

"won't explain right now because it would hand over the solution to much better-funded teams who can beat us to implementation" is a very different thing from "won't explain".

While there are (unfortunately) a lot of uninformed people that I wish would stop shilling, I think you might just be missing some subtlety here.

1. We already have transaction privacy enabled by ring signatures, and network privacy enabled by Tor+OBFS4.
2. We will gain stealth staking in Q2 2018. At present if one wishes to stake, one's coins must be held in public balances (XSPEC has both public and private balances).

If you have seen claims that contradict these facts, links would be appreciated so that I can set the record straight.

I know I can't prove this, so there's probably no point in saying it - but we don't have a cent for marketing. The two developers we have (Bryce and I) are funded entirely by community donations, which don't amount to a lot at the moment, and we're not big holders of XSPEC. After funding the two of us there's nothing left to spend on marketing. And honestly, even if we had money for marketing, it wouldn't be given to people to shill here. I hate that kind of thing.

Even if they run Tor and I2P perfectly, their traffic is still going over exit nodes unless the currency they're using supports advertising .onion (/I2P equiv) peers. Very few do. Bitcoin actually does, but there are vanishingly few such peers advertised, which obviously brings its own problems.


Not locked-in on anything. Was just addressing the misconception that you were (and still seem to be) repeating.


Sorry, I prefer to let results speak for themselves. Check back in a few months for that

As a project, we just put something on our roadmap that we're working on. That's the extent of the "advertising" that we've done. (Please don't confuse random community members shilling on bitcointalk with something controlled or condoned by the project.)

I think Gandalf86 put it quite well as to why we didn't simultaneously publish the full details of how it works when we listed it on our roadmap. To put things in perspective, we have many orders of magnitude less funding than Monero. If we publish the solution to a problem that everyone is interested in, we're almost certainly not going to be the first to successfully implement it in our currency.

This is a really common misconception, but it's not true. It is not trivial to just use Tor/I2P with any cryptocurrency, if you care at all about your privacy and security. If you're not using onion addresses (or the I2P equivalent) then your traffic is traveling unencrypted across exit nodes, who can view and even censor your transactions. It's well known that some of these exit nodes are operated by governments with an interest in doing exactly that sort of thing.

The integration of Tor or I2P with a cryptocurrency requires thought and care, which is no doubt exactly why Monero is pursuing Kovri, and is also why Spectre integrates Tor and uses only onion addresses, rather than just pointing the SOCKS proxy at Tor like people suggest you can just do with any cryptocurrency.

I don't mind the claim being scrutinised - as I have already said, I am not asking you to believe anything until the design is public. I am very strongly against the shilling that I see on Bitcointalk but it's not as if I can prevent people from doing what they want. We don't pay for or incentivise this stuff at all (even if we wanted to, which we definitely don't, we have no budget to do so). If it were up to me, we would keep relatively quiet about the stealth staking until it was ready to go. But people want to know what we have planned to release in the future, and we've already worked out the math and validated it, so we put it on the roadmap, and then half the community wants to tell everyone on bitcointalk 


So, you're saying we should lie? 

If I'm a government with the ability to do dragnet-style surveillance, I simply need to find the peer that first relayed a given transaction. It's not a particularly difficult challenge once I'm already collecting all the data. As long as the transactions are being relayed over clearnet this vulnerability exists. This is why Spectre integrates Tor and only exchanges traffic between onion addresses. I understand that Monero is integrating I2P for a similar reason?

How is it that you quoted me and yet still managed to claim that I said the opposite of what I did?

We know exactly how to do it, but as I said, just wait for the paper and source code and you won't need to trust my or anyone else's word.

Hey generalizethis, we don't "claim to have anonymous staking". We've worked out a way to do it, and we will be launching it towards the end of Q2 this year. Nobody is asking you to believe it until we release the paper and source code, don't worry

Hey I don't come to bitcointalk very often but someone linked me to your post and I felt like replying.

XSPEC is very much a legitimate project. I'm the lead developer of it in fact. We're working hard on the technology, we have a really nice wallet already and in the future we have some innovations planned that no other project to our knowledge is working on (including staking of stealth coins).

Unlike many coins we don't have a budget for marketing, nor highly-paid developers. Just a passionate community, a few solid developers funded entirely by community donations, and some good ideas.

That passionate community sometimes tries to compensate for the lack of a marketing budget by trying to "spread the word" and unfortunately it sometimes comes across like shilling. I'm not a fan of that type of marketing personally, and it's not an official approach of the project or anything like that.

I hope you'll consider coming over to our slack (http://spectreproject.slack.com/ - invite link: http://slack.spectreproject.io/) and saying hello. We're a friendly bunch and you'll find us to be refreshingly transparent compared to much of the crypto world.

Spectre v1.3.3 Wallet

I'm happy to announce the release of v1.3.3 of the Spectre wallet. This is a minor update resolving an issue with the UI updating that some Windows 64-bit users experienced, and improving the reliability of ring signature generation if small ring sizes are selected. There are also startup and sync performance improvements in this release, so all users are encouraged to upgrade.

Windows 64-bit, Windows 32-bit and macOS wallet binaries can be found here: https://github.com/spectrecoin/spectre/releases/tag/v1.3.3

Instructions for building from source on Linux have also been added to the README.

The next release will be v1.4, a major release incorporating a modernised fully-native wallet as part of our first step towards mobile wallets, as well as many improvements to the anonymous (stealth) transactions. The v1.4 release will also include binaries for Linux platforms.

Spectre v1.3.2 Wallet

I'm happy to announce the release of v1.3.2 of the Spectre wallet. This version fixes a bug several people had experienced with their balance and transactions not showing correctly sometimes, and also provides more flexibility with the generation of anonymous transactions using ring signatures. If you are in a hurry and want to trade off anonymity for speed, you can now choose a smaller ring size.

Windows 64-bit, Windows 32-bit and macOS wallet binaries can be found here: https://github.com/spectrecoin/spectre/releases/tag/v1.3.2

The next release will be v1.4, a major release incorporating a modernised fully-native wallet as part of our first step towards mobile wallets, as well as many improvements to the anonymous (stealth) transactions. The v1.4 release will also include binaries for Linux platforms.