Many new companies (e.g. restaurants) create fake reviews to draw people in.  If those restaurants are actually good and later become successful and get good real reviews, should the owner resign?

Even in video games, companies bribe Gamespot to get review scores above 80%.

Broke our trust sure but UF no longer has anything to do with NEM. 

All UF did was spam sockpuppets to promote NEM back in January.  UF only kept 1 sock for a second stake, which is legal if it's for someone else.  Taint analysis removed hundreds of sockpuppet stakes.

BCnext and Satoshi had conversations with themselves, in the beginning, to drum up popularity.  Seems fitting UF would name his sock "ghosthouse".  UtopianFuture, Satoshi and BCnext may as well be the same person.

NEM never had an IPO.  It was a call for participation where most people paid $5 to $40 and it has a very fair distribution, unlike NxT's IPO whales and all the other $hitcoins out there.

UF resigning had no impact on the price of NEM, historic low was 17K and it's currently above 20.

The people who think UF committed murder are all NxTers who fear NEM.

I looks like the old NEM thread was locked before I could post my response. In any event, these are my thoughts:

I'm saddened and disappointed by what has happened today. There is no excuse for what utopianfuture did. It's unprofessional to bash another coin anonymously using sockpuppet accounts. It's worse that those same sockpuppet accounts were used to sign up for NEM stakes because that goes directly against NEM's fair distribution principle.

Having said all that, I would like to thank utopianfuture for what he has done for NEM up until now. Without utopianfuture, NEM wouldn't exist. He conceived of the idea and recruited a lot of the core dev team, including myself. He has also done a number of things behind the scenes, including paying some out-of-pocket costs (in fiat).

I've heard from a plurality of the core dev team and they mostly share this sentiment. I'm sure I will hear from the rest of the team at some point over the weekend. But, aside from a lot of extra gossip, this transgression shouldn't impact the development of NEM. utopianfuture is not a developer and has not written a single line of code.

I'm hopeful that NEM will emerge from this situation even stronger. NEM was always built around decentralization and fairness and having a single "leader" is really diametrically opposed to that. NEM needs to have a community, not a leader.

As for myself, can you trust me? That's up to you to decide, but I will share a few things:

1. I've never heard of simcoin.
2. I'm to busy coding to have sockpuppet account.
3. I don't have a multiple personality disorder.

Let's try to move forward instead of living in the past. The open alpha is less than two weeks away!

P.S. The core dev team will be reaching out to the community to find someone to lead the marketing and biz-dev of NEM going forward. Understandably, we want to spend most of our time coding until NEM is ready.

P.P.S. I will be on the #ournem IRC channel for the next half hour if anyone has questions for me.

url to Pastmast3r's profile?