Am going to quote these posts here from entropyextropy
I would suggest that people read
http://forum.qrk.cc/post/8142It's a collated post regarding all of the research that went in to the blockchain audit and the resultant findings.
What individuals on the outside don't see are the private forums/messages/irc logs from individuals who stepped up to the plate in order to get development started again. If you look at the codebase, you'll notice that there haven't been any commits to any files since the initial release in July, with the exception of the addition of a few seed nodes. If you compared the codebase to SIFcoin, Quark's predecessor, you'll find that the codebase is, in most cases, identical. This is the nature of altcoins, many of them are copies of one another.
I bring this up to clarify that there was no active development between release and last week. In our effort to get development started again, we tried to reach out to Kolin and Max. And they would pop up here and there, but were, in general either hard to get in touch with, or it was hard to get them to answer specific questions.
We know that Kolin bribed Bill Still; the thread is still on Bitcointalk. We know that the difficulty skyrocketed in the initial days and the growth curve indicates that half, if not more, of the coins were mined in the initial month. We know that there's a single mining pool that constitutes 90% of the network and that the multiple big-rig workers are, most likely, Kolin's. There are many, many circumstential factors that need to be rebutted, but they... haven't been.
I'll be glad to answer any questions that people have, either here or through PM.
If you don't see that there's a technical forum full of pleas for people who are having issues with wallets, sending transactions, quark disappearing, etc., then it's easy to say that there's nothing to 'fix'. But, further, a coin's intrinsic value derives from continued development of that coin; the introduction of new features, refinements in client, etc. There was no active, forward development of quark.
I will say that development does not end with code improvement. Development extends to coordination and management, infrastructure improvements, public relations and branding, etc. None of which happened during the period between launch and November. When I stepped in to the Quark project, I helped to bootstrap community development while we frantically tried to find Max. I got our IRC development channels up and running, did outreach, did a code audit, pushed for and worked on the blockchain audit, etc.
I highly suggest you look at the audit of the blockchain. It's very telling. When we claim that 100 wallets (not people, wallets) holding 60% of the monetary supply isn't 'bad' because other coins are similar, we should also remember that other coins still have the prospect for participation in mining, whereas Quark does not.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1su2aj/the_scam_behind_quarkcoin/http://forum.qrk.cc/user/617https://twitter.com/EntropyExtropyentropyofdays
I'm hijacking the top thread just give my 2 cents. I became a dev of Quark two weeks ago because I wanted to help turn that ship around. A lot of honest people put their money into Quark at Bill Still's direction and I thought that it could be saved.
I pushed for an audit of the blockchain (
http://forum.qrk.cc/thread/368/auditing-block-chain), and what we've found (
http://forum.qrk.cc/thread/568/quark-faqs-compiling-fact-sheet) is incredibly disheartening. We lost a very dedicated member, who also happens to be a professional Forex investment manager, because he became convinced, like I have, that, not only are the fundamentals flawed, but the development, or lack thereof, of the project has been carried out in a very, very shady way.
I went to bat for the Quark project not because I believed that what Kolin was saying was true, but because I was willing to give the project the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, all of the quantifiable metrics have proven it to be just as it is. And it saddens me to say that, but it also bolsters my resolve because the community came together to, a) fix what could be fixed, b) prove what should be proved regardless of project allegiance.
Unfortunately, there is no 'fixing' the Quark project. Both Kolin and Max have disappeared again.
I want to point out that there's no problem with having alternate cryptocurrencies. If anything, the crypto-development community must mirror the Linux development community; forks and small projects experiment with features that the mainstays (in this case, Bitcoin) can't because of their industrial adoption. Cryptos are a good thing; scams and pump-and-dumps are not.
edit: I'm willing to talk more in depth to people about these issues should they want.
edit edit: I also want to say that the community came together in an astounding way to kickstart development, only to be, if not in word than in action, rebuffed by kolin and Max. The folks over at the quark forum have dedicated an inordinate amount of time on a volunteer basis doing what should otherwise be paid development (in PR/Branding/Graphics/Bug fixing) and it's an absolute shame that none of the 'large holders' of quark came out of the woodwork to support them. That says something.
The forex guy he is reffering to was my friend who was in the quark foundation and who really pushed quark hardly.He also was the guy who started the other currencies where many members followed him.
Have a look what Max is writing there in 2013.That he didnt disappeared and that he will keep working on Quark.Seems like he didnt anything for years
but of course the other dev guy is the liar
And here a reply from Kolin
They were a bunch of trolls (members of a alternate "Dev" team ) that Tricked Max into making them "mods" on the forum - its been fun , but now its over sadly : (
oh well time to get on with the important work we were doing any way .....
it was entertaining watching them try as hard as they did but - : D
i thought it would be better if we let them go ha ha -
guys thank you , i love this stuff , it make it all worth while -
He is not any Dev he was just a troll that Max was tricked into making a Mod ,..
Would have got away with it too , if it wasn't for you meddling kids !
: D
OK so here is the Quark scheme for the noobs:
Set a very high number of total coins.
A few people mined 95% of all quarks in a very short period of time.
Agreement among the early miners to hold on their coins except a very few for trading on the market.
Give quarks to people with some decent audience (i.e. Bill Still + Max Keiser) so they can promote it.
Resulting a high number of buyer on the market + very few coins available for trading = high market prices in a short period of time.
High market prices X total mined coins (which 95% held by a small group of people) = super artificially high market capitalization.
Newbies look on coinmarketcap.com and say "WOW quark is very promising!"
Rinse and repeat 4-7
Dump and profit.
Shame on all QuarkCoin promoters!