1. Ooookay, what is this? Turned 2 months 4 days ago on January 9? It's FEBRUARY 14! Or are you actually correcting editfmah, who is the co-lead dev, and apparently isn't aware of his own nascent project's release? My heavens. The shenanigans are apparent right from this thread.
Well not everyone is in the same timezone, it was still the 13th for me when I wrote that...
nah just a brainfart, February* 9th. Glad you're paying attention
2. If you don't allow any kind of funding, even donations from the community, how in all the bitcoin blazes will you ever get any exchange listing fees paid? Will you just expect Bittrex and Binance to list turtle of their own good spirit?
We never said we don't allow any kind of funding or donations. We have only said there was no ICO and that we have not done any fundraising to this point (which is still the case). In ful ltransparency, RockSteady did sell some special roles on discord for TurtleCoin to fund various efforts in the form of TRTL bounties, but that caused some issues and those people were all refunded. The bitcoin paid to get us on TradeSatoshi (now back online, btw) was bootstrapped by Rock also.
We have discussed various fundraising ideas and encourage the community to be entrepreneurs themselves. So far bounties and self-initiative from community members have accomplished a lot; we're happy with how it's going and hungry for more. This organic growth of very autonomous contributors seems quite scalable. We'll talk about more crowdfunding with the community if and when we feel it is necessary.
3. There's some drama around the cryptonite "hack" that involved admin betrayal. As stated aforementioned, I shant go into the details. But to my understanding, none of the other "cryptonite coins" shared your urgency. In fact, they simply ignored your requests for contact. Retrospectively, seems iffy that they were affected in the slightest. Sounds likely twas a turtlecoin problem that emergency PR tried to desensitize by making it a "cryptonite coin" problem. Fumble coding? And now you're trying to lump your emergency updates about balances not showing up as just part of a "routine update." You needed these two exchanges to update their turtlecoin software at least twice this week and that doesn't include the cryptonite debacle. We can read between the lines.
There is no drama around the forknote/bytecoin vulnerability. A moderator mistakenly gave a person access to a private channel and that person then posted a screenshot of discussion about the issue, not knowing the dev team had already followed proper disclosure procedure and reached out to other forknote/bytecoin developers as well as some downstream service operators. The person admitted the wrong doing and apologized, in public discord, and we changed our discord moderator system in response to that.
It is not within our purview whether or not other cryptonote developers choose to respond to the vulnerability. All we can do is appropriately inform them to the best of our abilities and provide the fix in our code. The issue was not at all unique to TurtleCoin code, it is present in many (all?) bytecoin and cryptonote reference forks. You can read about the issue in full here
https://www.ayrx.me/cryptonote-unauthenticated-json-rpcThe "0 balance" issue was indeed deemed an urgent fix, but not because anyone's wallets or balances were affected. No wallets lost any coins, it was an issue related to simplewallet not properly syncing with the TurtleCoind daemon that was easily fixed by a manual sync (typing `reset` in the simplewallet console). We made an urgent fix of it because, despite not compromising wallets, it was at best a frequent annoyance and often a source of panic for many users who were unaware of the issue.
To your point though, we have been in lots of discussion this week about nailing down some of our processes to ensure code quality. We absolutely want to follow best practices and rely as much as possible on continuous integration with automated testing and building. If you think you can help in this area, or any other, we'd love to have you on board.
4. With a neutral viewpoint, we can't say whether these two exchanges are under your control.
This is a true and fair statement.
But, then again, you two are anonymous devs, who knows what control you have in the first place. Was TradeSatoshi even an exchange that the consensus voted on? Or did the lead devs simply abruptly shove a btc into tradesatoshi to get it listed without any sort of community feedback? Surely the decentralized exchanges you're working on being added are cheaper than TradeSatoshi, if not free. I'm not certain why you would single out tradesatoshi as the exchange of choice. Surely alternative, better known exchanges could've been chosen with that same listing fee.
I can say personally that I have no idea who is behind TradeOgre. Obviously whoever is behind it must have some interest and connection to TurtleCoin being that they popped up listing just us and a small number of other coins soon after we started, but that is really the extent to my knowledge. I have no way to prove this but I am least putting it out there in public testimony.
TradeSatoshi I think is a bit larger and under more eyes. I suppose it's possible we could be connected with them also though I will again say publicly I have no connection and am not aware of one with anyone in our dev team. We paid the fee and applied to get listed, went through a *lengthy* approval process that apparently riddled our community with anticipation, got listed and were put into an extensive maintenance mode shortly after. You can also see discussions between some of their devs and ours in the #dev_general channel on discord. All in all I think it's been a transparent process and doesn't exactly beam of inside connections and favoritism. As far as why tradesatoshi? Ultimately it came down to the people who paid and did the work made the choice of who they paid and what work they did. We're a doer's community. As far as I know there was indeed some open discussion about it, though admittedly I cannot specifically point to it.
As far as our anonymity, it is really only pseudo anonymous. Many of our core contributors and myself have appeared in person to present TurtleCoin at meetups. RockSteady and myself are known by many people. We just don't want it to be about that or about us; it's a PRIVACY coin and we don't see any benefit to forcing anyone to attach their identity to the work they contribute.
But thanks for your clarification. Only begs more inquiries.
Thank you, Lovecove, for expressing your concerns and making those inquiries. I appreciate your interest and willingness to participate in the discussion.
-bebop
