Did this viacoin ICO really raise over 600 BTC?
900 Btc doesn't seem like a lot of money for a team of Devs, for instance 21 million dollars raised by blockstream towards sidechains development and the Counterparty Devs being funded, millions no doubt, by the overstock CEO. Baffles me why some people think Viacoin raised a huge amount and expect immediate results, should just go badger Blockstream or Counterpary in my opinion. Charlee Lee is another one in the habit of putting down Alt coins that are premined or had ICO's as though it's some kind of detriment to the coins longevity. No doubt working at Google had some advantages for Charlee and Litecoin, working at Coinbase must also help the coin, imagine lots of people believe LTC will be available on the Coinbase platform someday.
I get that. But what Im asking is what have the ICO funds been used for? Im not expecting immediate results, but let me give you a quick outline of what has happened development-wise for viacoin.
-Grynn San hired. (Probably not even part of dev team anymore)
-Peter Todd hired.
-ClearingHouse released.
-A few wallet updates.
-Recent android wallet release.
600 btc just for that? That's literally it in 5 months time, and the top3 happened weeks after launch...so the past 3 months have been lacking. I get it, Im not expecting BTCdrak to spend all 600+ btc within a few months, but after those listed above, there has been no mention of where the remaining funds will be put towards.
In the meantime here are some empty promises from BTCdrak that has never came to realization.
-Weekly updates
-Desktop application
Like I said, its pretty obvious whats going on here. Viacoin is just playing the 'waiting, wishing' game. Im aware of treechains coming up so dont even bother with that. Once thats out, whats next? More empty promises? Near non-existent development hoping a true Zynga scenario would actually happen? If thats the case, I dont know who would willingly want to invest in something like this.
You also conveniently forgot blockchain notary, which is actually pretty big.
600 BTC is worth around $225,000 at the moment and could go lower. I've worked closely with a number of start ups and the cost of having a team of 1 full time developer, one part time dev, and one part time chief scientist would typically be around $15k per month on the low end. So basically 600 BTC gets them around 15 months of runway under normal start up circumstances. However unlike normal startups, altcoins can't expect to have the opportunity to raise more capital through later rounds of funding, so the right approach is to be insanely frugile if you want to keep things going for 3 to 4 years. Expecting him to be spending on much more than the team he currently has would ensure the project doesn't have the runway it needs.
There's likely a lot more going on behind the scenes than you realize. For instance, I also work closely with Darkcoin. While it might seem like a trivial project, it took us just under 6 months to get it up and running. Also, we were hesitant to announce anything about it until we knew for certain it would go live.
Just because we don't hear anything doesn't mean things aren't happening.
