What I'm looking for is the following:
1. PR guy/gal or developers interacting with the community each day of the week.
2. Promotion and advertising. Think reddit, Stealthcoin subreddit, Bitcointalk, twitter, major altcoin people, etc...
3. Hype creation with professionalism from the developers to back it up.
4. Making the coin as appealing as possible to larger investors.
5. Increasing the community size continuously for growth, promotion by word of mouth, etc...
6. This last one is completely optional, but many coins who had the developer reveal his identity increased greatly in value because the developer couldn't just run away with people's money or scam people.
Give us more development updates:
1. Even if nothing new has happen, we like to know you didn't die, end up in the hospital, abandon the coin, etc... A simple, "we are still working on this" is good enough for short developer bits of information in addition to other information.
2. Don't just tell us your hopes and dreams for the coin. Tell us what can be accomplished now in a reasonable amount of time.
3. Plan the development thoroughly but be ready for unforeseen roadblocks. Keep something new like a feature, contest, etc... in your developer test wallets for a rainy day to please the community and keep the value up.
4. More than one dev talking is always good.
5. Show us how active you are. Investors want active developers!
6. We can never have enough transparency!
Yes, these are all great suggestions. Probably the main reason for the low value is that the initial pump was killed by the Proof of Stake block validation problem where stake mints got rejected based on the PoW difficulty. Normally this wouldn't have been a problem, but the difficulty happened to be very high precisely as the very first stakes matured. We fixed the problem within 18 hours, but it did kill the pump.
The next pump was killed by yet another block validation issue. This time, some of the code that validates blocks worked fine in other coins but somehow caused Stealth to reject blocks only after a wallet restart. We fixed this problem within 12 hours, but that also killed a pump.
Both of these issues would probably never affect the price except for their perfect timing with pumps. Honestly, the dev team thought that Stealth would take maybe a week longer before it hit bittrex. I was personally troubled when I found that bittrex had added it after only 36 hours after launch. A few more days would have given us time to detect these bugs and fix them before the pump teams took over. All we can say is that we learned a lesson.
The addition to bittrex caused other problems as well, prompting most holders (miners) to move coins to the exchange, leaving the network empty of stake. Again, this was our miscalculation. Lesson learned. We are trying to correct this lesson by having competitions to get more stake on the network, but it seems that we have a dearth of participants and so the stake is still sparse, but building slowly.
Right now, it seems that we have a battle against trolls, profit takers, and panic sellers. None of whom have any interest in staking coins, which is the single most important thing any holder of XST can do at the moment. So, if you plan to hold long term, just try to split your holdings into maybe 20 to 100 different transactions and keep your wallet open and unlocked for minting
all the time. We'll add a sleep period to the ThreadStakeMinter and this will help you to find blocks at intervals more helpful to the network.
Do we have a plan? Yes we have a plan. Yes we have a roadmap. No, we have no functional PR at the moment. But yes PR is in the plan. In terms of professionalism, we know that Stealth's bursting into the spotlight only to be plagued with connectivity problems does not seem professional. But this is an experimental coin introduced in a rapidly changing investment environment. The best functioning coins are those which are carbon copies of established coins. We choose to innovate with Stealth and so we expect some short term technical issues, the most problematic of which we have fixed quickly. Frankly, if these issues cause speculators to dump their coins, then it is of our opinion that their dumped coins will fall into hands more beneficial to Stealth Coin anyway.
So how will we address the synchronization issues reported by some? Well, from what we can guess, the synchronization problems fall into a couple of categories:
- Wallets picked up corrupted transactions during days 3 and 4 when Stealth had the block validation issues. To remove these corrupted transactions, it is best to try to use "salvagewallet" from the console. If that doesn't work, then it will be necessary to export the private keys and import them into a new wallet. Both of these operations require an unlocked wallet. The wallet may hang during the process unless the entry "stake=0" is added to StealthCoin.conf. After the wallet is salvaged (or the keys moved), the "stake=0" entry may be removed. It's a good idea to completely remove the blockchain and resync for this fix.
- Connectivity issues can be traced to DNS and/or Tor port blocking by ISPs. Several posts mention using google DNS servers. Also, I plan to make the Tor port configurable with a "torport" configuration option. I will also make the default a port that most ISPs will not want to block (like one used by credit card transactions). These are planned changes that I'll put in within the next few days. (I'm still on retreat, so it is hard for me to make a wallet release).
But other than these fixes, there is nothing wrong with the wallet that I can detect. If you have problems, then pastebin your logfiles when reporting any issues. Recently, there were several newbie sockpuppet trolls complaining about syncing issues, but they posted no log files.
Finally, a big question is whether we are going to create a roadmap or whitepaper. Well, our whitepaper is the interview that was released earlier. That interview started as a bunch of honest questions during an informal chat. The questioner thought the discussion might make a good whitepaper or interview and offered to prepare one or both. In the end, we just decided to release the conversation as an interview because that seemed most natural.
So go read the interview to get an idea of our plans for privacy protection. A full implementation is a few weeks out (maybe 2-4). I've been so distracted by the launch, subsequent technical issues, and the staking problem (as well as internet issues here on retreat) that I haven't been able to work as much as I would like on the blockchain resistance. It's coming.
