When i was offered 10% of Bay by Steven, I thought they were buying it with their BTC. Only when the ICO started did I realize that wasnt the case.
My reluctance to expose it earlier (and by the way, I was the one to expose the entire scandal)... my reluctance was that they would do something like this. Anything that I discovered in the ICO phase would damage investors. So to be honest, I was trying to protect everyone involved including investors. I broke my silence because Bob was selling his Bay and provoking me with schill accounts.
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So you believed they were going to buy that BAY with BTC completely separate from the BTC received during the ICO? And you believed they were going to buy it after the ICO was completed and unsold coins destroyed, from the open market?
See that's the problem I keep coming back to, because you continue to say that I and other investors were being protected by you - but if Steven offered you BAY at any time prior to or during the ICO... then you were, in fact, defrauding the investors. I don't mean you wanted to defraud them, or that you designed things to defraud them - simply that your actions (at a minimum) are the very catalyst, which allowed the others to succeed in that fraud!
You keep saying that you were trying to protect the investors, but your decision created the only situation which virtually guaranteed that the investors would be the only ones that lost in the deal. Not Bob or Ryan, not Steven, not Lin, not you - just everyone else.
I do not dispute that you were used. I do not dispute that you had good intentions going in. Unlike other notable critics, I do not dispute your abilities as a dev, nor the potential of both Halo itself and the BitBay concept as outlined. In fact, that's exactly why I decided to throw a little BTC your way to support it - despite there being warning signs all over the place.
The problem however, is that you are still partnered with Steven - and he had to know about everything, or else he couldn't have offered you a single BAY in the first place! (He could have offered you more BTC, and let you buy your own BAY when the markets opened... that would have been perfectly reasonable - and honest).
I do feel sorry for you - and I do hope for everyone's sake that you can make lemonade out of this unholy pile of crap... but I can only come up with two possibilities, even if I assume that you are 100% true to your word now (which is vastly different than your word prior to, during, and even after the ICO):
Possibility 1: Steven is brilliant (but crooked) and was 100% aware of everything from the beginning... thus he knew you were being played - and was fine with that. Ironically, if he does indeed see BAY as a long term play and not simply a quick buck... then he might be the perfect guy to run a coin on the business side. After all, he figured out the one way to get everything (including you) and even get rid of all of the other partners - while still keeping control of a majority of the proceeds!
Possibility 2: Steven is utterly retarded (but honest) and easily convinced into committing crimes by strangers, stabbing his friends in the back, and destroying his own business' long-term prospects in the process. He's also completely clueless about markets, crypto currency, investing, sales, and everything else. If this is the case, he is the very last person on the planet to which you should continue to tie yourself to, and the last person you want running the business side of anything worth more than a cup of coffee - let alone thousands of BTC.
However, maybe there's a possibility that I'm missing... but I can't come up with one.
Oh and at least you're using a multisig wallet for what's left... hopefully that will prevent both you and Steven from making any weird deals with unknown people again. If only the investors could hold a third sig... maybe you should work on setting up a system where holders can vote for a community representative to hold a third sig.
Reputation>Money
If he had outlined everything before it had happened..they would kick him out of the team and as a result investors would lose money and thread would turn into fudstorm which is FAR worse than what is happening right now. Everyone would start complaining how they had faith in him and how he betrayed them regardless of him being truthful and honest.
I don't think you understand this but there WAS no way for him to save himself from the shitstorm. In your perspective one thing would be better than other thing but that's far from the truth. Yes, you would be happy but how about other investors? They would start whining about how they lost money. Bob & Gecko were threatening him and his family and asked him not to release any info. He has mentioned lot of times that he wanted to release info but they kept threatening him. It sounds more like he was stuck with something he didn't want to be part of.
You're right that he should've refused the offer of Free Bay but man gotta pay his bills.
Bob & Gecko threatening him ans his family Good one, are you competing for the best story telling with Gecko ?
The guy lives in Cambodia (nice to evade prosecution no matter what...) while the 2 other idiots are in Canada ( )
The way to save himself from the shit storm was to walk away from the coin period.
Not doing this doesn't mean he wants to protect the investors, it just means he wants to scam them again.
How do you walk away from shit after stepping on it? It'll get stuck to your shoe and go with you everywhere you go. He is just trying to clean it.
As far as me being a bag holder. He has my full permission to do whatever is necessary to bring those clowns behind the bar for threatening his family. In fact I have 20 BTC+ and I could careless about them if he chose to go that route. Besides all this shitstorm he is still here working on the project when he can just walk away and let crypto die on its own but he chose not to. In fact if I was him I would walk away and bring new coin on monthly basis to scam all of you stupid fcks.
You have no fcking clue about how easy it is to scam people in this shit and if he wanted to scam he could take his profit from Bay and leave it...then come back tomorrow with new name and new coin...scam again and he could do it for as long as he wanted but he chose to stay here to fight for his reputation and investors.
The easiest way to walk away would have been to not walk in... Every project which have put large IPO were all scams (not some, just all of them...)
So if you walk in that sort of project, you know very well it will be a scam and you will be part of the scamming team.
may-be he got cold feet at some point, I don't know, but he can't say he didn't know, he always knew it was the scam. He took part of it, in full knowledge of the situation, let you being scammed in full knownledge of the situation and now tries to make you believe that things has changed, knowing it is a big lie again and he and others (ex-)team still have large amount of the coin, they will dump on you or any future "investor" going in.
So keeping his involvement in the coin, will most likely increased the amount of btc scammed from people stupid enough to believe him once again.
The project is entirely doomed no matter what he does or does not because of the huge amount of coin they still own and the fact the team split makes it even more dangerous for the investor.
So keeping the project alive will just hurt more people (not him personally ), so even if walking away isn't easy it would be better for everyone that he walk away, as well as for you especially if you plan to put more btc in it, because they will just disappear.
Actually the only way to move on, would be to make a new coin forgetting completely about the old one (but obviously you won't like the idea ) which is just a giant trap with too many people waiting to dump.
Sorry but you are screwed as well, and your only way to get out is to convince "investor" so you can dump on them too...
because of all that, that project has absolutely no future...
Assuming it was all a scam. Ask yourself this: What the fck is David still doing here. Why isn't he chilling in Peru with all the scam money he made off it? More importantly, why isn't he running another scam...Crypto is so beautifully fcked up that any Dev with skills like him can become millionaire within months YET he is still here defending his position and protection investors.
Answer is simple: Money isn't his motivation in this and chump like you coming here trying to pull him down is just as pathetic as Bobsurplus running with 500 BTC with no regret whatsoever.
People like you can't see future in crypto and you think of it as pump & dump scheme. For example: Only reason I ever bought into Bay was because of marketplace. I run a business and I'm looking forward to sell my stuff in decentralized marketplace using smart contract with no middleman attached. Whatever money I've invested is LEAST of my worry at this point but since you can't see anything but p&d it's useless to explain it to you.