Just a short add to the story:
The plan that Kolin outlined was indeed attempted to be carried out. In June there was a chat between some members of the core group - James, Adam, Julie, Vic and Max, Alphanuma probably someone else, this are the names that I remember. (Btw. in this chat Kolin claimed to own 1,000,000 QRK when he talked to James - while I don´t know if that is true, he certainly lied about his holdings, since he recently stated that he only owns 400,000 QRK. It could be more, it could be less, it doesn´t matter. He lies - that´s what matters).
The chat was meant to discuss merge mining. In the end of the meeting, people agreed on the following (summarized by Kolin):
1. Merge mining
2. it can be many currencies - as per Max an shake said
3. it could be one we make also
The reasons for this were presented to core members by Julie (the following parts are quoted from a mail on this issue by Julie):
a) to increase Quarks hashrate, increasing security of the network against a 51% attack. (...)
b) To potentially increase the value of Quark, as people will be fueled to know that something is being done to secure the network, and this should incentivize people to re-connect and contribute to the Quark Community (...)
c) To provide added funds to the Quark Foundation for infrastructure projects for Quark as well as provide continued developer engagement. (...)
(...)
[The proposed ideas include a] new coin created by Max Guevera, with a Quark algorithm and a longer term distribution. This coin will have some additional feature(s) that will hold value and interest new people to mine it and trade back and forth with Quark (and engage/bring back older investors as well)."
At this point a merge mining coin sounded like a good solution to some prevailing problems and people were all in all positive. I was more or less agnostic in the mid of June because I had to deal with more important personal issues and didn´t even follow all email threads that were hammering in at that time. In the meantime Vic, Adam and Kolin were planning to launch a coin. Vic later argued that he wanted to push things forward, so things wouldn´t get cought in buerocracy. He and Kolin contacted me to design a logo for the coin. Kolin contacted me the 10th of June, the comment included a note that all Quark members would be filled in eventually:
i'd like you to design the eventual logo - and if i have the ability i will pay you in the currency - i'd like to phase all the Quark members into this eventually.
I received a mail from Vic later:
Hey Peter - our coin is just about ready to launch, however we need a cool logo for it. The coin is debuting as "B9" - essentially 9 hash bitcoin. We need a 256x256 logo for it - is there any way do you think that you could whip something up? Doesn't have to be amazing or anything, just useable - it will be rebranded when officially integrated into Quark.
I thought that this was public record, so when I finished the logo I pushed it to Vic and Julie who only then found out that the launch was plotted silently. In fact the coin launch was botched. Few days later I had time to reread a discussion between Vic, Adam and Kolin. It turned out that they already launched a coin, however there was a misunderstanding: Vic announced publicly the involvement of Max and Adam (probably because he saw no reason to stay silent about that). The thread was named "B9 - The New Fairer-er Quark Preannounce -Release June13, 2014, 12:00am EST". Vic linked the thread on June 12 at 7:21 PM. From 9:48 AM on Kolin send the following mails:
HOLY SHIT VIC - CANCEL this project -
one minute later
Sorry guys i'm out - you wrote MAX and SHAKE in there man - shit - i should have done this ha ha omg -
again two minutes later
sorry guys for the work that will have to be done - but we have to make another one - otherwise i can't support this - - it will have to be B2 the second banana lol - i will make the ANN when i'm out of noobie prison
again one minute later
too late - it will have been cached - it can come right back at me - i'm out on this one - sorry guys -
then at 1:52 AM:
unless we are saying we created it for this purpose - i can't do it. otherwise i look like a liar -
After this reactions Vic deleted the thread at about 8:00 PM and Max stated: "Phew. Ok cool. Don't think anyone noticed."
The whole thing was reviewed by other core members. The approach was criticized heavily, particularly by Julie because it looked like a scam (even though it was told to be well intended). Why was there a silent plan: Kolin and Vic feared that if an official merge mining coin for Quark would be announced people would "rape mine" it and dump it as soon as possible. Kolin told Vic it would be better to either find a Quark algo coin where he and other involved individuals would control a large share of the coins (I remember they talked about BitQuark and rejected the idea because the developer who was interested had only comparatively small share) or create a new coin, announce it publicly so it would look like a legit start but create it in a way so that it would appear worthless and noone would mine it (you can see that already in Vics comment, that the Logo doesn´t have to be something special. You can also see it in the way Mimiccoin was later carried out). In the latter case they would have only small competition in the early mining phase. After about 6 weeks they would announce that this coins would be merge mined with Quark. They expected that then many people would mine the coin. However, as a large initial share of several week of mining would be in control of them, they would be able to control the exchange rate for a while. It´s therefore funny that Kolin later stated that it would be ridiculous to attempt to control the price because 1st halving would only happen after 4 years. While this is true, it is also true that 4-6 week of mining this coin would have given all those who knew about the plan an unequal advantage and allow them to manipulate the price for at least some time. This was part of the plan.
It would be to hard to summarize all discussions that happened afterwards. In the end the merge mining idea wasn´t rejected but planned to be discussed with the community. In fact at the same time there was a discussion on bitcointalk about this very issue without anyone from the core group to have sparked this. However, even though there were serious criticism on a(nother) silent launch, Vic and Kolin launched the same coin branded as
Mimiccoin and staged the whole thing as if there was a developer who talks like Hello Kitty (or rather like Kolin) & who agrees on merge mining with Quark.
I hope this outlines the shadyness of Kolin. I still believe in the integrity of Vic, even though I have no understanding of how he proceeded and I explained this in long mails to him. Vic had his own issues with Kolin and thought he was dumb - but he believed him to be an important link to Max. We found out later that Max knows very well that Kolin is a weirdo who is rather bugging Quark than helping, he simply doesn´t care (check the log of the last chat with Max, he states it explicitely). So I guess Vic fell as well for the image that Kolin had established over month and showed him as a somewhat important personality in the community. Nothing could be more far from truth.
If you have further questions on this issue, go ahead. I left the community and won´t come back but I still hope that it will succeed in a way given the hundreds of hours I invested in Quark.
