Topic: Don't give support to anonymous developers never more, guys! They are scammers! (Read 2826 times)

That's what makes investing in altcoins so interesting - and so different from investing in penny stocks (turf I'm more used to, specifically in the gold-exploration sector.)

If you buy umpty-thousand shares of a penny stock, if you're the typical punter, you watch its trading like a hawk and, more often than not, pump it on forums that bear a strange resemblance to this one. But beyond that, there's nothing you can do to grow your speculation.

That's why so many penny investors end up bitching about management when their stocks go nowhere. Beyond the above, that's all they can do.

And the exploration sector is one of the few with an "in" for a would-be outside builder. If you have a talent for rocks, you can get a prospector's license, outfit yourself, send about a season or so whacking around in the bush to learn the ropes, and then try your hand at staking a promising property and shopping it to the hundreds of listed exploration companies. But even then, if you get one of them to sign on the line, you get restricted shares: escrowed until the regulations permit you to sell them.

And that's how things work in the sector with the lowest barrier to entry. Just try something like that with a senior stock, like the Royal Bank of Canada. Investor relations will either point you to the job board or secretly put your name in their crank file and start humouring you.

Altcoins are the only sector where an investor can pitch in directly and help grow his (or her) investment with independent outside work to benefit the coin. The closest parallel is to startup shares, but shares in startups can't be traded for a long time. (Regs, remember?) Those lucky "instant millionaires" who got paid in Facebook stock at its beginning all had nice, unsalable pieces of paper for years. How instant.

Contrariwise, all altcoins are free-trading once they're listed. 

In a very real sense, the altcoin world is like the bohemian part of town. The bohemian 'hood was famous for the great talent who lived there - but it was also notorious as the part of town where you'd also find the nutboys and degenerates. And, yes, scammers and con artists.

But that said, Shadow_Runner has his point too. Devs do have a special responsibility, even if a totally undefined one by the law, so any semi-legitimate dev should be pitching in - especially if the coin was IPOed. In fact, the customary expectation for an IPCO is for the dev to spend it on coin-building bounties and/or quit his job and develop the coin full-time. The ambiguity comes with the newness, fluidity and legal-blank-slate of the territory. It makes for an inexhaustible supply of points to argue about.     

Hi Jarkko, nice to meet you.


Guilty as charged. But now I know better.


Cheers,

Graham

Axbridge, in Somerset, England.

Well I'll come clean also.

My nick is sort of semi-pseudonym, my real name is Jarkko Lehto
and I live in Finland.

"Yarko" is the correct spelling of my first name, I have
adopted that because English-speaking people used to pronounce it
as "char-koh". And L in the end is the first initial of my surname.

Who's next?

I didn't even try to quantify the context, merely point out the ineptitude of that particular respondent's argument and render it less likely to be (ab)used by others of a similar kidney.

It is difficult to stay on solid ground, I constantly edit and re-edit my writing, trying to scrub it clean of anything that remotely smacks of preconception. You seem to have inadvertently wandered into a bit of a morass ... “There's been several guys caught who have been discovered to have made several coins just in 2014 alone.” Caught? The context doesn't support that choice of semantics but it does support "accused", which makes a world of difference.

It's even more difficult if you don't have access to metadata because the condemnation “discovered to have made several coins just in 2014 alone” loses a lot (but not all) of its pejorative force when you learn that there are traceable records of .. excuse me while I show off ...



That's 1264 altcoins (yep, you can say that aloud and let the implications sink in: one thousand, two hundred and sixty four) that have been launched/readied for launch - the total is inflated by 1, i.e. Bitcoin which is apparently not an altcoin by definition - (mental note, track down a definition of altcoin).

An alternative interpretation is that these operators of $hitcoins were simply responding to market demand as they perceived it.

It's the semantic vacuity of the term "$hitcoin" that is the problem. No-one can provide a satisfactory definition. I suspect that the reason for this is that right now we don't have a sufficiently effective and expressive means of describing altcoins and this lacuna is frustrating all efforts to derive clear comparisons. We're reduced to: "that one is ... and that one ... no, that one isn't ... but that one is".

It's called an ostensive definition and it's a fallback for us when the domain of discourse resists articulation, of which “Art” and “$hitcoin” are classic examples. You can't define it but, if educated, you can identify positive and negative instances and thus construct a set of members.

There's absolutely nothing we can propose that will deter the more serious operators in this arena - and they do get serious; in one instance a list of apparently plausible team members was identified as bogus when someone spotted that they were the names of Swedish hockey players*. That's very acute (on both sides).

But in principle, if the general standard of transparency can be raised, people should have a better chance of correctly identifying these high-risk opportunities.

The wierd s**t above is me, working on my contribution to improved expressiveness: Description of a Cryptocurrency (DOACC) an ontology for altcoins and an RDF Graph carrying metadata for 1264 altcoins.

Here's another example, querying the (labels of the) various schemes used to protect the public ledger from tampering, with the results formatted in JSON:


I'm finding that this is really useful stuff. I intend to use it with OWL rule-based inferencing and possibly give it a NL interface. One reason I'm exposing what might seem to be database internals is that this stuff isn't internal, it's all publicly accessible, self-describing, queryable via HTTP, published to Linked Open Data standards (assuming I can successfully decipher them) - if anyone wants to pitch in, feel free to just holler. We don't have the resources to aspire to a more polished implementation, it'll have to exist on make do and mend basis, just as we are doing ourselves.

People are in desperate need of effective help to stay clear of the kind of confusion that has apparently enveloped your good self because what you cite is unsubstantiated rumour and not verifiable fact. I have every sympathy, it's easy to get blind-sided by the FUD. I find that if I make explicit efforts to stay with the facts, I'm generally okay. My first question is usually "Where did you hear that?" Phrases like “are easily making between $100K to $300K per scam coin” just bring out the cynic in me - “Seen the accounting records, have you?”

Cheers,

Graham

* “What, actually checked the team list against the player list, did you?” Yep.

Very good advice, gjhiggins, and very good use of deductive reasoning.

Well, yes - people can develop some strongly idiosyncratic mental models and we do like to encourage our children to exercise their imagination, so the response perhaps isn't all that surprising.

It's a hilariously ill-conceived response and we could entertain ourselves hugely making fun of the hapless responder but if we put that on one side and acknowledge that this feeble excuse for an excuse is actually widely employed, we could benefit from taking it a little seriously. No, please, I know how difficult that must be but do try.

On the positive side, the response provides pretty much all the information you need to inform your decision as to whether to engage with this coin or not

If we can be confident that the italicised text is indeed a response pounded in by the dev's own fist, then we can profit by examining the semantics of the argument:

IF "we made the most successful crypto in existence" THEN "people will break our doors down to rob us".

There's a step in the logic that's glossed over:

IF "we made the most successful crypto in existence" THEN "we will become famously rich"
IF "we are famously rich" THEN "people will break our doors down to rob us".

I think it's inarguable that a sharp divergence exists between the views of some altcoin devs and miners' views generally on the how the spoils rewards should be divided. The logic used in the argument here informs us that the dev of this particular altcoin is anticipating a share of the profits that is so stupendously large that it will, by itself, make them famous.

I can't seem to turn up a single existing attested example from the altcoin domain, let alone an emergent trend, of super-rich altcoin devs getting robbed in their own homes. (Nope, not Kim Dotcom, it doesn't count if the robbers give you receipts for what they take).

There's no existing instance, let alone trend, to support this fantastical notion. In its child-like, comic-book simplicity it has no correlate in the real world but it does usefully serve our purposes by illuminating the dev's preparedness to sacrifice miners' interests (of greater transparency) on the slightest pretext. And it's as classic an example of "slightest pretext" as I've ever seen.

Moving through the text ...

"Think about if Satoshi Nakomoto has given his real name... That man would either be in jail or dead."

I haven't experienced the "..." logical notation before, it's use here suggests that it can be interpreted as "insert any or all of your favourite conspiracy theories".

From a less imaginative perspective, if the person or persons referenced by "Satoshi Nakomoto" had given his/her/their/its real name, the most likely outcome would be that their employer's lawyers would be pursuing them for the IP.

SN is very likely employed in a technical capacity and SN's employment contract will include a section that (broadly) states: "We pay you to be a tech, so the rights to everything you create, in or out of work, that relates to tech is OURS. End of." (I was once asked to sign one that was even broader in scope; personnel only backed down and narrowed the scope when I publicly threatened to submit intimate family photos to their "Please, may I keep this IP?" process.) SN probably published under a pseudonym in an attempt to prevent the employer/s from mounting a claim on the IP. (Doesn't matter if the code has been Open Sourced, the assignment can be challenged because it can be argued that SN didn't own the rights in the first place.)

The same context applies to any number of amateur altcoin devs. They have a full-time job in the tech sector that pays the rent; the altcoin stuff is done quietly on the side as a potentially lucrative hobby and they prefer not to be publicly identified with AspirantlyCupidCoin or whatever because their employment contract assigns the IP to the employer. I treat it as merely an inherent limitation arising from amateur status; professional practitioners quickly come to understand the value of a personal reputation because it circumscribes their entire professional activity. It matters less for amateurs, they spend the majority of their time on other things, they're just not in a position to commit to the coin because the coin is not their main priority. However, it is something that investors might want to factor in to their risk assessment.

Then there's those altcoin devs who are still in secondary / tertiary education, using pseudonyms to conceal their minority / abuse of .edu resources / support limitations. Here's a recent example: the challenge is to try and keep a straight face. Still - you can't blame the lad for trying and he'll probably try again; with luck and learning he might be able to put together a solid project, worth investing in. In some cases, it's only inexperience that prompts the over-enthusiastic claims and fuels the over-confidence that investors need to be alert to.

In other cases ... well, let's return to the damning conclusion of the response to your customer enquiry

"There is a reason people choose anonymity when it comes to cryptocurrencies."

The semantics of that sentence give me nothing to cavil about, the premise is incontestably correct and has been driving the success of Darkcoin. Unfortunately, it's got absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with the previous statements. It's a non sequitur and that distinctive error in reasoning gives us a couple of implications to consider.

1. The author's reasoning capacity is so under-developed that they are unable to recognise it as a non-sequitur. This can be expressed more prosaically as “couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag placed over their head” and, of the two, this is the explanation I prefer (c.f. Roger of Occam) and my preference is informed further by the author's apparent inability to distinguish between the semantics of anonymity and pseudonymity.

2. The author knows full well that it's a non-sequitur and it has been deliberately constructed to mislead the enquirer (unlikely, given the wobbly logic but people can be unexpectedly canny with such things)

Either way, the response is vacuous and will act as a strong signal to even partially-informed investors that they should adjust their risk assessment of this, ahem, investment opportunity.

Presumably there are other, even more hilariously fantastical responses to be elicited - all you do is ask the question on the coin's forum/thread and reference this thread. Make the open source principle work in your favour, s'what it's supposed to be all about.

I've learned how important it is to define terms, but this isn't the right forum, or even medium so I'll make an informal verbal sketch instead, just to outline the scope ...

It's not about everyone knowing everything about everyone. A focussed transparency of process doesn't mean "no pseudonyms at all for any altcoin devs" but it does mean "given the amount of money at stake, altcoin devs should be able to confirm their identity or be able to present a convincing argument as to why investors can be relaxed about this particular exception to the rule of thumb". At minimum, this is just so someone knows where the spare key is kept.

There's one convincing explanation presented above, someone with, e.g. Sunny King's technical depth is almost certainly following a career path in the tech sector and will be subject to the same potential IP grab from his employers as I was. That's a good enough reason when paired with the outstanding quality of SK's work.

"I've got a full-time job and need to conduct this activity via a pseudonym but if they promise to keep it to themselves, I will tell the MineMineItsAllMineCoin Foundation Chairperson" is a transparently poor reason when paired with dump-commit* dev but being obliged to make the argument means communicating valuable information for investors about the dev's priorities, in that investors need to account for the risk of Real Life disrupting coin development plans and schedules --- not a purely theoretical consideration given that bct threads are positively carpeted with variants of "Hey dev , y u no post ?"

IP protection may, or may not, be the actual reason that SK chooses to remain pseudonymous but it's good enough. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether SK's weekly development report is deliberately intended to counter potential investor nervousness about the pseudonym (given that it seems to be providing effective camouflage for luserdevs) or whether s/he's a top-class engineer who intuitively understands the benefits it brings (probably mostly the latter, maybe a bit of both).

Were you aware that the Primecoin dev issues a weekly report? How much change in altcoinland would be needed before "* Weekly dev report" appears amongst the tickbox ticklers in altcoin launch [ANN]s?

I don't think anyone would argue against a claim that we have seen some scam altcoins and although bct threads are littered with misunderstandings and misperceptions, there are a few real stinkers in there: people have been cheated and gulled out of money. It would be completely unrealistic not to expect investors' attitudes to harden in response to this.

I'll brown-bag from my previous post:

I've not read anything in this discussion which would cause me to reconsider that recommendation. I've risked boring you rigid with an over-deep analysis of what is an insultingly ill-considered response mainly in order to add some nuance to the context. The result is, I hope, of use to both the investor and the altcoin developer alike.

I'm indebted to Spartak for enabling me to observe that my earlier response has prompted at least one professional to discard his pseudonym (waves at Spartak. Hi, nice to meet you.)

Integrity is as integrity does and I'm interested to see whether what's being discussed in this thread is taken up by altcoin investors. My figures suggest that we've seen the peak of altcoin launches and are now stabilising at a lower rate, still too high for many people's comfort --- but not mine, I confess; for me, the vitality and exuberance of the altcoin domain are invaluable natural attributes, to be nurtured rather than strangled.

Cheers

Graham

* dump-commit - e.g. Albocoin, dev made a copy of the repos and committed that; discarding the commit history and removing the code from the main stream of development. Contrast with SK's fork of the bitcoin code, preserving the commit history and keeping the codebase within the main development stream. This is the right thing to do, the Albocoin approach is just luserdev wrong. Why is it right? Because SK can "simply" merge development work that's taken place on the Bitcoin repos -- see Primecoin: Merge with Bitcoin v0.8.6 lookit all the improved code, extra features --- that SK didn't have to write <- smart operator. (experienced devs will understand why "simply" is scarequoted)

If your fave altcoin's pseudonymous dev is following similarly cost-effective strategies, then leave 'em be, they're doing a solid job for you.  If they've made the mistake of crippling your fave altcoin by copying rather than forking, then you might want to consider moving your money elsewhere or asking the dev to re-seat the code back into the main dev commit stream.

Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer have it knocked - Dogecoin 1.4 was a copy (91 commits) but Dogecoin 1.7 (5727 commits) is back in the stream (Bitcoin Core 0.9.1-based).

If you care to, just look around and make a few simple, direct comparisons - check the github repos. For an altcoin using the bitcoin protocol look for 5000+ commits, I've found it to be a very good indicator of a technically strong dev/cointeam, irrespective of pseudonymity.

Yesterday i asked an alt dev to reveal his name and his identity but he refused. Here is the reason the dev gave to me:
We won't be releasing our personal information because we don't want people breaking our doors down to rob us because we made the most successful crypto in existence. Think about if Satoshi Nakomoto has given his real name... That man would either be in jail or dead. There is a reason people choose anonymity when it comes to cryptocurrencies.

Satoshi was ONLY a part of the team that made the coin.. he may have had the idea but that is it.
You can tell what code he wrote by his 'c' coding style the rest was contributed by others..
who are here in the scene and available by name..

your attempt at using broken logic to smooth over and white wash BAD BEHAVIOR is pure FAIL !

Anonymous coin cloners are cancer on this scene and if people knew what these guys were up to they would not support the scammers
hence why they have to hide in the first place .

i couldn't agree more with the OP i have said this myself non stop for a year and why has been painfully obvious.
there is NO debate at all about it i am right and anyone that argues with me is a stupid idiot.

the fact anyone would even attempt to make excuses for shit like this blows me the fuck away big time !
You sleazy excuse making supporters got some nerve and i bet you have one hell of a huge ulterior motive for doing so

50% of the problem is Bitcointalk itself carefully created this situation ON PURPOSE !
They could have added more restrictions instead the removed the newbie jail for new users..
that shows where their priorities lie.. with the scammers not us.. ad revenue much ?

Um... Bitcoin's Satoshi was a pseudonym. Peercoin? Primecoin? Those were created by Sunny King - also a pseudonym. Or Nxt? Qora? Those were also developed by pseudonymous devs: BCNext and qora respectively. The Auroracoin dev was anonymous/pseudonymous too. Lots of quality coins were launched by devs who preferred to remain anonymous.

Don't give support to anonymous developers never more, guys! They are scammers! 

Why would I buy or support an anonymous developer?
If the developer does not discuss or show how something works then I would not invest with them.

Never buy from an anonymous developer named after the coin

*Stands up, applauds, and then pumps fist in the air.

I would recommend people treat a pseudonymous dev as a yellow flag - not a diagnostic certainty, merely a contra-indicator. Personally, I change it to red if I discover that the repository source has a commit total in single figures as this betrays shallow thinking leading to costly and ineffectual security theatre.

I look around and note that, with the occasional exception, the inarguably successful coins are characterised by a lack of pseudonymous devs. A few weeks ago we had an object lesson in how much media interest can be whipped up by an apparent resolution of a prominent pseudonym. The more visible/successful the brand, the greater the vacuum caused by continued inscrutability, especially so in a domain perceived by the media to be tantalisingly rich in tecchy mystique, rumour and tittle-tattle.

At some point, the dev's preference for remaining pseudonymous will almost certainly be overwhelmed by pressure from the coinholders as the coin's performance begins to suffer due to increasingly negative perceptions of that opacity.

Here's a snippet from CNN's reporting of Dogecoin:

“Ben Doernberg, a board member at the Dogecoin Foundation, said that raising the money for the sponsorship was done in record time. Beyond sports ventures, Dogecoin has raised money to build clean water wells in Kenya and for a charity that trains service animals to work with children with autism and other disabilities.
"We are all about fun and goofiness," Doernberg said. "At the same time, we want to make sure that digital currency is really giving back to the world. We do feel like this is a technology that can make the world a better place, and we want to put that into practice by doing fundraisers."
Doernberg said the NASCAR sponsorship is one of the largest fundraisers they've done to date.”

reads somewhat better than:

“scamhunter23, a board member at the Dungecoin Foundation, wrote that raising the money for the sponsorship was done in record time. Beyond sports ventures, Dungecoin has raised money to build clean water wells in Kenya and for a charity that trains service animals to work with children with autism and other disabilities.
"We are all about fun and goofiness," scamhunter23 wrote. "At the same time, we want to make sure that digital currency is really giving back to the world. We do feel like this is a technology that can make the world a better place, and we want to put that into practice by doing fundraisers."
scamhunter23 wrote the NASCAR sponsorship is one of the largest fundraisers they've done to date.”

In the context of the good works above, for a coin ambassador to use a pseudonym is at once both pretentious and incongruous. But someone has to be quoted in the media - it just won't be a pseudonymous dev, that's all. So the developing recognition factors for the coin brand identity will not include the dev and in time, the incongruity of the pseudonym ceases to become an issue as the dev's role becomes circumscribed to that of Chief Engineer, toiling away in the engine room.

Of course, neither Billy nor Jackson made that mistake, nor did Evan. Look around, you'll find quite a few people prepared to stake their reputation on their coin work, it's an invaluable signal to investors, I'd have thought.

Of course, if the dev has zero expectations of the coin receiving any significant media exposure (maybe because the coin has an anticipated lifespan shorter than the average mayfly), then a pseudonym can handily serve to conceal a cryptocurrency sideline from pals, boss and workmates. One unfortunate consequence is that punters are beginning to associate "pseudonymous" with "amateur", "hobby" and "long-absent" --- and those are the positive qualities, the negative ones all trivially boil down to "scaaaam".

There's always trouble money to be made when those who own the problem aren't those who own the solution. In this instance, it's indicated by the appearance of "backstage" altcoin dev teams fluidly forming and re-forming as required. The next stage will be marked by stable, branded teams, offering standards adherence, quality assurance, reliability and long-term in-depth support --- factors important to anyone with an interest in the coin.

I find myself asking: are "trustworthy" and "reliable" appropriate labels for someone who makes advance preparations to avoid taking responsibility for their actions by masking their identity with a pseudonym?

Hm.

Cheers,

Graham

Edit: s/own the answer/own the solution/ more precise

but satoshi is a scammer, he fastmined btc with low diff

what's wrong with it?

That guy is so wrong. People must understand that they are the ones who give value of "something". No matter if it's cryptocurrency or beer. If I own "some"coin, of course that I will try to help my investment. Maybe we should sit and wait to become Bill Gates in 24hrs?

Not all of them are scammers.
There are legal problems launching new coins on the Internet, so many developers prefer to remain anonymous

but ppl hop onto them, so problem are ppl

I agree. Last week there has been more then 30 scam coins announced. This is madness here.

SATOSHI is a SCAMMER!!! Don't give support to Bitcoin never more, guys!