I wonder how many real people are left in the HashTalk forums? I am not talking about shill accounts, but true members with a stake is XPY.
All too often, I go to read a forum post on HashTalk, linked to from someplace else, only to find it deleted. If the thread is not deleted, I can't help but notice "Banned" under so many poster names or posts where the content simply says 'deleted'. If I were a member of HashTalk, I would not feel good about this at all. I can fully understand the motivation by Hashtalk admins to ban abusive users, spammers or users with nothing constructive to say. After all, it is the company's main forum & it only makes sense that discussion should be constructive.
However, I see users banned far too often for posting a question that no representatives of GAW wish to answer or users being banned for expressing healthy skepticism. Had I invested in a project like XPY, be it $20 or $2000 with the expectation that it was going to be worth 4 or 5 times my investment, only to later see the value of my investment go down by 80%, I too would have questions. Even if my expectations were based on my my own misunderstanding & completely my own fault. If that is the case, set them straight, educate them & address their concerns. If I was a moderator or even the CEO of such a company, I would expect people to have questions or even be downright angry & I would deal with them in professional manner. How do XPY holders support the censorship & immaturity this company CEO exhibits on a daily basis? Just because an investor has questions or even shows signs of losing faith in the project, it doesn't mean they are your enemy. After this ride from $20 to $2, how could anyone employed at Hashtalk expect anything different?
For the true believers left at the forums, if you are reading this, I have a question. How does it feel talking to yourself? I mean seriously, how do you participate in a thread or start a dialogue, only to log out & then back in as someone else, to post to yourself? Then when anyone other than yourself participates, they are met with a ban? When you gleefully cheer Josh for his latest post promising another feature, do any of you ask yourselves what happened to his previous promises? Why do you follow this pattern of Promise, Hype, Delay, Disappointment over & over & over again? After all, your miners that will always remain profitable, no longer are. The points you mined, with the promise of a $20 value are barely worth 10% of that figure today. The ability to shop anywhere with XPY has yet to materialize, if ever. The XPY Credit Cards have not materialized, the investors who were going to hold up the value of XPY have not materialized. Why would you think a buyback is going to materialize? Maybe it's time to start asking questions XPY holders. Oh, that's right, you can't, because otherwise you will be banned & lose access to whatever investment you have left. I suppose the smart thing to do would be to keep your mouth shut & hope for the best. But I certainly wouldn't be cheering on the CEO of GAW on or even participate in the echo chamber at HashTalk at this point .
Never doubt of the capacity of a Ponzi scheme in changing the people's mind.
The case of Paycoin reminds me the case of Telexfree. Telexfree was a Ponzi scheme which was opperated in Brazil and United States. It consisted in selling VoIP signature lines using a multi-level marketing strategy. But after all, nobody bought these lines, but instead they just re-sell these VoIP lines for other people interested to enter in the scheme to re-sell these lines too. Like the typical cloudmining scams, they also had a referral program. After 2 years of operation, the Brazilians authorities closed their operations and they entered with a bankruptcy filing in the US. But the people involved with that scheme started to riot with authorities, alleging they were paying their taxes normally. These two guys, for example surrended themselves to prostest against the close of Telexfree by authorities (in Portuguese:
http://g1.globo.com/ac/acre/noticia/2014/01/divulgador-se-acorrenta-em-forum-no-ac-por-liberacao-da-telexfree.html )
But what Paycoin and Telexfree have in common in the same people's behaviour. Every announce of Telexfree the people wrote things like "Voa Telexfree!" (Fly Telexfree!), and same happens with Paycoin and the "GAWesome".
Even assuming the hypothesis of Paycoin not being a scam, a lot of questions remains unclear. For example, what happened with the CAF? Go to posting in a forum saying "I'm honest, I did what I said I would do" means nothing, it's just bullshit. They should provide a balance showing exactly what did with every penny. There's 300 millions USD (which is also 10 times bigger than the Paycoin's market cap) and no data about where they spent it?
Also, in the beggining (when still it was named Hashcoin), they claimed "Cryptocurrency mining is back", and it comes 97% premined. And we had the infamous "20 USD floor". When the floor failed, they started to blame the dumpers and the bad news and started t re-write the history, using the strategy of repeating a lie a lot of times until it comes true. The same happened with merchant adoption, they clearly said the large merchant adoption would come at the launch of Paycoin/Paybase. After they changed the history to "Paybase will not be born in a day". Worse, they GAW still doesn't accept Paycoin.
Another question which remains is the centralization of Paycoin, with the prime controllers and HashStakers. This is really bad, because it turns the coin more easier to attack.
But Paycoiners won't accept the fact of this currency is a scam. There are two type of people here:
1. They still believe in Paycoin because they can't believe in the fact of that is a scam. Admiting this would hurt themselves and could lead to a depression.
2. The don't believe in Paycoin anymore, but they don't want to sell what they have and get rid of this, because they would loose money. So, they pretend to believe in Paycoin while waiting a solid opportunity to sell.
The success of a cryptocurrency can't be tied to one specific business. What happens if GAW goes to bankruptcy tomorrow? Paycoin goes to zero, because Paycoin's is not a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, it's just GAW's currency. So, Paycoiners don't understand cryptocurrencies. If they'd understand cryptocurrencies, they would understand a simple fact: cryptocurrencies aren't ready to the masses. Just go to read the Gavin Andresen's interview at Financial Times. We are still in the early days, like the early days of the internet.
Also, I have to agree with this article (
http://coinbrief.net/paycoin-succeeding-dangerous/ ). An eventual success (which is in my opinion, unlikely) would be really bad.
“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” -Mark Twain
