Topic: Investors hiring for 'Bitcoin successor' (Read 2324 times)

I get the impression that the people quickest to dismiss this are heavily invested in Bitcoin (or their own blockchain).  Having worked in the valley on a number of startups over the past 10 years, I can say that nothing about their job ad is inherently "amateurish".

CEO and Software/Web Leads can be founder level positions but you can certainly hire for these positions and I don't think their offers of $75-$150k/yr are unreasonable.  We don't know how much equity they're giving up but for $150k/yr, it would be unreasonable to expect a controlling stake.  From my understanding, this project will be open source (at some point) and the investors plan to make their money back by either getting in early or through some of the extra services that they'll develop/provide for the new currency before it's publicly revealed.  It's not really clear from the post how "StealthCoin" will be created and distributed.  If it is successful, it's easy to see how there will be money to be made by being the first to offer the usual wallet/banking/exchange/merchant services for it.

I know plenty of investors and startups in the valley who hire off of CL, SO, Dice.  Hell, I know some who have hired off of OKCupid.  Everybody does not know everybody and you can't assume that you always know somebody who knows somebody who is qualified, willing and able to take on your project when you need them.  We don't know who these guys are yet and maybe they're trying to keep themselves anonymous, which would make it difficult to hire through friends.  You can call these guys jokers but in my experience the minute you say "that could never work" the impossible starts whooping your ass.

Anyway, we'll see what happens.  Maybe these guys are amateurs and maybe they're throwing their money away but that's their prerogative.  Several groups are working on blockchain forks and a few are working on completely new architectures for p2p decentralized currencies.  It's an exciting time and I think competition and innovation in this space is a great thing.  For the most part we're all on the same team.  We want one open source decentralized p2p currency to rule them all.  We just don't agree on what that technology looks like and how we're going to get there.  Personally, I'm supportive of all efforts to improve on Bitcoin and alternatives, and I think that if people want to risk their own time/money in the process of making those improvements they deserve a chance at making a profit out of it.  I don't need to criticize any efforts.  The market will do a fine job of that for me.

What a joke. They want to hire CEO, lead front-end, and lead back-end developers (all founder-level positions), for what one can only assume from the posting to be minimal/non-controlling equity? And no investor worth their salt recruits a position this high up off a job posting. You use people you know, and the people they know--everyone knows everyone here in the valley. Who are these jokers?

There are silicon valley startups working on bitcoin. There are even some working on new blockchains (I'm lead developer for one of them). But these guys come off as pretty amateurish.

A lot of the F2P MMOs are doing just fine at making money hand over fist.  Runes of Magic comes to mind.

Link at the top of stackoverflow post points to bitcoin.org while content says it's not based on bitcoin technology, and how it is possible to write such a massive project from scratch in several months. But competition is good as long as it doesn't get free ride with merged mining.

These guys don't sound serious. They want to hire only 3 people, including the CEO, and pay them a "combination of cash salary and equity", which probably means a low wage.

Somebody may eventually launch a successful variant on Bitcoin, but it will probably be someone with the resources to put prepaid cards into every 7-11 and do a large scale launch. 

I wouldn't be surprised if the Church of Scientology does use Bitcoin some day. LRH hated governments, so he probably would have loved Bitcoin. One of the questions on the whole-track security check is, "Have you ever debased a nation's currency?"

They could call it OvertCoin.

(Scientology joke)

Which raises a question in my mind.  Is there a public searchable registry of copyrighted/trademarked names?  If so we can scan for recent registrations of *coin.

Bitcoin came out with something unique.

+1

I too found the name "StealthCoin" as decidedly business unfriendly.  Not legal businesses anyway...

According to the Wikipedia Page, it may be the opposite of my initial impression:

I suppose "StealthCoin" could be a code-name, pending a better choice of name/branding.

It seems rather silly of them to link their new currency with the Church of Scientology that way - whether or not they are in fact Scientologists.

While theoretically it shouldn't matter who initiated things so long as the code is open source and scrutinized by many - I think 'an anonymous Japanese/English cryptographer 'is a heck of a lot of a better start from a PR perspective than 'Scientologist Investors'

Even the name 'StealthCoin' seems to make little business sense.   
Bitcoin is already burdened by some perceptions that it's too risky, shadowy and not for 'legitimate' business - why would someone genuinely wanting an investment return push further in that direction?

I find it strange the the job posting asks applicants to mention a code-word referencing Scientology.

Does this mean the Church of Scientology knows about bitcoin and wants to push out their own version; complete with celebrity endorsement?

There have been quite a few to go down in flames over the years. The only one with a chance is SWTOR and that is only because it's by a proven company with a large following, based on a well known IP (much like Blizzard was Pre-WoW).

However, there have been others to go down in flames:
All Points Bulletin - Lost $150mil, Bankrupt
Final Fantasy 14 - I believe the price tag was close to $150mil. It was such a failure, it almost bankrupt Square Enix. Game was closed until further notice.
Vanguard - $40mil (most expensive MMO ever at the time)
Dungeons & Dragons Online - Not sure on price, almost shut down the game before it went F2P.
LoTRO - same thing with DDO


Then there are quite a few more and I could probably name them all if I sat and thought about it, but I think you get the point.

They keep failing, yet they keep coming. Not counting all the smaller niche games to corner that market, such as Mortal Online and Darkfall just to name a couple. WoW owns mainstream. Eve Online owns niche. Then there are quite a few F2P Asian games that aren't popular at all in the West that do pretty well in Asia. Everything else has pretty much failed and failed horrifically. Many of which have been canned in early Beta Phases when Investors realized that they were about to lose big.


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All that said, I guess I'm not that surprised that a company is creating a 'successor' nor would I be surprised if they actually succeeded. It really depends on how well their R&D goes and well good their programmers are. Bitcoin has alot of room for improvement and is a great idea. I'd rather see a company adopt Bitcoin, rather than create a new one, but I guess we're all just here for the ride.

I disagree.  WoW is losing members, people are getting sick of the grind.  The first MMO to come out with something unique will be very popular.  Same with cryptocurrencies.  

People keep making MMOs, yet keep losing hundreds of millions of dollars because they think it's going to be the next World of Warcraft.
They never are and they never will be.

So the 5 or 6 attempts at a successor that have failed miserably is still not a deterrent to their investment?

Well throwing money at a new bitcoin-competitor is a strange sort of love for bitcoin.

I guess it's to be expected that we'd have not just the amateur alternative-chain attempts we've seen so far, but some backed by people with a bit of funding.
Every man and his dog thinks he can do better it seems (or just wants control). Most likely they'll just fall at the same hurdles the other alt currencies have hit.


Another posting here, where they mention they are 'too busy with our current  obligations to tackle this project ourselves' but will be 'providing plenty of guidance to the core team'.   uhuh. But they haven't been too busy to understand the deep technical issues involved in securing and scaling such a currency? Colour me skeptical.