Topic: New ZiftrCOIN Presale Launched! - page 8. (Read 20972 times)

You know good and well. If he raised $660,000 he wouldn't still be trying to beat us out of our $30  

What proof is there that you have already raised $660,000+?  Just want to make sure you aren't blowing smoke up our asses..

This is a good question. Thanks for asking.

First I just want to make it very clear that we aren't guaranteeing ziftrCoin will work with every merchant on our existing shopping site. We do have our "foot in the door" with many of them and in addition we have years of experience working with their sites on a purely technical level. We're also going to be doing everything we can to get as many retailers on possible (big and small) using our ziftrPay system. In fact a large part of the funds from the presale is going directly towards this goal.

As part of this we're working to make it so that our shopping tools work with many crypto currencies, multiple exchanges, and (most importantly) are extremely easy to use for both shopper and retailer. Something in the ballpark of 2 clicks for a shopper to buy things and a simple signup process for retailers to sell things. Decentralization is also an important part of our coin, so anyone is free to accept it directly (the same way they can now with bitcoin, litecoin, dogecoin, etc) if they, for some reason, don't want to integrate with our tools directly. We, of course, can't guarantee the $1 value at those merchants not using ziftrPay.

We're also changing our FAQ to make this more clear and better answer questions like this.

check the website. lol

If I invest on Ziftrcoin, where can I  I spend it? and How is it to use or integrate? 

Let me break this coin down to what it is...


Loser and his Friend needed money - so they came up with this concept.

It's frustrating when the conversation breaks down to who can spend the most time typing very long arguments.  Of course it's always 'team protect their own interests' that can spin the best fiction and theory about new projects to push their own agendas.

At the end of the day Ziftr is an experienced and proven team that is very legit and public about getting into Bitcoin. Let's applaud their ambition to jump in with both feet and help them.  There is no doubt that they are not experienced in bitcoin forum etiquette and have made some PR errors.

Yes it is THAT press release and the assumption that a huge investment in the millions has taken place when, in reality, it hasn't. It is just another coin project put together by the IT department of zitr and launched under the auspices of, financial and promotional support, of the mother company. It is a gimmick, a promotional campaign designed to bring more customers to zitr.com, NOT any effort to bring digital currencies to the masses. If you continue using euphemisms, communication will be impossible and, ultimately, quite deceiving. If you do achieve the expected target of bringing new customers to your site, a SIDE EFFECT could be that some of those would be enticed to use digital currencies, but it is neither a priority nor a necessity. Not even a convenience for you; the opposite, if anything. Clearer now?

Now, mind you, you are giving ANYTHING to entice those new potential customers, since it is a pre-mine and it has cost you absolutely zero. And all your enticement to those potential new customers is a paltry 5% discount in your network of merchants. As enticements go, this is very minimal and, as stated before, will be a resounding failure but as a means to attract new customers to zitr.com and, even more so, to bring "crypto to the masses". But reality will sink in on this soon enough, so I will not beat that particular dead horse anymore.

The red flag of 10X cannot go away. It is not just a red flag, it is a HUGE problem. Unshakable. And will hinder the project fatally.

I will tell you how it could be somewhat neutralized though: Doing things right (what a concept, ah?). As in: Making a "contract with investors" by which 10X will be limited to remain as an "angel investor" with both time and targets thresholds to sell their tokens set in writing and legally enforceable. For instance: 10X will not be able to sell any of their coins until a specific price is reached (and sustained, on average, for a month) and then only in amounts no higher than 10% of their total holdings and only during windows of time pre-set before the coin gets to the market. 10X will not be able to sell any of their holdings off-market before offering any potential sale to the current stakeholders for the same price. These are both legal and common-sense obligations in all such cases in the real world, so all of them are pretty standard in any VC or corporate investment scenario, so nothing new really.

As for the "innovations", it is, sorry to say, laughable. Let me just refer you to the recent case of Bytecent where the "protections" were -and remain- gamed. Fact is you need a network of miners, as big as possible, and it makes no difference to you if it is provided by hundreds of small people with ant miners or huge pools in China. Those safeguards you mention won't stop even a 15 year old computer wiz, much less any reputable hacker. Reducing the number or orphans as a tech innovation? Let's just say meh... and of no relevance whatsoever for the purpose of the coin's survival that will depend, exclusively, of it price progression.

And the technical development... I believe there are dozens, probably hundreds of real developers that have worked for over a year in proven projects that would easily discount your research, discussions and experimentation for they have done it all, in spades, for oven a year on a daily basis... and all of it is freely available to anyone that wants to copy/paste it. It goes from very sophisticated wallets -some of which now include video calls and maybe even conferencing for free- to so called, quite euphemistically, "smart contracts". None of it has any practical use in the real world, mind you, for there are regular providers such as Google, Facebook and other that have been providing such for quite a long time already. And the "smart contracts" are quite dumb and unusable for the most part, but your coin would not be able to offer neither anyway because, among other things, as repeatedly stated, your project is not a cryptocurrency, but a -potentially cost effective (for ziftr and its parent company)- promotional campaign.

I'm not sure which press release you're referring to exactly, but I'm assuming it's this one.
http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/ziftrcoin-crowdsale-passes-500000-during-first-two-days-of-presale-1979276.htm
And that you're referring to the line, "Ziftr has already put millions of dollars into developing a suite of tools and applications that will accomplish this goal, and the funds raised during the ziftrCOIN presale will go directly toward making this happen."
In that statement we're specifically talking about "bring[ing] cryptocurrency into the mainstream for consumers and retailers."
I don't believe we're intending to claim that we've put millions into development of the coin itself. Forgive me if I'm looking at the wrong press release. There has been a lot of press linked around the office lately.

Regarding costs, forgive me if I'm being daft, but I guess I don't know what you mean when you say "expenditures." The development of the coin, and more importantly everything around it that makes it useful, takes man-hours and everything that goes with it, eg office space, healthcare, etc. That's a company expenditure isn't it?

I didn't mean to imply that I didn't understand what you were saying about the 10x investment. I just meant that I found it interesting since I have never seen it mentioned as an issue before. Thank you for explaining it further to me though (not being sarcastic here). I think you actually have a good point, but I'm not sure how it's unique to alt coins. Would it be better if 10x was purely a traditional investor with stock in Ziftr (which I believe they are also), but no coins? That's not a rhetorical question; I'm legitimately curious as to your opinion on that. It just seems to me that this is a problem with any investors in the crypto currency space. Since, as you said, there is no regulation, anyone with enough inside info and deep enough pockets could manipulate the markets. Are you against all VC money in crypto currency space until there is regulation? I think maybe the question I mean to ask is, (though it might be too late) hypothetically speaking, what would make this red flag go away for you?

I don't know the exact price 10x paid for their coins. I know it was "around what everyone else paid." Which I realize is a TERRIBLE answer, so I will find this out. The coins sold total on the website is accurate and includes their coins, so they aren't sitting on billions of undisclosed coins though. Either way, it's a great question and I agree people have a right to know. I also don't know the terms of the sale. I didn't mean to imply that there are none. I simply don't know them. I will also try and find out any information about that for people.

Regarding the innovative features of the coin, I just meant that we detail them in the white paper. The primary innovations are sign-to-mine, and coin-age-as-a-tie-breaker.
     Sign to mine (which is also the algo) is an attempt to keep mining decentralized. It makes it so that all members of a pool must have access to the private key for the address which will receive the mined coins. This makes it so that members of a pool must trust all other members of the pool. To facilitate smaller miners we're working on a thing we call social pools, which lets them group up with friends, family, other trusted miners, etc. Just to be clear, this will be open source and free. We are NOT doing the ol' build a problem then sell the solution game.
     Coin age as a tie breaker (technically count of mature coins) is a feature meant to mitigate branches and orphans, as well as incentivize miners to actually include transactions in their blocks. The short version is that nodes will use transaction volume in a block to determine which branch is the correct one and more quickly come to an agreement. This makes it so that including transactions is more important than propagation speed so there is no reason for a miner to mine empty blocks. It can also be used as a method to replace transaction fees for micro transactions.

When I say development I mean programmers writing and testing code that will be part of the wallet/daemon, implementing those features I mentioned and a few more, as well as features we'll need for other projects to integrate (easy hooks for a blockchain explorer for example). I also include the massive amount of research, discussion, and experimentation that takes place as part of that development. 

The dollar value is based on a 6 month moving average btc value as reported by Bitcoin Charts (currently showing $431 I think). This inflates the displayed price slightly but we felt it was the best way to show a "live" price without having it bounce all over the place. We originally were using a 7 day moving average and got a lot of questions about the price fluctuation. We display the 6 month average thing right under the value in an attempt to be transparent and not confuse people. A large portion of the presale was also done in cash (at whatever the btc rate was at the time), so that value wont' fluctuate, which further complicates the total.


The price when the presale started was 1600 ziftrCoins per bitcoin. At the time bitcoins were worth about $350. The price is increasing as the sale goes on (like most coin presales), but we're trying to make it not too drastic.

I did some maths on this and at current BTC prices and the current 1 btc -1020 ziftrCOINs that equates to around $0.27 per coin. So for a pre-sale of $665,541 USD  for 3,721,806 coins gives me about $0.17 per unit. How did you arrive at that number?

Is it because you keep jacking the price as you get closer to launch?

What did the price start out as in the beginning?

In a non-censored thread like this, you are going to have all kinds of posts. Having Steven and his "passionate" responses here is highly detrimental to your project. While "passionate" is, generally -depending on what- a positive things, if it leads, as it usually does, definitely in this case, to out of control, inexperienced, school yard behavior, IS detrimental. I know you get the gist.

If you read your own press release you will notice that it either is very poorly redacted or it was done that way to give the impression that sift is claiming to have invested many millions in the development of siftrcoin. The list of "non free" items you post are "cost of trying to do business", not actual expenditures. And every coin project carry those. Costs, again, remain close to ZERO.

I thought I had explained very clearly why the 10X is a monumental "red flag" rather than the opposite, but obviously you need to read about the Black Hand in Blackcoin and stop for a while and use your common sense, ok? To state that it is the same and has the same effects if any investor dumps his coins as an institutional one that may own 10-20% of the float, is simply preposterous.... and hard to believe it is stated out of naivety, by the way. And, on that subject, how much did 10X pay for their coins? In other words, how many coins did they get for their $150,000 investment. What were the strings attached? This is information investors and general public in your project ARE ENTITLED to know, you know that? If Warren Buffett makes a deal to purchase a large amount (never even remotely as large in % as 10X purchased in  your coin) of BOA as a "special" price, it it illegal not to make it public, ok? Did they get 1600 per? 3200? 5000? For what you posted I have to deduct that there were no obligations on their part... which is mind boggling for, in actuality, puts the entire project on their hands and they can sink it at any time they choose, either to get rid of it or to buy it all outright for peanuts. And you don't "see the problem"? I believe perhaps you need to go back to corporate business 101 class... Hint: These deals, in the real world, come with many LEGAL obligations -designed to protect the investors, of course, not the corporate raiders- and no enterprise would allow such venture investment without specific time obligations, like "10X cannot sell any of their tokens or representation of such to any third party, either directly or publicly fo X amount of time and then so in such and such (%) amounts of their total holdings..." Now I'm quite sure you "get it", don't you?

But the more pedestrian way of screwing investors in this unregulated wild west of crypto would be the obvious accessibility of 10X to inside information and the inevitable price manipulation that they would be capable of because of it and because of their huge holdings. For instance, they could influence the creation of promotions, special or not, to dump part of their coins while everyone else is buying. P&D 101. Or any other "landmark announcement". Privileged info. Jail time in the real world, total impunity in crypto (for now). Anyway, I know you see the inevitable conflict. And dire consequences for buyers of your ICO.

The pre-mine, not unfortunately but by design, is just your way to pay for the gimmick. Legitimate companies budget and pay for their gimmicks. You choose to try to have your naive investors carry that burden. It won't work, I can guarantee you that. You are going to have a front row experience of it.

Finally, what "innovative features" are you speaking of in ziftrcoin? a "white paper"? Really? have you checked around? There are about 1,000 still-active coin projects with "white papers" of one kind or another already out. Is that one of your "innovative features"? What "real development" has taken place in your coin? Perhaps we need a new definition for "development" here...

Anyway, I hope those 35 people along you are able to somehow keep their jobs or, at the very least, to get some valuable experience from this exercise in futility. It will be a monumental feat if they do keep their jobs, that's how tough the space your business is in. But there's no future in it. And much less while diverting any, whatever smaller, resources in trying to tap into the crypto world to attract new customers. You guys are already in the process of getting a crash course in it.

And, unfortunately, you will represent just another -if minor- step back in the development and mass implementation of digital currencies.

One of the purposes of the FAQ is for people that know nothing at all about crypto currency or bitcoin. The question directly under that one is specific to mining ziftrCoin. I definitely agree that question is, at best, out of place. I might also agree that it's not a very good answer to that question in the context of a complete newbie asking it. I've brought it up with the team.

Looks interesting and big corporation is behind it. I just bought some.

Good luck

First, thanks for taking the time to read my post and make your reponse. We know that the crypto community has seen a ton of scams, pump and dumps and failures. This is one of the main reasons we've waited so long to start posting on bitcointalk. We wanted to have as much ready as possible to show that we're legitimate and to be able to respond to red flags.

Ziftr is a VC backed private company. I'm not sure how this is a red flag though. There are plenty of very successful privately held companies out there. As far as I know there have been no IPOs in the crypto currency space, so this shouldn't come as a surprise. Our CEO is not new to this space and he's very involved in what we do. This article from a non-bitcoin news site provides insight and explains, I think, better than I can our goals and purpose. Note it's a bit of a long read compared to most crypto coin news articles. http://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/300075170/channel-titan-wilkins-makes-game-changing-cryptocurrency-bet-with-ziftr.htm

The word gimmick typically has negative connotations and I believe you mean it to, but by the definition of "a device intended to attract attention, publicity, or business," then I suppose maybe ziftrCoin is a gimmick. Only it isn't meant to be directed at the existing crypto coin community (I know, says the guy posting in a bitcointalk announcement thread). It's for the people that think Bitcoin is a company, or "that thing used to buy drugs online." The redemption value combined with the give-away is meant to entice those people to try something new. The coin isn't even where we intend to make our profit. In fact we had considered just using Dogecoin for everything we're working on and giving away millions of Doge instead.

The "millions invested" is certainly not in the development of just the coin. I don't believe we ever claimed that (I sure HOPE we didn't). Our shopping site alone (while obviously not perfect) is impressive. I would hope you can understand the amount of work it is to create and maintain something like that. Our shopping cart, payment platforms, merchant integration, multiple exchange integrations, etc, which we are currently working on, is what millions are spent on. You also have to admit that it doesn't cost NOTHING to create a coin (it costs 0.075 btc on coincreator  ). But seriously, there's development time on the coin itself, tons of research on new features, testing of all aspects, server management, mobile wallet development, marketing, and front end development on the websites. Those things aren't free.

I'm not sure why saying that we're trying to incentivize new people to use crypto currency "stinks of BS." This is something that everyone involved in crypto wants. We have just shy of 2 million active users (last I heard), most of which have no idea what bitcoin is. We of course want to make that number larger and we want them all using various crypto coins. This is good for the entire industry. We obviously would prefer they use our site/tools, but why is that a bad thing? 

I find your belief that the 10x Ventures investment is a red flag really intriguing. In my mind that has always been an anti-red-flag worth promoting. My thoughts being, "if a real life venture capital firm believes in the coin enough, it must be legit, right?" I don't know the intricate details of the deal (I am just a developer after all), but I don't see how they would be any more likely to dump than anyone else who purchases a large amount of coins in a presale. Isn't that risk one of the inherent problems in a presale? I would think (perhaps incorrectly?) that buying coins would give them less ability to corrupt our coin than that of a traditional investor, not more. I have not heard of the investor issues around Blackcoin, but I will read into it when I get a chance and share it with the rest of the team.

Regarding the pre-mine, we know about all the issues with it. Unfortunately it's sort of a requirement in order for us to have a large give away, which is a huge part of the coin. This is why we've tried to do things to make the pre-mine more legitimate, but we do realize it's still a pre-mine.

As far as Stephen goes, he's extremely enthusiastic about what he does. He even wrote this senior thesis on elliptic curve cryptography. In my (obviously biased since it's what I'm dong now) opinion, having passionate developers that are willing to speak their mind and interact with the community is always a good thing. It promotes transparency. While I personally detest the term "FUD", your first post was a paragraph stating that a 4x return was a gimmick and a sentence claiming we have no innovation and our coin is a copy/paste hackjob. You then copied the post to another thread. One has to admit, that doesn't come off as someone looking for a discussion. In general, people have a tendency to not read anything then develop rock hard uneducated opinions (seems like that was irking FinalHash a bit yesterday morning). I would hate for someone to come to these threads, read such accusations about our coin, then instantly believe them as absolute fact, when we do have innovative features, a white paper, and have put real development time into our coin.

https://www.ziftrcoin.com/what-is-ziftrcoin/faq/


Did you copy paste that straight from some bitcoin FAQ without even checking it? Why would someone interested in mining ziftrCOIN read your FAQ to find out about bitcoin ASICS and bitcoin mining pools?

Exciting! "Bitcoin Exchanges Add ZiftrCOIN Listing Prior to Presale End"

How are we explaining this poorly or trying to deceive anyone? If you have any suggestions or specific complaints we'd actually really like to hear them so we can try and fix it. Everywhere that the $1 redemption value is mentioned (in news articles, on our website, and answers to questions here) we try to explain it and clearly state the limitations and where the value comes from.

As for being a gimmick, the purpose of the coin isn't to give users a guaranteed 5% discount on all their purchases and we've never pomoted it this way. The purpose of the coin is to incentivize new people to start using crypto currency. The $1 value is part of that incentive. It also adds buy pressure to the open market and gives the coin a backing (from our profit stream) which, as far as I know, no other alt has done. As I mentioned above, we're also making it so that users can purchase products entirely using ziftrCoin, bitcoin, and many other alts coins such as litecoin and dogecoin at market value. In this way our coin is as useful as any other alt and we're working to make all crypto currency (bitcoin and alts) more useful and as such more valuable.

You don't need to make 200 different purchases to redeem 1000 coins. You could do it with just a few large purchases. A high end mattress or some new living room furniture, for example, and those 1000 coins would already have paid for themselves. For another more personal example, I spent about $6000 in online purchases in 2014. If I had 1000 ziftrCoins purchased at 25 cents that would be $250. Assuming I was able to use ziftrCoins in all my purchases (a big assumption perhaps), then I would have been able to pay for $300 of my online purchases with ziftrCoins. In this example I would be up $50 and still have 700 coins to either sell on the open market or save for future purchases. I'd hardly call that meaningless.

If you could get a roughly 3.75% discount on top of already getting the lowest price (we do this already see www.ziftr.com) from the merchant of your choice by just clicking a few buttons would you not do it? If you've ever been shopping in a state with sales tax during a "tax holiday" you'll have seen that people will go crazy over what is effectively a 5% discount.

Lastly, our coin does have new features beyond revenue stream backing. These include sign to mine and coin age as a tie breaker. Both of these and more are detailed in our white paper. Unlike many other alt coins we have a full and experienced development team and we proudly list the members and all their contact details on our websites. The coin is still in development so the source code is kept private (it WILL be released with a functional testnet prior to official launch). Calling it a copy/paste hackjob is quite the accusation considering no one has seen the source for the coin or any of the tools we've been building around it.

Amongst all the FUD you are spreading, you have one valid point: it's not completely 5% off the purchase because there is a cost associated with getting the ziftrCOINs in the first place. To that I would just say that if 3.75% free money off your purchase isn't enough incentive for you to participate in the pre-sale, then that's fine, just don't. But there's really no need to spread a bunch of FUD like this about a company that's been around since 2008, has 35 employees, and is VC funded: http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/ziftrcoin-crowdsale-passes-500000-during-first-two-days-of-presale-1979276.htm.

But the cost to getting ziftrCOINs isn't pegged to the ~$0.25 that is required in the pre-sale. If you get your coins via mining, or giveaways, or on an exchange, they will still be valid within the ziftrCOIN network for the $1 each. In those cases, the cost of getting the ziftrCOINs could be much lower, and it would be more like 4.9% off your purchase. And I most certainly had no intention of deceiving anyone about how the discount process will work, I thought the picture and multi-paragraph response would explain it well enough.

It may also be good to note that if ziftrCOINs are trading above $1 then the 5% limit is removed and you can spend as many of them at checkout as you like. In addition, we will be doing limited giveaways to get people some free coins to play with, so they can realize that cryptocurrency isn't too hard or complicated, and they can use it in the real world.

I know the crypto community has been been scammed a lot before, and it sucks. But please take the time to read what we are doing and give critical, constructive feedback.