https://blackwavelabs.com/We were recently asked if we would be including PayCoin (XPY), thought up by the controversial mining company GAW Miners. The most common reason we were given to add XPY is that XPY has been added to the popular payment gateway GoCoin, and because of this and a large market cap their growth would be inevitable.
XPY, for those who are not familiar with it, has had incredibly high volume since its launch. Their market cap and mining power quickly escalated to astronomical proportions on popular market summary websites.
Only truly innovative coins will be traded on Exco.in, and simply put being accepted by a popular service does not qualify as innovative. We are immediately suspicious of any cryptocurrency that doesn't explicitly offer technical achievements.
Deciding to educate ourselves on XPY, we began our investigation with their official website. We were curious to see if there was anything we may have missed underneath the marketing. Scrolling through the page, we reached a section titled "How can I use PayCoin?" only to find every item within linked to nowhere, a succinct metaphor for the project. Farther down, in the client section, we were presented with a selection of unsigned clients and no link to the source code.
We quickly found the source code on Github and begun our review. We looked over each commit since initialization of the XPY project. The changes we saw in practically every commit were superficial, along the lines of removing, then subsequently adding back, the Peercoin copyrights and adding new checkpoints. These trivial changes indicate to us that there was no actual development occurring.Upon reviewing their "Features" section, we discovered that XPY does not list a single technical feature. This indicates to us that they have no interest in developing a cryptocurrency. It started appear to us that there was a high probability the creators of XPY are simply selling an idea, with the hope traders will gamble on a token over which GAW Miners maintains opaque and unregulated control of the majority. Everything they claim to offer, including their addition to GoCoin, has already been accomplished by Bitcoin. Bitcoin is also under active development, being constantly refined and improved, and has the network effect and a massive community. So if XPY offers no technological achievements over its predecessors Bitcoin or Peercoin, its value appears to be dependent on its potential acceptance as a currency. There is no reason to believe that this project will ever surpass Bitcoin when it has yet to achieve anything that Bitcoin has not already achieved and offers no technical advancements. After what we have learned about this project, we would not describe XPY as innovative in either marketing strategy or technical achievements.
We see two likely reasons GoCoin management decided to add XPY to their platform. Either GoCoin's management team is woefully naive and unable to recognize the obvious lack of development in their recently added project or, the more likely scenerio, they have a financial stake in PayCoin and expect to make money on the hype generated from their decision and actions taken by other sites cascading from it.
We have entered a fascinating time in history, where there are a growing number of technological advancements that can be recombined and remixed in countless unique ways, where everyone has good ideas and everyone should have good ideas. However, ideas are not enough. What is truly impressive is not simply a good idea, but the act of following through an idea to completion. We will be staying true to our commitment and continue to focus on spotlighting true innovation and actual development in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.