update:
https://www.facebook.com/electroneumI've just sent the dev team home, Adam and James had pulled another monster session with at least 37 hours straight coding. We are reconvening at the office at 7am and we'll get cracking again. I know I keep saying it, but we are nearly there! So sorry for these delays, all I can say is that the code changes are important, or I wouldn't be doing them.
Wonder what they are coding non stop. I am a developer myself and would like to understand what you guys are coding. With 40 MM, you should get a decent coder than two college kids Adam and James.
What more do you expect when you change your code base from Bytecoin to Monero just 3 days before launch? Was any kind of testing done on this? Your whole hacker story is so full of shit. Hiding incompetency with easy excuses. Seriously, why can't they hire more people who are competent? If only you spent 10% of your marketing efforts on this, you'd be in a much better position.
Good job in making this initiative drown..!
this was explained a little bit at the end of the facebook video. also to address some of the other questions 'what are they doing when all their github page is is a monero fork' -> thats correct, their *blockchain* is a monero fork. electroneum is not doing anything (that I know of) to advance or further blockchain technology. They are simply reusing a proven technology for their network. (which is also why the blockchain launched without a hitch). well, the dev pools had problems though. that wasnt good. and the fact that they didnt pick up on the issues with their own official pools is extremely alarming. Despite that, , 100% of their development effort is being spent on the mobile app. I asked about this before and they are not open sourcing that code which is why its not on their github page.
regarding "what happened", which had nothing to do with the blockchain itself (since again, they used a proven technology Monero which works great), the blockchain has been working just fine. all of the delay has to deal with vulnerabilities they had in the mobile app's api which is how it communicates to their backend system. yes, that part they developed themselves. this part is what was explained at the end of the video. given my background (experienced software engineer/architect), let me explain a little more as I understand it given the little bit they elaborated on in that video. When they released the android mobile app, a hacker basically loaded this up in a dev type environment which allowed him to reverse engineer the mobile app's api. this isn't particularly hard to do at all in general for any type of external interface. these apis, while they may not be "published" apis, can be figured out with a little bit of tinkering. Once you know the definition of the protocols, then its just a matter of understanding how they work and how to use them. In this case the "design flaw" had to deal with how the referral system worked. While they didn't dive into exact details yet on their mobile referral system, from what I understood it was that the referral system worked by awarding you a coin or % of a coin for every referral. When the hacker realized this, he simply exploited it by create a bot-net that would programatically create thousands of fake accounts that were referrals to each other basically giving him an unlimited reward of coins for as long as he could keep it up. that is why they had to completely shut it all down (the mobile app). I'm assuming the desktop wallet app uses the same apis so both are affected here which is also why they didnt release that yet. the reason this is taking so long is basically they had to toss the entire referral system out and recreate a completely new one that isnt based on straight up coin rewards. I think he mentioned something about doing random giveaways instead but that wasn't explained in detail.
that also doesn't explain why they didn't release the ico coins yet though. I know there was at least one supposed hacker that kept saying the accounts or a handful of accounts were compromised in some way which is why they kept telling people to change their passwords. its probably a due to a small handful of people that used stupid passwords or are already known to have compromised accounts (there are websites that publish known emails+passwords, i'm assuming this person simply wrote a script to pull that list and try logging into electroneum using those emails and passwords and some of them probably worked). and if that person was able to log in , well then it would be quite easy as soon as the ico coins are released to log in and take those coins for themselves. it wouldn't have affected everyone. afaik their own database that stores login credentials wasnt compromised so its really just due to a handful of stupid people. if they had use 2FA like google auth they wouldn't have this password reset issue.
this is my understanding of what they had to deal with. its kind of quite messy for sure. and the communication was sub-par. it definitely doesn't give a lot of confidence to the dev team. they doesn't mean they can't learn from their mistakes though. the mobile app has already lured non-crypto people into crypto and I think that was one of of their major goals and good for crypto in general.