Topic: Who is John Conner , creator of Vanilla coin? (Read 3060 times)

There is the possibility that they were
granted access to a private dev branch.

In my experience that would be uncharacteristic of Poloniex. But I could see them doing that if they felt the risk/reward was right and that the coin itself wasn't a pure scam. Like they knew that they'd have a good chance of making enough money through the decent volume that's been had by VNC, so that any risk of loss should be covered more or less. Maybe they were also offered some insurance against being double spent by VNC people too.

I think they did that on pure trust, as the
relevant (1-confirmation) code wasn't even in the open
at the time.

That being said, I think the VNL solution is pretty
damn interesting.

This whole "smart" thing is kind of silly, about as silly as Donald Trump's, "rich" thing. Donald Trump will tell you he is rich all day long, he will offend most people, he will argue with most people, but the bottom line reality is he is rich. No matter what he says or does will change that. Whether you like him or not does not change that he is rich.  John-Connor is a p2p, economics, and cryptocurrency veteran with 20 years experience. He coded a coin basically from the ground up to solve some of the problems bitcoin is running into. He has worked on other similiar projects, and VNL is not a p/d 1 week clone coin, it has been his entire work for over a year. Constantly updating new code to git for mining software, fpga software, and of course VNL. Whether you like the guy or not is your opinion, his personality can rub people the wrong way like Trump, but there is no denying that he is a highly intelligent and extremely competent developer. In fact he has so little intollerance for newbs, idiots, and fudders that he won't even respond on this forum anymore. If you would like to debate things with him, he is usually available in #vanillacoin IRC and on his own forum at vanilacoin.org.

Thanks for concurring with my statement:


I indeed made the point that performance trumps labels or assumptions about performance due to labels of intellect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Furlong#/media/File:Edward_Furlong_image_2.JPG
the real John Conner



incredibly smart (?)
super smart (new paradigms)
seriously smart (mathematically endowed)
seriously capable (forkers)
successful smart (decision making/prioritization/realism skills)

any more kinds of smart?

how old are you kid?...6?

Any evidence?

Looks like a P2P software developer and not someone incredibly smart.

His argument with gmaxwell showed that he was only capable of looking at the issue from one stubborn perspective and thus not able to hold all possibilities in his mind at the same time pertaining to that complex issue.

He may have extensive knowledge in some areas of software development. I distinguish that implementation knowledge from "super smart". To invent totally new paradigms such as proof-of-work (or something like a zerotime that is actually proven in a white paper), you need to be seriously smart.

He may be seriously smart, but he needs to demonstrate it before I would claim that. For example, Daniel J. Bernstein is seriously smart. Vitalik Buterin is seriously smart. In both cases, that doesn't mean they are qualified to create a successful altcoin. Berstein probably lacks relevant domain experience in economics. Buterin appears to lack experience and decision making/prioritization/realism skills. My guess is fluffypony is probably not as mathematically endowed as those 2 guys, but already proven he is seriously capable of helping launch a fork for a successful altcoin. So my point is I am not even sure "seriously smart" is entirely informational in the context you are trying to employ it.

Ummm, I second the previous response, how do you come to the conclusion that JC>Critics?

BTW, I don't suppose there is any chance the shills and fanboys would stop using the term 'FUD' to describe statements and questions which challenge the overtly-positive spin being put on all things VNL, is there?

It takes a bull market for people to bother spreading false scaremongering in order to suppress the value of a coin so they can accumulate. Those days ended over a year ago in altcoin-land. I don't know if you've noticed but it is pretty clear that the vast majority of altcoins have turned out to be pump-and-dump scams, with most of the truly creative innovation being the social-engineering driving even more elaborate methods to fake legitimacy for as long as is needed to cash out.

I can't see what is supposed to be so innovative about VNL, the 'white paper' is somewhat lacking in actual detail.

What? Can you elaborate as to why you're coming to that conclusion from reading that? Because I don't see that at all.

So John Conner 1:  Fudders 0

Why do none of these people ever delete their comments and apologise for being flat out wrong?

Oh, miners who disabled the sanity checks on blocks then mined the wrong blocks? Yes, that's what happens when you turn the safeties off to make it go faster. I'm going to explain this once in case anyone is actually listening rather than just trying to pump a coin:

John Conner didn't warn of a fork, he stated the developers should hard fork immediately (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5634#issuecomment-69482103). He states Bitcoin was incorrectly encoding the signatures; this is false, signatures are fine when encoded by the reference client, however it used OpenSSL to validate those signatures and OpenSSL was permissive of slightly incorrectly formatted signatures. Whether using industry standard cryptographic tools to verify signatures is not a discussion I have time to get into, but ultimately this is why libsecp256k exists, to remove this dependency.

That was in January. Instead of hard forking at the time to implement a fix that would have broken validation on all historical signatures, the Bitcoin developers introduced BIP 66, which included a new block version (3). Once 75% of the last 1000 blocks were mined as v3, such blocks only validated if all signatures were standard. Once 95% of the last 1000 were mined as v3, non-v3 blocks were rejected. This gave them a couple of months between the release of Bitcoin Core 0.10, and the feature actually enabling, for miners to upgrade their software.

What it turned out miners were doing was running custom software that did not enforce those requirements. They were accepting arbitrary blocks from the network, performing cursory checks (such as validating the hash met the difficulty target), and then mining on top of them. They produces v3 blocks, but did not require v3 blocks, meaning that when at 96% v3 blocks an old miner produced a v2 block, they accepted it and mined on top of it, creating a fork.

Warnings about BIP 66 being activated were sent via Twitter, reddit, the Bitcoin-dev mailing list, and that's just the channels I'm aware of. This screwup falls directly at the feet of the miners.

Notably, Litecoin later enabled the same fork with absolutely no problems, due to their miners actually validating correctly.

This discussion? https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5634#issuecomment-69481908

I've searched for every quote where he mentions forks:

"Why not fix the problem and hard fork instead of hacking the code?"

"This hack-around is wasting CPU cycles and should be fixed properly after a certain block # way in the future with an organized hard fork."

"My assumption is that if you try to fix the problem then you'd have to hard fork the network."

I've searched for the word "double" to find references to double spends, and found none. I've then gone to the next thread, where the soft fork was implemented: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5714 - no sign of him.

So, not sure how that's a warning, in fact he was pushing for a more drastic fork to be rushed through.

Furthermore how much in the way of resources are we really supposed to believe that Poloniex put into this code review? This little exchange actually studied the entire thing, employed mathematicians, programmers, and cryptographers to determine that double spends couldn't happen and 1 confirms are safe? And did all that in almost no time at all! I find that extremely preposterous.

My guess is that the VNL promoters put up some kind of fund to indemnify Poloniex against double spends that might happen (if anyone bothers to try). Am I getting warm?

John Conner is someone who has gone into a bitcoin developer community and managed to shit all over every single one in a single evening:  
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5634#issuecomment-69481908  
  
Then he lied about being backed by investors.  
  
Then he posted fake source code to Github and when he was called out about it he claimed he did it "to throw off his enemies".  
  
And then there's the matter of a LOT of shady block activity happening in January when John was turning PoW on and off for VNL, the blocks of which would have landed directly in John's (or an associates) pocket:  
 
  
Also from what I can tell he has claimed that Vanillacoin is an independant code base when it is actually stolen code from a variety of projects including bitcoin, peercoin, and others:  
 
  
Then there are the multiple dissenting voices that John has silenced on the official forums and the aggressive supporters who will PM you threatening messages if you publicly speak out against VanillaCoin.  
  
Plus there is the clear shilling going on around the internet with regards to Vanillacoin, including the shallow replies in the official topic to keep it at the top of the ANN board:  
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.12082877  
  
Not to mention a subreddit full of mathematicians think the entire idea of zerotime confirmations is ridiculous:  
https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/3fv115/theres_a_new_cryptocurrency_that_claims_to_be/
  

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I'm done hearing about VanillaCoin.  
  
If you want to pump your altcoin, fine.  I'm not holding that against you, but don't act like it's the most revolutionary thing on the planet and don't fill bitcoin talk with meaningless threads about it.  All the evidence points to the fact that it's not.  
If the technology is truly so revolutionary, it wouldn't have been muddled in so much scandal.  
  
The supporters will point to the fact that Poloniex is allowing 1 confirmation transfers after having done a code review, which seems to me to be a ridiculous move.  On this I have no comment; I would really like to see someone who represents Poloniex make an official statement about this, because it seems there is an inherent flaw in the concept of Vanillacoin that it is not secure against double-spend attacks.  
  
I am not as technically inclined as some of our members here, but I know some something fucking wrong when I see it, and this is something very wrong.  
  
My personal opinion: Stay away from VanillaCoin.

Which is why this is one huge coin. The guy is obviously incredibly smart, so either he is insane or more likely he has done what he said he has...why not be hopeful instead of assuming he's lying. I honestly think I have a good bullshit detector and I'm sure he's legit...so everything points to this being legit and a breakthrough.

Sure. That's one huge IF.

I personally can see the similarity, smart and lacking in patience.

Surely won't you readily admit IF he has solved the double spend problem then that would be revolutionary and a sign of the developers high competence?

Evidence? I see no stylistic similarity in writing or anything else for a start. What do you have?

have you looked at the how he is speaking on github? The guy is seriously smart and called out issues with big developers....and was right, this isn't a scam developer.....at all.


Plus you are missing the point, John Conner just made double spend impossible...