Topic: Why I chose not to invest in SpectreCoin (XSPEC) now - page 4. (Read 2225 times)

The tone of this is such that I don't think rational discussion is likely, but I'd like to respond to one or two specific things.


I have not asked for more money. As a matter of fact, upon learning that some people were talking about a new "donation drive" based on the misguided idea that more money can somehow increase my output, I asked them to either call it off, or direct any raised money towards either finding more developers or marketing or other efforts. At no point have I made any request for more money, and in fact I have in the last days suggested that we should reduce the staking donations I'm receiving and use some of that to fund bounties to get more people working on the project. Many people have witnessed these discussions in Discord in the last days so I don't think there is much ambiguity here.

I can think of only a few explanations for your comment above. (1) you legitimately misunderstood something I said (though I don't think I said anything that could be intepreted this way). (2) somebody impersonating me on Discord is trying to get some donations for themselves (I didn't find any evidence for this so I don't think it's the case). (3) you are making this up, or willfully misrepresenting something I said.


I've never claimed this, and I have no control over claims made by random anonymous Internet strangers that I've probably never even spoken to.


I've checked, and none of the addresses you have mentioned (other than the donation address) are in my control. They are almost certainly exchanges' addresses which obviously receive many coins from many people.

Working on this project is becoming increasingly demoralising and difficult considering that there is almost zero reward, and constant accusations that even if ignored cause significant stress, but I hope that the tone will improve once I am able to show some results.

same here. Thanks gunner. I didn't do my due diligence until gunner mentioned that github needs a close inspection.

I can confirm everything he said about the lack results. Over the course of a few hours I did a quick code review of all changes since last summer and other then a few UI changes (colors and alignments) and some quick version updates there isn't much, not even what a single part time dev should produce. The guy has been getting paid a lot of money to basically do nothing. What does this mean? It means all those promises of stealth staking are probably empty as well. He will never deliver on anything substantial.

And all those pathetic fanboys that cry FUD can just come up with a commit hash and argue otherwise, show us the incredible work done by two full time devs with 40 years of combined experience.

You are probably right about the coin value. But still jbg says he does not own much money, not sure this is true either.

Pretty sure the 1M address is not an exchange, it would have much more transactions (deposits and withdrawals).

What do you think about all the other points?

@gunner833,

nice observation regarding donation address, but IMO you ignored important aspect. Value of XSPEC significantly increased end of December. At the beginning of 2017 it was less than 2 cent, July - Aug 10-20 cent, beginning of December 30 Cent. So with this in mind 100k of coins don't look that much, but it still doesn have to be bad. It depends on time when did he or they (in case donations were meant for  the first crew who left the project.).

'Regular' community started paying jbg sometimes around start of this Year (staking donations.), and during this time approx 4k of coins have been collected IIRC.
Before it was mainly ICO holders who paid/donated I think, and they seem to be ok with it? So if whales don't mind giving him 100k of coins for fixing few bugs, library maintenance, why would we be against?

Also, as a software developer I know I wouldn't be ready to work for someone who is paying me regular salary e.g. 3k of EUR per month if my works is going to make my client filthy rich. I know many developers do this, I just said I wouldn't. But I would maybe work part time, bit less for the money (This is just me.). So I can understand such relationship.

Regarding address with million coins, could this be exchange?

Dude, there is a core community which isn't abandoning this project. You know what that means? You and anyone else with the same sentiments only have to sell your coins little by little as the price recovers. You will be able to get your money back.

Or you could panic sell now---entirely up to you.
Some of us are playing a long term game and are accumulating.

Sorry to hear you're losing money. I am not sure what to advice you, the price dropped a lot, so it might bounce back a bit on the short term, but who knows?

I would not keep for the long term.

#prayforjbg
#ripbryce

I want to thank you gunner833 for your detailed informations about xspecter. Hard to find and get such neutral and informative informations.
Unfortunately I started reading about your postings today. I am holding some coins and would have sold most of them if I would followed your postings earlier.
I am not sure what to do now since the price is down and I am holding a small amount of coins. Anyway I will try to keep following your posts, they seem valuable.

Hey, jbg came back with a new nice set of excuses! Let's analyze them together.

First of all: judge on his decision to not reply publicly to my thread. Was that a good decision? Price was at ~30k sats at the time of my review. Today it reached ~5k sat.
Secondly: judge on his decision of continuing not to reply to 3 threads with 3 independent reviews of the code (this thread you are reading, but also here and here). Will this be a good decision?

But let's dig into his excuses, it's fun.

1) Few weeks ago jbg comes on chat to reassure the community that "it's looking good to hit our target of end of Feb". So you assume he knows what he is doing, the release will happen and he is aware of what is missing to develop. He basically did an estimate that the work needed to be done could be completed by the end of the month. 3 days ago jbg comes back and says the he needs 24/48 hours to give another release date, as he's late. What? So he doesn't know anymore how much work is left? Why can't he give a new release date straightaway? Ok, let's wait for these 48 hours. Now after more than 48 hours he comes back saying he is not going to give a new late release date. So he's basically saying he has no idea about how much work is left. He now says "it's not imminent".

2) Thankfully someone asked him why he has not made 1.4 public yet. After more than a month when he failed to do so, he now said that "unfortunately things that can't go public yet (stealth staking) are a bit mixed up with things that should already be public". This is now becoming ridiculous. 2 experienced developers have mixed up the code of 2 separate features, one feature due (end of) Q2 and the other due (end of) February, and also implemented by 2 different developers. The most embarrassing thing to me is that he does not even realise that he is basically saying he is an amateur programmer. 40 years of experience in 2 developers and they did this. Also this is worrying because this means that he is trying to manipulate the github commit history, like I said a few posts before, what else is he manipulating? But now I think that is pretty sure that there is no stealth staking and he is just late because he has not done much work. This will be proved when (and if) he will release 1.4, when everyone will be able to see that he has not done all he promised. And new excuses will come.

3) After being absent for a month, after all these threads saying he has not done much, one of the first thing he asked on Discord today is more money. Now the new line is that he need to hire a new developer, and of course the money are not enough. Wouldn't it be better if he started working instead? Or maybe he is not able to do the work? Don't take me wrong, decentralise development is definitely a good idea, as he has proved he cannot deliver multiple times. But asking for more money after all of this.. unfortunately he deleted the message saying money are not enough (ah!).

4) He repeated that he is working full time, this goes against 3 independent reviews by 3 different developers (this thread you are reading, but also here and here)

5) The brand new excuse for the lack of core changes is that he is building the foundation for the future and he is learning the code base. 9 months to do a few library updates, UI changes and learn a code base? Guess what it would happen if you had this record of achievements after 9 months in a real software company working full time. I personally would not pass the probation period even for a junior developer with these results. To not forget that there is supposedly also another dev working on this project.

And now some other stuff I researched:
1) I was digging into some more code to check effective core changes. In the official release notes for 1.3.5, jbg wrote he implemented "Automatic ring size determination for stealth transactions". Very good candidate to check! Guess what? There is no code change for this. All the code for this is ShadowCash code. He only renamed a few javascript functions, but the logic is the same as ShadowCash. And he wrote about this change on the official release notes for 1.3.5, even though the code has always been there.

2) I have read some people saying that jbg integrated Tor in SpectreCoin. That's not true. Again the code has the truth: the first TOR integration has been done by lulworm in January 2017.

3) On this I am not completely sure but I'll leave it here so someone else can double check. jbg stated on chat that he had to withdraw money from the donation address SgGmhnxnf6x93PJo5Nj3tty4diPNwEEiQb, so I had a look. Firstly the donation address has received ~100k XSPEC so far, which is not bad at all for 9 months without doing much, and for someone who claims he has not got much coins, and asks for more to hire another developer. Then I followed all the outgoing transactions, and most of them go through this address: SdsaXSYCksJcW18AJ6HcG1ZwgFKcU7WYrr which has 233k XSPECs received so far. I also followed a few other outgoing transactions and reached other few addresses, one in particular has 34k XSPECs and 110k received (SaKHqXU67HdP5NsatVXwb6DSSDdRYRKyrr through transaction cd40a8c93b7526255bb36dd3982ae4eee0b345da0fbae2aa9a1d3c5e82d33635). In this one stuff start to get interesting, as if you track what's happening into this address you can quickly arrive to addresses with a lot of XSPECs: SWNSHaAXLcehx3bXAdZSTD9CKpEwCJLtjT with 50k XSPECs, if you track the most recent ingoing transaction of +49,999.9992 XSPEC (fc48d7b0ab3c590e921a439fc6bcbca13ae3339b72d2212b9d074f8b54783d5a) you reach an address with a million coins received: SdyjGEmgroK2vxBhkHE1MBUVRbUWpRAdVG.

Anyway to conclude, the only thing that jbg is producing so far is excuses, still have to see any proper development on XSPEC.
We yet have to see 1.4 code on github after more than a month. Now he has another excuse. Let's see what's the next one.
We yet have to see any of the XSPEC shillers to post some github commits of his hard work done in the past also.

except they din't deliver anything yet. Yes, XSPEC is a good privacy coin, but not thanks to these two. Eveything that makes XSPEC good was implemented in shadowcoin and these guys just took the code and implemented tor obfs4 instead of the old tor integration. And they also did a shady job on that because they just copied the tor binaries from firefox and call them on command line.

Can you show me anything else these two guys have implemented? Let the code speak. Please paste the commit link and lets discuss their merits.

P.s ..last sentence a typo!

Well, well, well. Look at all the drama unfolding in this thread.

Bottom line:
Xspec has a Core loyal and commited following.
This Core following is happy to have jbg on board.
And I think we realise that jbg doesn't have to be perfect to make this gig work but we appreciate his presence and consistency since he has been part of the project.

We still are very happy with the project that is Xspec.
And we are convinced it is going to go a long way.

Some "hands" have already been shaken out:

If there are doubters left amongst Xspec holders, am sure the chance is still here for them to make an exit too.

Due diligence and investing only what you can afford to loose are amazing things.
They make mighty strong hands out of anyone and impart the freedom to actually be committed to a project.
Peace!

Some "hands" have already been shaken

Thanks for replying pvk444, glad to see you are back talking to me even if I can't stand a rational argument. I am still waiting for you to provide some proof of development like you said in your previous posts. Quoting you:


Maybe you are only a shiller? Noticable changes between releases

I will wait for you to reply to this before having to lose more time to reply to your points, and basically repeat the same things I wrote in my first post again.

1. Jgb had a tragic event in the family last week ... but I expect, you will anyway decry this as a lie and not believe it

2. You claim you are a developer. Then you should know that a simple line of code metric does not reflect the work underlying the code. Or have you never spent hours or days to find a bug, which turned out to be a misplaced comma?

3. I don't know what you think Jgb is getting form this financially, and which coins you think he is dumping. The XSPEC ICO netted about 15k USD. None of this went to Jbg. About half a year ago, the XSPEC community donated some funds for Jbg to take on the development full time. This netted the equivalent of less than 10k for him and Bryce. And the staking donations, which was introduced in the latest release are still untouched, as can be checked on the blockchain by everybody.

4. You are claiming blatent lies. Why? Because there is a small delay in a soft target? Because he is not showing all the code or does not prepare a detailed time sheet? Show me which project in crypto does that. Because Jbg exagerated his experience? So what? Which CV does not do that? That does not make him less capable. Or did you have a technical discussion with him and can state that he does not know what he is talking about?

5. Whereas previously you at least introduced some facts (although you patched your story with unverified statements and assumptions), now you start with conspiracy theories that Mandica is in reality jbg. How low will you sink to pursue your agenda?

6. And even if you and your buddy would be 100% correct in your ad-hominem attacks, and jbg would be really such a bad guy, that does not say anything about XSPEC as a product, as a project, or the strenght of the community. Even if it was developped by a bunch of hustlers and thieves (who did not get any benefit from it), the product is still working as advertised.

7. Which brings me to my last point. You created an account for no other apparent purpose than shaming XSPEC. Why? What is your true motivation? You don't seem to be the person who is here for altruistic reasons, just wanting to make the world a better place. So either you get some saddistic pleasure from trying to fud a project, or your are on a personal vendetta, or perhaps most simply you have some financial gain from putting XSPEC down. And the fact you recruited preshpr1nce to join this farce with hunt, does not change anything.

None of your statements or so called "findings" are proof of scam. You might want to conclude that, but that does not make it true. The fact that there is a working, viable product, different from what it was derived from, and the fact that it delivers what it is saying it does, makes the scam accusation complete, and utter non-sense. The fact that the main culprit in your story did not have any financial gain from this, further contradicts your scam accusation.

Just an update.

As expected, 1.4 didn't come out. And 1.4 is not public on github either, as jbg promised end of January. Also he promised to give a new late release date within 48 hours. Now he is late to give the announcement for the late release date. Not sure why he needs 48 hours to give a new release date?!?

Why 1.4 is not in a public branch yet? Because there is no 1.4, and now I am pretty sure that whatever will be released, will never justify the months of development gaps in the github history.

As proved by me and other developers here in this forum, jbg is lying. I am feeling very bad for all the people losing money just so jbg can dump his coins.

If you have a software developer who is a friend of yours, and can distinguish between an UI change, a library update and a core change, ask him to evaluate 9 months of development on XSPEC github account by 2 (1 for 6 months) experienced developers, and you'll have an answer without having to trust me. He'll probably laugh at you for your investment.

Also to people saying "this is crypto, it will come back up", you need to understand that nobody thought this was a scam back in December, now it's pretty clear. This coin will never come back up, unless it gets another pump and dump like it happened in December. But there is no reason why it should happen in XSPEC, it has the same probability of any other of the hundreds of coins out there.

Let's see how many bullets jbg has to shoot to buy more time, I pretty enjoyed the last one: exume mandica's account

Fair call mate.
I'm no lawyer so that question isn't one I could answer with pure confidence, we're talking open source projects being forked here, minimal work being done and false hope being pushed, how would it look in court if an investor told people he was working full time on a project but we had only about a days worth of work on the project visible after a year? probably not so good... Even worse if he put more effort in to a "donate the developer coins" system.

People have his real name, so I would be very interested to know if he's broken laws if this coin shorts, if some one else can answer this question please do.

This is also a worry:
XSpec
$0.825178 USD (-29.18%)
0.00007215 BTC (-32.89%)

Much the same happened yesterday too (in my time zone any way)
Down in to the 7000 sat zone, back up to the 9000s, now back down to the 7000s again, looks like a slow dump to me.