Thanks for taking the time to reply HippiePyro. I am going to respond to a few points.
Below are the responses that jbg gave to the community the day of the OP, point by point. The only concern jbg did not respond to in his public slack post was that he alone controls donations and could run off with them. He did address this issue a few days later by suggesting the concept of a community council to control the funds with a multisig wallet. This potential idea is currently being developed, and various options how it would function are being investigated.
Sorry to point out that this is another promise to add to the list. As far as I know, this hasn't happen yet, after almost a month. In the meanwhile his donation pocket is growing. People in this community need to start distinguish between what he has promised and what he has actually done.
Jbg has always done right by everyone within the Spectrecoin community. It's true his methods are not “typical” by most standards, but Spectrecoin is not a “typical” project. I have always been satisfied with his work. He has never shown any of the illusions of grandeur or desires of greed that are implied by the OP. I don't think you were given an accurate description of jbg's persona.
No one gave me a description, all what I wrote is from my personal experience.
Gunner, I appreciate your research and thoughts on the work done thus far, and for not revealing his identity. It is true the commits have not been on the new GitHub, hardly a broken promise, just the usual for our dev. But updates keep coming. I can't say I agree with your conclusion. I'm not a coder but I have seen the results of his work since I joined the community and compared the older versions to each new one. There have definitely been improvements with both performance, appearance and functionality, with each version. Nothing ground breaking, just what was promised. I don't know what more you can ask of a dev. You are right though, we are simply running in circles here. You said your concerns and he had addressed them. Only time will tell who was correct.
Yes, we are running in circle, not for long though. In a week we should see the result of around 6 months of development (the gap of commits which everyone can see in github, which I mentioned multiple times.). Let's see. My bet, just to have fun: it will not be in time, pick from these excuses: "dev done, we are testing", "oh we need to fix a $random_bug_you_cannot_prove found during testing", "now we are packaging", "oh there is an unforeseen problem", "bitcoin tests are difficult to integrate", "Bryce has been kidnapped", etc...
RESPONSE TO DISINGENUITY ABOUT EXPERIENCE:
It was suggested that I had a bit more experience than I really do:
This is the most true thing in the post. I've never said anything about my age (at least as far as I remember), but I've said I have 20 years’ experience. In reality, if you actually go back through my CV, I've only been working on software development since about 15 years ago, of which 2-3 of those years were spent part-time and the rest full-time. I rounded up (which is hardly rare), but I shouldn't have, and I won't be claiming 20 years any more. I'm sorry that a casual exaggeration from me has led to this shitstorm!
Unfortunately this turned out to be worse. I have proofs of him saying he has 25 years of experience, which is not exaggerating anymore, but it's lying. This concern has been also passed to other senior members of the community, can say the names if needed, but no one said a word to the community.
RESPONSE TO QUALITY OF DEVELOPER WORK:
It was suggested I have not made "structural" changes to XSPEC's codebase but rather UI changes and library upgrades and there is not as much activity on GitHub as it would be expected:
I've made some pretty significant changes since I joined the project, and there isn't really a definition of a "structural change", so this is quite hard to respond to. He could basically make this claim regardless of what changes I had made. As we've said before, the development work for v1.4 and v2.0 has mostly been happening directly between Bryce and me rather than on GitHub. With v2.0 it's because we want to keep stealth staking under wraps until it's ready, and with v1.4 it was just out of a desire to not have people trying to run unfinished code.
However, after talking to @Gunners (the author of the BCT post) and having other people express a desire to see the development happening out in public more, I decided to make some changes on GitHub so that the contributions could be seen more clearly, and talked to @brycel about how we could be more transparent with development. We decided to move to a model where we make pull requests to each other and review each other’s' code in public, so that people can see progress. Ironically, this action seems to have been the trigger for his BCT post!
This is under everyone eyes: another broken promise. Nothing of what it's written above has happened in almost a month. I am still waiting for 1.4 to be made public. After almost a month!
And "with v1.4 it was just out of a desire to not have people trying to run unfinished code." is just another excuse, since he has made a lot of public commits during December (the only active month he had in 9 months), and he wasn't worried at that point. Why? No sense. Also why on Earth someone would try to build from a separate branch other than master?! Again, no sense. And also no one did try that, there was only someone trying to build from master, but never from a separate public branch.
RESPONSE TO RECENT GITHUB ACTIVITY AND OPENSSL MIGRATION:
It was suggested that going ahead with the GitHub repo move would mean that if we did do private commits during Sept to Dec last year, we would probably not be able prove this anymore:
Actually, we took pains to preserve the repository history, and when v1.4 things and v2.0 things are merged in, the history/dates of the commits should be preserved.
We'll see on this one, but again: it takes 2 seconds to make 1.4 public in a separate branch! Promised but never done.
It was suggested that if there really had been some work done by two full-time developers since June last year I would at least see some public commits from them both:
He is presumably not aware that Bryce didn't join until September last year. And the "see some public commits from them both" is addressed in the second response above.
Bryce's first pull request was a "library change" (migrating to OpenSSL 1.1) rather than a "structural change”:
That meaningless phrase "structural change" again... Bryce was the most qualified to make this change. Not only does he know OpenSSL through and through, but the change touches parts of the code that deal with important cryptography, which he is most qualified to ensure remains correct. He wanted to move us to OpenSSL 1.1 ever since he started, and he finally did it. I don't see the problem.
This made me laugh
Bryce (if he actually exists, I doubt it) has just made a simple library update, with a few breaking change fixes between OpenSSL 1.0 and 1.1. My personal estimate for that work: a day or so, max 2. You don't need to be a "cryptographer" to do a library update, and anyone could have done that PR, jbg too (guess what my bet is...
). Actually a cryptographer usually is much more theoretical than practical. Anyway after this change Bryce went back in the shadows.
RESPONSE TO PROJECT COMMITMENT CONCERNS:
It was suggested that I am running another ecommerce company on my own, that is a web application:
I am supposedly running an "commerce company" alongside XSPEC (and therefore not devoting full-time work to XSPEC) The only other thing I have is a hobby web service, completely automated, with about 7 customers. I spend maybe 1-2 hours a month on it. Calling it an "ecommerce company" is flattering but a total misrepresentation. I work full-time on XSPEC.
What he says here on his company might be true, I still have my doubts he's full-time on XSPEC, where has he been the last month? Almost disappeared.
RESPONSE TO PRIOR BUSINESS DEALINGS:
I ran a hospitality business years ago, for a few years. I kept working part-time on software development. The hospitality business didn't go well (I'm much better at software), and ended up owing a bunch of tax. The business was wound up, the bar sold to pay the tax debt, and the rest of the tax debt written off. I don't think more detail than that is warranted.
This is correct. Even though working as part-time developer is debatable, as he says that only because he integrated an online payment to his POS system of his bar. Also from my research, he's never been a software developer in a company, but he was more into system administration. He also created a couple of IT companies, always around system administration / hosting, which are all closed now. Good entrepreneurial spirit though.
I re-inforce my point:
In my opinion there is the need of proving that a guy who has been proven lying to people about his development experience, is really a full time developer on the project, with also another "cryptographer". At the moment there is hardly any proof of 2 developers working full-time, and I am backing my assumption with quite a lot of facts here.
Time will tell (but after almost a month it's already telling a few things!). But remember: in the meanwhile he's getting donations for doing almost nothing. And people blinded by their investment will keep giving him donations until Q2, that of course will be the end of Q2, that then will be delayed and... you know the story already.
If I was you, I would ask every single day "why 1.4 code hasn't been pushed in a public github branch yet".