Bitcoin Forum

So we've all been seeing a lot of hype around XSPEC on this forum, some members claiming it's a scam, others calling for proof, I've put this together to give my take as a senior software developer on what I feel proves it.

First off, a member on here under the name gunner833 found some interesting points about the xspec developer, you can view these findings here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2839833.0

2 key points from this thread, the developer is in his 20s yet has claimed to have 20+ years experience, the developer also owned a bar for 2 years which wen't bankrupt, leaving him with $90,000 in tax debt... you can read his thread for more details, you can also see the shills claiming this isn't a big deal or just a small white lie, make your own mind up on this.

Now putting that aside, let's look at what xspec actually is:
It's a complete mirror copy of Shadow Cash and the Umbra wallet, they've changed some colours and the logo/name from the Umbra source code, picture below gives an idea
https://i.imgur.com/dONQGrz.png

Shadow Cash is a dead project, initially XSPEC made no claims of their coin being a fork of this project, they've been called out for this and admit it is, but claim they're making improvements to ring signatures and have added obfs4 to the project.

Doing a bit more digging, I wanted to see what these improvement claims were and also wanted to see how they've implemented obfs4 to their coin, I was very shocked with what I found, even for what I consider a scam project they've done such little work it blows my mind.

Now remember, XSPEC is open source and their project is on github, you can view the full commit history of the project which also proves they only have 1 developer for any one questioning this, here is what I found by going through their code commits:

1. The "ehancements" made to ring signatures:
Here is a code snippet of the only changes in their source code relating to ring signatures, here is the original code from Shadow Cash


This bit of code uses a ring size of 2 in shadow cash, now let's look at the "enhancements" made by Spectrecoin


So what we have here for those who can't read code, "if value of nRingSize is equal to 1 then use a ring size of 1 other wise use a ring size of 2"
So what has changed? pretty well nothing, they've allowed for a ring size of 1 which is a bad move, a ring size of 2 is stronger than a ring size of 1, Monero has a minimal ring size of 5 I believe.

Here is another code change commit by XSPEC, they've changed this from Shadow Cash


To this


They've removed this message from the warning alert "and harms the network"

So the so called enhancements to ring signatures are anything but, and to me it looks more like an absolute nothing change just for the sake of saying "I've changed it", he's made the anonymity weaker by reducing the ring size, perhaps he views transaction speed marketing as something more important than anonymity on a stealth coin, a smaller ring size = less secure but faster, larger = more secure but slower, this change could of been performed by a very junior developer in a few minutes, yet this downgrade is being pushed as one of the big changes

2. obfs4 implementation:
This is the second biggest point around XSPEC, they've implemented obfs4 which Shadow Cash did not have, you can find open source code online for obfs4 implementation so I wen't digging through the XSPEC code expecting to find this, what I found blew my mind, here is the code snippet which shows you the obfs4 implementation in XSPEC


To sum up what this small block of code does, it executes the obfs4proxy.exe process, there is absolutely no code in XSPEC for the obfs4 other than executing an exe file, now let's take a look where this .exe file came from


So if you install TOR on your computer, you'll find the obfs4proxy.exe file in the TOR Pluggable Transports folder, so this great obfs4 implentation by XSPEC is nothing more than taking an executable file from TOR which runs along with the wallet, just like it does the TOR browser

That alone is enough to prove to me this is a very very shady project, so I've dug through pretty well all of their commits to see if they've actually done any work over the last year, extremely surprised no one has brought this up yet, but their changes are as follow:

1. Changing wallet colour, version numbers, the name and logo
2. Upgrading to newer versions of libraries
3. Executing the TOR obfs4 executable
4. Allowing for an insecure ring size of 1

All up the above changes are less than a days work for even a mid level developer, the interesting part of going through their commits is there are actually examples of nothing commits, cutting code, moving it up a few lines and recommitting just to increment the number of changes shown on GitHub.

The biggest body of work they've done is their donation platform and website.. very shady if you've got time to setup a donation platform but do no work on the actual coin.

Also the developer has made claims of big things coming in Feb, here we are in March and we see no changes on Github, no new version, no changes, just the prior things I've listed above.

The other concerning thing is the poor spread on this coin, you can view it's richlist and see the top 10 hold over 30% of XSPEC and the top 20 hold over 40%.

We will see shills in here trying to pick at the most minor detail of this post, but let me just start off by asking for some one to explain the above code findings? If you've come here to defend this coin then realise the code findings are what this thread is mostly about, so I want to see some points around that rather than the typical garbage from the XSPEC shills.

You did a fantastic job dude.
I totally agree with you and xpec is scam for me too. Also they are trying to get some money from spectre.ai investers cause of name.

Thanks mate, interesting to hear about spectre.ai attempts, will read in to this.

Spectrecoin are in the process of adding more devs to the team.There will also be a white paper released very soon.

It also clearly states on coin wiki this

HISTORY

SpectreCoin was created in 2016 to improve on the concept of ShadowCash (SDC)

Since April 2017, the ShadowCash project has been abandoned for a new project of the ShadowCash developers called Particl, which ultimately stopped the accusations of SpectreCoin being a ShadowCash clone.

During summer 2017, SpectreCoin founder mandica started facing serious health issues and finally handed over the project leadership to lead developer jbg, who is now developing the coin.

Aug 9, 2017, SpectreCoin version 1.3.0 was released by jbg. This update fixed a lot of issues in the old codebase, updated Tor, included a 32-bit binary for Windows and added support for the OBFS4 obfuscation protocol. Also, a new website was created on https://spectreproject.io/ with updated information and a new, clean design to display the philosophy of the new project leadership.

From Aug 20 to Aug 25, 2017, the community raised ~37,500 XSPEC and 1 BTC (which was about ~$4000 USD at that time) to fund development, which allowed jbg to quit his job and work as a full-time developer for SpectreCoin.

Sept 10, 2017, an ex-colleague of jbg, @brycel, joined the project as a cryptographer in order to improve the stealth transaction mechanism, so that it could be used as the default transaction mechanism in future versions. Brycel was initially paid by Mandica from her own pocket to work for 1 month.

Sept 11, 2017, wallet version 1.3.1 was released by jbg, which addressed a visual bug in previous wallet versions that had become known as the infamous zero-balance bug, because it made the users balance appear as zero. Furthermore, this release was the first to include a binary for Apple MacOS. A change to the stealth transaction mechanism was introduced so that the wallet allows for non-anonymous ring signatures with only 1 or 2 members. The reason for this was that at that stage, the network often did not have enough participants for ring signatures to do a full ring signature transaction. On the same day, version 1.3.2 was released that fixed a minor bug in version 1.3.1.

Sept 12, 2017, version 1.3.3 was released, which fixes some further GUI issues, and brings faster wallet startup and sync performance.

During October 2017, the community raised additional funding for Brycel so that he could continue working on the project.

Wallet version 1.3.4 with an updated Tor version, updated node list and a new "staking reward donation system" was to be released on Jan 8, 2018, but got delayed due to a leveldb transition issue and a Qt4 bug on Windows. The decision was made to skip 1.3.4 and instead port the wallet to Qt5, which would become version 1.3.5.

Jan 16, 2018, wallet version 1.3.5 got released. With this release, a new project funding mechanism was introduced, that allows users to donate a certain percentage of their staking rewards to the developers of Spectrecoin. The donation is probabilistic, and by default 5% of the staking rewards are donated, which means that on average, every 20th staking reward will be accounted to the official donation address instead of the user's address. By donating up to 100% of their staking rewards, users can decide to financially support the development team on an ongoing basis, in order for them to be able to grow the team and hire additional full-time developers.

I've known from the first time I read about XSPEC that it was a completly useless shitcoin. And not to talk about all the spamming going on here on bitcointalk. For ones and for all can we just let this shitcoin die.

Ok so here we have a prime example of an XSPEC shill, let's take a look
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1764701;sa=showPosts

4 Posts, all 4 about XSPEC.

Also your coin wiki post proves nothing, your comment about "what's to come" proves nothing.

Bryce has improved nothing and probably doesn't exist, looking through gunners thread there was 1 example of Bryce talking to the community, this was probably jbg with a different account.

I have explained via code examples what the OBFS4 feature is, it's calling the TOR executable, it's not part of the code itself
I have shown what the so called "encryption improvements" are, allowing a ring size of 1 (not an improvement)

I have explained that all of the work has gone in to a system which allows you to donate to jbg while pretty well no work has gone in to the coin.

Like I said in my first post, fault the code findings please, hiring more developers = bs, in 1 year hes done under a days work on the coin and only implemented a feature that allows you to send him money.

Here is the "improvement to wallet startup" change

Original Shadow cash code

The big improved feature from XSPEC!

Changed the connectSignals function initiation time from 500 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds, he changed 500 to 200 and now claims he's made a big improvement again, nice try, more meaningless change being pushed as a meaningful change, no one will notice a difference between 500 vs 200 milliseconds and it just proves my point more.

Not even a good attempt sorry, lets see what the other shills try.

It is good that you wrote about a scam of this project. Now I will know that you shouldn't enter it.
I came into the Otho project recently too it appeared scam.

I kind of like XSPEC because it's more private than even more hyped Onion.

But how are people investing in something what even doesn't have a simple Whitepaper?!

I hope this thread has changed your mind some what, I've not dug as deep in to Onion but from the little research I've done it's another I would avoid.

Excellent jobs preshpr1nce! Intuitively I don't want to buy despite all PR with this coin. But now I saw some more solid arguments. Excellent. Will looking for developing. But now XSpec not looks so good for purchase

Your post on here means stuff all buddy. Your on the outside looking in, where on the inside looking out. You really shouldn't be posting absolute rubbish and FUD about something you know nothing about. Im shilling nothing, i'm telling no one to invest in spectrecoin as its entirely up to them to decide where their hard earned cash goes. The guys on the inside of this project know exactly where its at and where its heading. Just in the last few days there have been 3 new devs to come on board and offer their support. All i can suggest to the people reading your garbage is to watch all the new updates and releases about to come out in the coming days and weeks.You will than realize that the bloke who wrote this article has no credibility at all other than to be a troll!

So lets see now, I've provided evidence through code and even broke it down for the non coders, can you not understand or see this as evidence? what have you done other than make claims with 0 backing?

FUD? absolute rubbish? let others decide where their cash goes?

I am far far more concerned about people being mislead and buying in to lies than I am hurting your bias view, I do not FUD, I am just a person who wants to see blockchain and crypto as a whole succeed, these type of projects do nothing positive for this space and it's usually the new traders who get pulled in to it, I would much rather a new trader tell his friends the success he had with crypto vs how he was scammed and lost all his money.

Please, you made this account purely to promote XSPEC, you're now on here dribbling with no basis to your claims, you're upset.. It's ok, build a bridge.

I am more than happy to post links to the source files from the XSPEC GitHub where I've taken these snippets from, no made up stories here, would you like me to do this?

People will decide when they see whats about to be released this month and year. Thats the proof! Whats coming out of your mouth is just pure diarrhea. I will no longer be replying to this thread as its pathetic. To anyone reading this i urge you to get on to github over the coming weeks and month to decide for yourself.

So if you read gunners thread posted in my first post, you'll see he spoke to the XSPEC developer who also made him false promises about what's coming in Feb, he failed on this and nothing has happened, early march and nothing, so I'm not going to take your word on this.
I would stop posting too if I were in your shoes.

Thank you for taking the time out put this together.  It truly shows how much of a scam XPSEC is.

Thanks for all your hardwork on this.  If I had merit to give, I would send you some.  I was initially going to ignore this thread as I figured it would just be another idiot claiming abc coin is a scam with no evidence.

So I sold out of XSPEC and doubled up on SUMO.  Would love to see you dig into some other low cap privacy coins, like Deeponion and Aeon.  I've always been weary of those.  And I'm pretty confident in SUMO but would love to see some validation from a programmer.

I saw somebody month ago who said about XSpec. And he said similar - XSpec scam. Were you? Also from North Korea. But I think same. And great thanks for those great job. Also will watch for thread

Thank you so much! It's really got me thinking. You did the titanic labors for us, but unfortunately i have no sendable merit to you  :'( 
I'm going to follow your further posts.

Thanks a lot for posting your findings, now I only have to add a small piece about "obfs4 support' in Spectre.

Almost everywhere, "Tor+OBFS4 support" in SpectreCoin comes following words like native, integrated and built-in. The tool-tip in the GUI says Tor+OBFS4 connection online.

In the meantime, at least on Windows, to enable obfs4 support in SpectreCoin client you have to at the very least download obfs4proxy.exe and edit torrc manually to add the bridge. And there are three funny things to it:

• First, spectre is able to recognize obfs4proxy in its data dir. It then strips the path and only passes the file name to Tor. Tor, in turn, attempts to find the executable in its own directory since it doesn't have the full path, and fails to do it.
• Second, there used to be an obfs4 setup guide on the official Spectre site (it may still be there somewhere but having just had a quick look I couldn't find it), which did not result in obfs4 actually working, because of the combination of the points above and below this one
• Third and my favourite, SpectreClient adds ClientTransportPlugin configuration option to Tor if it finds obfs4proxy executable but not the actual bridge config line; meaning Tor is aware that it can and needs to use obfs4 but isn't told how to connect to the bridge providing the functionality itself.

So much for native, integrated and built-in obfs4 support.

As an ICO participant in Xspec, it was most certainly clear to us that Shaadowcash was the basis for Spectrecoin. I'm not speaking to any of the code yet, I am responding to the first problem I saw, but the accusation this was hidden from investors is a complete lie right out of the gate. It is even on the Spectrecoin wiki, created by the Spectrecoin community, one of the very first statements on it, not hidden in tiny print somewhere. No one has ever tried to hide the Shadowcoin connection. Ever.

I dont reall know something about coding or anything about scripts,but as to what i have seen we need to have some debate here,the developer of XSPEC should have a good argument with the T.S so we will find any good reason why we believe to T.S or XSPEC we shouldnt accusing someone without any proper reasoning from the other side,but your posts looks legit lets wait for the XSPEC developers so that we will know that truth.

This, along with the claim that Spectrecoin has tried in any way to shield the fact it was based on Shadowcash, is a total and complete lie. Spectrecoin investors were reasonably upset when newcomers came along with an ICO of a confusingly similar name (see Bitcoin Cash), but no one is trying to get money from Spectre.ai and if they are they are a rogue agent who has nothing to do with Spectrecoin.

Show me proof, Cabellos.

well, this is not just FUD, it's tactical verbal destruction.

and it actually makes me confident about xspec, because they want to buy low.

and this means, the price will raise soon.

For me... FUD. I believe in xspec and I buy more.

" Also they are trying to get some money from spectre.ai investers cause of name. "

This statement alone should make your whole motive suspect and cause a reasonable person to pause.

There is no "they".....many community comments were made  to that group about the similarity of the names when that exchange project was launched this fall....and @jbg , our project manager and dev, actually quieted the community saying its a different project and the publicity might actually be a positive.
This is a matter of record. Your statement is not.

So, you and the people that are trying to fud the price down for whatever purpose need to go find another
community to try to knock down.

Haha, this FUD is now beyond a joke. No one in the dev team or marketing team did this. (There might be a few shillers out there, but they're working for themselves, and beyond anyone's control). spectre.ai came a long way after SpectreCoin, so this does not even make sense either.

Let the community decides,im sure more experts in coding would make some statements about this,it this is really true now it would be the best time to sell our XSPECs,but if this just a FUD the T.S should be responsible with this i personally believed to XSPEC from the start and if this will be proven it would be the biggest lost that i will have.

Xspec it is precious stone on crypto market. But some people or not understand this or deliberately want drop price. I think they receive money for this FUD posts

Maybe they like "true privacy" coin as  a token pay,verge or deep onion ? Why they not say thet this coins is scam ?  Because they not understand nothing on tech,  they only posts ordered by someone FUD

I do not believe that this is a fraudulent project. I have carefully studied it and can conclude that this is a good and promising project. I am ready to invest in it.

Well, I know how to code and get paid to do so.

People want the anonymity provided by Tor + obsf4, and now you wait for "experts in coding" to make statements..

Now, think about what you've just written for a second. SpectreCoin has saved you time to setup a node (wallet) within Tor, without you having to download anything or setup anything. It's not particularly hard to set up a Tor node, if you know what you are doing, but if you're waiting for "experts", then you are the exact type that this coin is targeting: busy people who just want to use a coin, securely and anonymously. The dev himself said that Tor + obsf4 is not even the big draw of this coin, but it's a feature, and it works.

Dude, no one wants this scam coin.  You're making yourself look like a fool if you think people here are trying to "fud" to "buy low".  It shows me that you don't know what you're talking about, are wrong, and anything you say from now on will be met with the same lack of merit.


The coin speaks for itself, it's been proven and shown many times that this is a SCAM coin.  The price is tanking, and I can only imagine that it's the DEV that got called out for this shit.  Don't try and save-face and twisting what the thread is about.

Agree
Me and my friens study and look for news about xspec and we believe on project.
If all cryptos grow and target 1 trillion marketcap this year, 100% shure that Spectrecoin price will target around 10 dollars

Will be nice to come back to this thread in Dec 18 and enjoy XSPEC at a healthy $15-$20. Thanks for pushing the weak hands out today.

I was a big fan of this project for some time but have had enough.  The red flags thrown up in this thread are one thing, but it's clear that even if the dev delivers, that the relatively small community, lack of marketing and general negative feelings towards XSpec are such that it will only grow on the tailend of another major bullrun where a lot of newbies blindly take a punt.

Code 1.4 doesn't exist. jbg is going to announce in next days that he is leaving his project because he is forced to do so.

I agree that some things are shady as you said, but you went too far IMO. First it was always clearly stated that the project is ShadowCashe fork. When I say always I mean since jbg over took the lead. First group of developers obviously took coins (approx. 20k $ IIRC) for few hours of work. Changed the name, not sure what else has happened, and what I find strange here is that despite that many ICO holders still defend these people and say 'they were paid to deliver the first wallet, or to do initial work'. Maybe they are just afraid of bad publicity?

Now, regarding jbg, he actually mentioned that the reason the project has no whitepaper is because not enough code changes have been implemented (compared to ShadowCashe code base) to justify new whitepaper, which is thus expected with version 2 of the wallet which should bring stealth staking.

Further I would like to stress the fact that writing code is not the only job for a developer, especialy in projects where security or reliability are so important. Code inspection is very, very important, and jbg also had to spend a lot of time to familiarize him self with the ShadowCashe project/code base. From my conversations with him, my personal, subjective estimation is that he is enough capable, and knowledgeable for this kind of work.

The fact that he updates libraries, such as the Tor network, is a good sign that he cares about security. If one compares it to other projects like DO and Verge, the situation with XSPEC is much better. DO run until recently on a very vulnerable Tor code from 2014.

How I see things is that exactly because project is in this particular phase/state, there could be much potential in it, and money is anyway the main reason most of people buy/hold coins. Big money usually comes with greater risk.

Monero was also called scam at the beginning, and who knows, maybe it was. But its founder recognized the potential the project had and decided to invest in it. I hope same will happen with XSPEC.

I also don't think that amount of money collected with donations has been spent wisely, or very well, but that is up to jbg and community to decide how much they want to give, and for what. XSPEC would definitely profit from new developers, and IMO this step is necessary for the project further advancement.

As a matter of fact, even if it turns out that not everything has been done well, that people were manipulated or something, the tech is not useless, and it already has more to offer than other over hyped, still very popular coins.

When I said people will try and pick at the most tiny detail in my post I wasn't wrong, the main argument now is "We knew it was a Shadow Cash fork!" changes nothing at all, this is your desperate attempt to save a coin, regardless of knowing if it was Shadow Cash, it changes absolutely nothing to the whole main point of my findings, it's had pretty well no work at all done on it and it's full of BS.

To people saying that they've done their research there for it's good, share your research with us or why bother?

And this..


Finally managed to get some one related in to this thread and look at his response, for starters the spectre.ai comment DID NOT come from me, it was the first reply to this thread, I quoted him saying I'll look in to it, view page 1 yourself to see this.

This should prove my point more, look at the fuel they're using to try defend these findings, it's terrible really.. sums the whole thing up nicely.


Thanks for sharing your findings? But perhaps you should just take an open mind, read the thread again, confirmation bias is not a good thing to have in the trading world.


This is pure optimism with no basis other than reading lies, you shouldn't trade this way, here's a more simple example to remove the whole magical fairy dust around crypto market beliefs:

1 year ago, I bought an old car, with this car I promoted a technology that would allow it to fly, I'm now marketing that the technology is just around the corner yet all I've done in the past year is paint the car yellow.

Would you believe me?

New member. Literally joined today. Posted this single message, which is complete made up bullshit. Please no more pretending there isn't a calculated FUD campaign in play.

So a new member can discredit my post now can they? I'm not sure how he would know about the developer leaving, but his first comment is right, Code 1.4 doesn't exist.

Now lets take a look at your CommunityWhale, 38 posts, 37 relating to XSPEC, you have a couple relating to Spectre.ai but that is more complaining about their choice of name, so I'll consider these XSPEC posts too, you are 100% an XSPEC shill.

This is no FUD campaign, if you want to know why I did this, you guys pushed the shilling too far causing me to look in to things, now that I have the answers, I'm doing what most other people would, share it with the community!

Sorry if that's too hard for you to understand.

I totally don't care what you think about my account. I've been a member since 2014, but my name was Doge related so I dropped it. Who cares? I'm not trying to score points to get Deep Onion airdrops and shill points for bounties so I don't care how old my current "name" is or if I have Bitcointalk Emperor Wizard Cowboy status or whatever. I don't hang out here that much anymore, as you pointed out.  And absolutely YES, the new member thing for just today for just one post is suspicious as hell, of course. I mean, of course, my man.

Please re-read my previous posts where I clearly state I will address only what I know, which I clearly state is not your code assessment, but there are other, glaring untruths happening in this thread that should be addressed. If you can't back up claims other than yours, simply do not defend them. Then you won't look like you are trying to be deceitful.

As far as the code, I have seen the Slack and Discord channels busy for a year with discussions including the dev about all kinds of aspects of the code I have no understanding of, so I'm hoping someone from those discussions will shed some light on it from another perspective.

 

Perhaps you can't read, I didn't question your time on the forum, just the nature of your posts, I didn't defend a member, I actually stated I'm not sure how he could know such details about the dev announcing he's leaving, I did back up his comment on version 1.4 though.

What's funny is we constantly see 1 day old accounts being made to shill XSPEC, now you're trying to bring down this thread from 1 single person doing the opposite of shilling from a new account? pretty funny isn't it.

And if you are trying to state for 1 second that this person is me, why would it be when on my real account I've got more credibility and have provided much better evidence? Not very logical..

It's fine if you only want to address areas of knowledge, but what you're doing above is taking a post from 1 new member and trying to discredit my findings with this, so expect me to defend myself in this case.

How do you guys excpect something BIG from a project what has 1 anonymous developer , no white paper,no progress,no community(only some fanboyz), no marketing,no direction, don't keep promises and have no funds to move forward ?  ::)

How do you think this project ever get some REAL and big partneships to grow somewhere with these features?

Spectrecoin is a scam joke, we are not in 2016 or 2017 where all the projects with ''good tech'' just grow to 1 billion market cap like 2 years ago,theres a HUGE COMPETITION and spectre doesn't have anything else but promises and hope,it's invisible

Go and check some other competitors/ projects community's and you'll see how fast things are moving  ,trustful teams who's not anonymous and you can talk with them like with your friends,, always get answer very fast from team etc. If you go to spectre discord there's like a rainyday everyday.

I think XSPEC will fail very soon if these things are not changing now, if someone says only tech matters , then it shouldn't be there where it is at the moment.

If my memory serve me right, Spectre project was a fork of Shadow cash, I don't think the team denied this and there is no wrong having a fork of another project, but what gives me concern is the noise around the project this year because I know Shadow cash project has been allowed to die and the team has moved on to particle project, there must be a reason for this

Like I've said to others, this is the smallest nitpicking that could be done on my post.
The whole idea of this thread is to show over 1 year near no work has been done, also the lies about the developer are more important things to take in.

I knew when I wrote about the forking side people would focus on this and not the actual fact findings in my posts.. I almost left it out, but it was needed to explain the code changes.

I understand the idea of forking a coin well, been successful projects from forks but this is not one.

I am so glad that some idiot bought all my XSPEC last month for 0,00040 BTC at livecoin. ;D

Why do they ask for money feom spectre.ai investor? If its true no matter what the reason and i am sure that they are scam.
So people who read this hope you can find out by yourself the real news and take action as you need based on your research. This specially for xpec investor.

Waoh you did a numerous and awesome research there
To be honest, i am once a fan and a believer in Spectrecoin, as the community is not toxic, devs is very active in the slack

However i sold it after that because i need cash urgently and hence, i never follow on the project anymore
The last update i knew were the obs4 thinggy.
I am not a technical people hence i don't know how to read code but their wallet is good when the time i use as it can stake, where staking is the only function i use

For the distribution, i think the ICO distribution is abit skewed but because minor people invest in it, that causes most of the XPSEC is HODL by few person

Just to clear up a few things. (I'm @mandica, the founder of XSPEC and still here for anyone new to this)

All the discussions about code snippets and code cloning and implementation of protocols is a bit stagnate. This is the nature of open source development. There is no secret (and never was) that XSPEC was build on SDC. XSPEC never claimed to be proprietary code and is based on Bitcoin in the end as many others are. This point has been laboured ad nauseam and if your objection to a crypto is based on it's Bitcoin / SDC / Monero code provenance then you will seek out other projects. The fact that XSPEC is open source and based on other open source code is not a basis on which to claim a scam if you are a thinking person.

@jbg and Bryce are working on the code and as you all know, not every update is shown on GitHub immediately. GitHub is a not a live window to follow updates. Nobody as forced anyone out and in fact Spectre has very dedicated community and in fact, I would suggest that a dedicated community is what will succeed in driving this forward. XSPEC now also have steady development funding and will hire. The community will make sure that XSPEC will last for years to come and with a solid dev fund we will have the resources to develop the project. The team is together and strong and nobody has left for anything else. I am working on something auxiliary that will benefit XSPEC in the long run but can't say anything right now.

XSPEC is not a scam, we are just trying to provide a quality functional privacy focused cryptocurrency against a tide of FUD and shit and we will succeed. I have nothing more to say and there is nothing to discuss. Adversity brings out the best in us. Discard XSPEC at your peril.

I am not a developer but consider this: this is open source. If the devs really work on particularly valuable features it would make sense for them, to NOT put it on github unless finished.

When it is on Github, even in unfinished/early version, every other competitor could steal it and complete it themselves. If I was workign on a project like that, I would keep everything local until completely finished, e.g. delay uploading into Github until the last possible moment.

This still not explains why so little code work was published until now (according to OP), though.

I am not concerned about the SC copy, but the relatively modest changes are. I wish you would address all the points OP makes, not just the SC fork (e.g. ring size, starting but not using obfs4.exe and so on).


That is extremely bullish if true.

Your scam evidences is very weak. It looks like a dirty fight with competitors. It seems to me that Xspec is one of the most powerful projects in 2018. But ofc I could be wrong.

It's so obvious that this is a coordinated FUD-Campaign by some silly kids, my 98 old grandmother would twig it. ::)
But thanks anyway, I bought much more XSPEC.

Special thanks to @mandica for everything.

Glad you exumed a BTC account that wasn't active since December. And joined discord asking what's happening and then an hour later write an informed post here. You now only miss a brand new Bryce account and we can start the party. ;D

Do you have anything to show us as evidence that two full time developers have actually implemented something besides those few lines of code? I would really love to see it because I stil hold my xspec.
 
Why have we been told that xspec wallet automatically checks for the Tor connection, and if doesn't find it it tries to use obfs4 obfuscation? One doesn't have to be C or C++ genius to implement this. It is very simple actually.
I could even accept KISS method here, but this would understand transparency, openness, documentation which  explains people how should they use the wallet and obfs4.

Even something in the lines of 'Guys try first if the Tor is working, if not, drop the obfs4 exe to that folder, copy this configuration file to another, restart the wallet and check again.' or even admitting,  telling people 'some issues have appeared, it doesn't work like we expected, and we are busy with implementation of 1.4 wallet.'

So:
obfs4 doesn't work as we have been told.
Automatically adjusted ring size was promised for 1.3.5 and on official site it is stayed that it has been implemented with 1.3.5.
1.4 code was supposed to be uploaded to github month ago.

I would be 100% ok with the project if jbg or someone address and fix these issues.

Under assumption 1.4 is far away from being implemented (bugs don't matter), I would stil be ok, but in this case you have to explain to the community why did you collect donations, and claimed two devs are working full time, because we don't see the results of this work? Please refer to the code they implemented?

This what i have been waiting for a good debate to clear things up,the founder of the xspec has spoke,will this post be the reason why would the people who are holding XSPEC to dump this coin?we need some solid evidences in each sides so the community will learn something new about the coin we are debating to,i have bookmarked this thread so that there will some action in this forum.

@mandica,

you have paid some nice amount of coins to the first group of developers for not really impressive amount of work. They forked code, changed name, disabled a feature or two in the GUI of the wallet. If we consider time needed to study the code, I would estimate one person, average developer didn't need more than 5 days (Time to squash a bug or two, and to fix some configurations issues with development tools included.). I have heard that approximate value of coins they received was around 20 000 $. Is this true? That are four - five excelent month salaries for a senior software eng. in western EU, for only  few days of work. Are developers in this branch of work so scarse (real question, no sarcasm.)?

Which other serious competitors? Those serious competitors are much worse, just for the fact they invest incredible amount of resource to mislead the people, instead of using the resources properly. That smells on high class professional scam, they understand human psychology an know what will bring amounts of money, in much shorter period of time.

Besides obvious scam projects there are also projects with serious issues. These are maybe not scam, but what you said about hope applies here. All Z* coins implemented zero knowledge proof and are now waiting on solution which won't require trusted setup.

Verge, DO? Give me a break.

I am aware of Monero, and can assume there is a project or two I somehow missed, so no the real competition almost don't exist.

XSPEC is the only project I am aware of with proper Tor implementation! No other project with optional Tor cannot provide this, because they are depended on exit nodes.

As far as I know they added new devs to the team and the main dev works full time for the project since around one year.

It would be nice to know some technical details about the stealth staking feature.

I want to give Kudos to OP for showing some actual evidence for his claims (something that the "this-is-not-a-scam" voices fail to do!). It's rational, well written and credible!

HOWEVER: After taking a look at the repository myself, I do find the OP's claims to be exaggerated (while not baseless). I wrote down my more detailed analysis here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3065979.0

Do you suggest that this is a bought account? I haven't been active here for a while because it's of minimal benefit in the long run. I just wanted to say it's not a scam. Who you believe is up to you.

No I can assure you he was just glad to see you.

EDIT:
Sorry, I confused him for another account. That guy started another, first 'XSPEC is Scam' thread, where he accused jbg for not being quite honest with us.

Thanks, I read it wrong maybe  ;D

Thanks for taking the time to answer to this post, that's great to hear that you and your team are still working hard on XSPEC and hopefully we will hear soon about this thing you teased that will benefit XSPEC in the long run.

I dont really care how this claim will end,i am not a developer i am just a simple guy who wants to invest and learn about cryptocurrencies.Doing claims like this needs a lot of evidence i mean solid evidences to support the claim,if there will be some adequate informations that would cause your claim to be invalid,i have checked you post and you have better claim than the TS.

 ::) calling XSPEC an ICO scam is pretty stupid (pardon the crude language) as it is one of the most successful ICOs ever. All our investors can attest to that. Sour grapes for not investing anyone  ???

I read a lot aboutd Spectrecoin and its not scam. Its a good project and one of best tech privacy coin. Its possible to read some news about it on google... just look yourself. Me and my friends believe a price target this year around 10 dollar if all crypto market grow too.

the FUD is only cuz government agencies fear the power of stealth coins, europol and some local law enforcement had statements all over the news in germany

Oh this is wonderful, the XSPEC lot are out in full force with still nothing to disprove me.
This is not a FUD campaign, it's 1 person vs a bunch of XSPEC fan boys who still cannot explain why over 1 year nothing has been done!

Looks more like a save your ass campaign from the XSPEC groupies now.

Any way, let's focus on this


For 1, I've never said open source projects are a scam or a basis to being a scam, majority of crypto coins out there are open source, the joy of being open source is we can actually see the work done in each version, it's also something I look at with other coins to determine they are pulling their weight.
2. Claiming not everything goes up to GitHub immediately is very understandable, but if you can read properly you'll see my findings were against the features that have been developed and have been committed to GitHub, your ring signature change was nothing yet hyped as a big change, your obfs4 implementation was nothing more than calling a TOR executable yet hyped as a huge change, the changes to the wallet startup times were nothing more than changing 500 to 200 (500 millisecond delay to 200) yet also hyped as a big change, the rest is just colour and logo changes, why can no one here give me a reason for this being acceptable?

Simply based on that, even if you are holding back on putting the latest version on GitHub, what's been done to date and released to the community is an absolute joke at best, so you've cleared up nothing here but the same garbage we see from XSPEC, "We have something you can't see yet, it's coming"

History speaks far louder than future promises, your history is full of nothing but a days work being hyped as big change, explain this? it shouldn't be that hard right? it's what I've been asking for from the start but you keep beating around the bush trying to fool non technical people.

Now this one:

You made an account yesterday, you've tried to sound a little less shill like by giving me little praise, to sum your thread up, you've done no analysis at all on the code, all you've done is look through a period of commits, seen some activity and said hey! He's wrong.. go through the actual code to see how tiny and meaningless each commit is, nothing more than lots of word changes, a few library updates, updating read me files, and the points I've stated here, the commits are fluff.
The biggest work done which makes up majority of the code change size is the donation system, if you really aren't a shill please look a bit closer, I went through every code commit on there and focused more around the key features XSPEC has brought along and hyped as big change.

Also this from your thread


This thread and these findings are not about these 2 points at all, you do not need comments to read the tiny amount of work done, never did I state anything about lack of comments, as for the "no commits" after Jan 30, my findings were on all the work done prior.

I see a pattern here, they're trying to justify that they've not committed any code recently due to a few "acceptable" reasons and this whole thread is based on their lack of work since Jan, this thread is NOT about that, it's about the lack of work in the committed code since day 1.

Stop trying to spin out of this.

To any one reading this who actually cares for the answers, go and view the post history of every person in this thread defending XSPEC, having an army of 100+ shills does not change what I've found.

You created the ANN thread for XSPEC, don't even talk about your account history, you've been part of this since the earliest days and still are.

presh1prince totally stole my idea for my new website PreciousPrincesses. That is the true scam going on.

#PreciousPrincessesRideOrDieSon
#PPRODS

Thanks for the thread starter in sharing this valuable information. In this time when lots of scammers are all over the internet we need concerned individuals who are always willing to help others by sharing this type of information.

My bad, wait till April, I have a name change coming then ;)

I wouldn't say XSPEC is a scam because the amount of work done since the fork is just marginal. However, I do think it's time for a realistic look towards this project. This thread gives a good insight in the quality of the code base. In the end the code is the one and only truth.

Thanks for doing this kind of intensive research!

Perhaps you've brought up some valid doubts about the project, but you've failed right from the beginning by calling it a scam.  Even if all your claims can be accepted without refutation and there is zero new development (which I highly doubt - how much work is local or unavailable to you at this moment), who is being scammed and how?  As mentioned, it's open source and community-driven.  It will continue to be that way regardless of the challenges that we encounter.  That's why some people are dismissing this as nothing more than FUD.

On Saturday they promised to run 1.4 version of the wallet within 48 hours.

Today JPG wrote that the update is postponed indefinitely, to which he can not say at the moment, and even can not say when he will be able to say when this will happen approximately) But, he mentioned that it is definitely not during this week he will say something, because he needs somewhere to fly on family business ... it remains to hope that this is really not just an excuse for "grandmother died."

BUT THIS IS NOT THE MOST SUSPICIOUS THING!

The most suspicious thing is that he bluntly stated - for the flight he will need money and, accordingly, HE IS FORCED TO SELL A PART OF COINS.

The sale may have happend when the XSPEC  updated a monthly minimum of 0.62$ (approximately)

But the question is different: if he has coins that can be used for personal purposes, for flights, vacations, etc. why all the time to refer to the fact that they do not have enough money and what they have collected through stacking - always not enough and the amount is ridiculous?

Maybe this is really SCAM?  I'm really scared of that...

This is a well executed job.Thanks for this exposure at least a lot of money will be saved from this scamming project. Keep it up .

At one point he said (in Slack) that he doesn't have a huge amount of XSPEC. Apparently he had if he could sell some of his coins to buy flight tickets?

I just wanted to update with the simple fact that @jbg was NOT part of this project from the beginning and does not have a huge XSPEC stake. I hired @jbg at a later stage, months into the project, to carry out specific work and I also hired another programmer that since left for the people who follow our story. So, @jbg has in fact been instrumental in bringing the new releases out and to work on the next version. He was hired by me and we have had meetings (online & in person) and worked out details around future releases. I have paid for @jbg and Bryce out of my own pocket to keep this running after the ICO funds were spent so I have confidence in the fact that @jbg will deliver what he says.

Mandica is totally right. The scam accusations against someone with so little stake in the coin, who barely scrapes by with donations, I just don't know what to say but isn't there a real scam you guys could be going after? So much time and energy here and damaging the price with your fud has done little to damage the people you think are scammers. The real financial damage has been done to the investors you claim to be trying to protect. If you're wondering who has lost money due to your inflammatory posts, its just good regular people, that's who. Does the coin not work? Was it not the first crypto with in-wallet TOR and then with in-wallet OBFS-4? Does it not have a roadmap containing even more firsts in the industry? Yes it was and yes it does! Go after a real scamcoin, for Christ's sake.

Who is the main person in this project after all? You, mandica?

O boy, another account created just to join this fud party. Typical.

Oh boy, as far as I can see you are also here recently) I see you have only 39 messages and they all try to cover up the reputation of XSPEC. But in my message below there is no lie! Everything is true here!



IT'S TRUE! >:( >:( >:(

I am not replying to mandica as she's only shilling cos she has just found out she's losing money. She doesn't even know where the project is. But hey, we are giving you the information to judge for yourself, information otherwise you wouldn't know. If you can't take that to your advantage, I am sorry to say that the reason of this is only you.

Anyway do yourself a question: who told you that jbg has not a lot of coin, apart jbg himself and mandica?

Check my last post here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2839833.msg31656875#msg31656875) and maybe you can help everyone to find more information about this.

His name is JBG, not JPG. The fact that you don’t even know his correct handle can automatically discredit anything you have to say.

On Saturday he did NOT say that wallet V1.4 would be released. He said he would have an update regarding the time remaining to complete the update within 48 hours. Just a huge difference, no big deal. He has been in the Discord the last 3 days answering questions. He lost a family member and you maniacs are out here screaming scam.

I don’t know about you, but I would much prefer him giving full disclosure about needing to sell some coins for a flight.

Do you people seriously think a person would run a “scam” this long to make a measly 5 figures? If he was some super shady character with programming and coding talent don’t you think he would’ve come up with a more elaborate plan to acquire a life changing sum of money, not just enough to get by?

XSPEC is already better than pretty much every other privacy coin than Monero, so we’re really not worried about it. Development will continue with JBG and some new devs that are coming aboard.

Maybe you should go have a look at XVG’s shitty code, and terrible privacy features with over a billion dollar market cap.

“Anyway do yourself a question: who told you that jbg has not a lot of coin, apart jbg himself and mandica?”

If he did have a shit load of coins, and was trying to pull a scam to make a bunch of money, wouldn’t he have dumped during the parabolic rise to $6 and disappeared?

Thank you for the research. I had xspec on my watchlist. Will delete it now.

Hmmm,

I'm not investing in, nor did I do a lot of research regarding this coin. But just a question from an outsider, to avoind being to quick to judge and call other coins a scam.
Just because one of the developers put out false information, the complete project is a scam ?

Nevertheless, If this puts you off.
You are welcome in the DeepOnion community.
DeepOnion is definitely not a scam. Development currently delivering at lightning speed: Android wallet, stealth addresses, E-commerce plugins, Votecentral, etc.

Maybe because he cannot predict the future?

now we saw the customer of this Fud's

Oh, really?!)))  Maybe you're just another person trying to save the reputation of this coin? EVERYTHING I WRITTEN - OVERALL TRUTH! I know everything that happens with this coin and your community!

https://a.radikal.ru/a19/1803/15/582f7c0e7c69.jpg

Just in case:

https://a.radikal.ru/a19/1803/15/582f7c0e7c69.jpg (https://radikal.ru)


IT IS THE TRUTH!
Do not blame people for lying!

If XSPEC is scam, DO is scam^10, else DO is scam^10. Seriously, DO is project where developer intentionally started project with vulnerable 4 year old code, and after community noticed it it took him 4 month to upgrade to another, again alpha (probably because it had the highest number at the time.) version of the Tor network. While blockchain was 100% public, and Tor the only 'security' feature, developer and community claimed it is the best 'anonym' coin in the world. Maybe we use different definitions of scam, so let me put it this way DO has been created with one and only one purpose, to make its founder rich. Or if we consider the issue with vulnerable Tor from 2014, maybe even something much worse. Really why choose vulnerable code from 2014 in year 2017?

Now back to topic.

For TLDR see below.

@mandica, @CommunityWhale you completely ignore OP's code analysis. Doesn't matter.

@mandica, you obviously didn't pay much, or enough. You thought this kind of project will be Ok with bit of initial work, and Moon is the next station? Software needs continued maintenance, with competition constant improvments, new features etc. Only one, poorly paid developer is not enough in this game.

I think it is somehow strange that everyone is talking about jbg here. He is just a developer, who works for breadcrumbs (Offical story, quite likely.). If he soon delivers 1.4, I would say he did a very nice job, considering circumstances.

What I think is more important than discussion about one developer is discussion about XSPEC as a project. Developer hired by whom? So let us talk about project self, its finances, organisation etc. jbg is officially the project leader, but his rolle seem to be quite symbolic. He self has no resources to maintain, support the project, except his time, few hours here and there he could spend, in case he is forced to find another, say full time job.

What this tells about the project self? IMO it tells that project is in deep shit, for whichever reason.
Community poor, not ready to invest, community small, whales care about quantity of coins more than their value? Doesn't matter, facts (slow development, lack or resources) stay.

Recently community started discussing possibility of hiring new developers. It took all this time, issues and NOW we are talking about possibilities of hiring new developers? I am not implying here that discussion about new developer is reaction to OP's post, because I am aware that the idea appeared bit earlier in discord channel, but it took really long time for this to happen.

TLDR

I for one actually think that things can improve, and that XSPEC has potential as a project, and hopefully good future, but ignoring facts won't help. Right people learn from mistakes and continue working/improving.

PS

Hey DO can improve too!

Ok what you typed about coins makes no sense. These coins were his salary. He is free to do with it whatever he likes. He received those coins from donations between approx start of January, current date, and IIRC there were ~ 4k of coins on that address (Donated for him to spend as he like.).

The shills keep on trying but they provide no answers to any of this


Why are you still not addressing my findings? wouldn't that put all of this to rest?
(SNIP, view end of page 5)


You are calling out another member for typing JPG over JBG? pretty easy mistake, maybe hes a graphic designer? :P
Any way, your comments have no bounds, they probably expected this thing to hit $20 a coin, in that case it becomes 6+ figures.
If you've lost money I'm sorry for you, but exposing this while it's got such a low market cap is far better than doing it after the value has grown, scams should always be called as scams.
Yes he did say Feb, even their banner on their reddit page says 1.4 coming Feb 2018, see for yourself
https://www.reddit.com/r/XSPEC/

XSPEC is not better than XVG or Monero, sorry, but Monero has proven itself.


Doubt all you like, but hey without doing any research, how can you doubt? typical shill response.


No one has failed by calling it a scam, it's full of lies, lacks any work, false promises etc.
When you have a guy in his 20s claiming he has 20+ years experience and has done near no work over a year while claiming he works full time, claiming 5 minute changes as new big improvements, claiming things will be done soon which never get done, what more do you need before calling it a scam?


Any way..
Gunner has added a nice post to his thread, it's worth reading for sure:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2839833.msg31656875#msg31656875

Looks like I got an answer to the lack of coding too.

Gunners points about how this would fly in the real world is spot on too, even some one straight out of university with 0 experience wouldn't pass probation with this lack of work ethic and skill.

@preshpr1nce,

I have a question regarding your observation related to Tor pluggable transports. I mean you already knew what obfs4 is? What did you expect you will find jbg's implementation of obfs4 if you already knew what is it? You expected him to reinvent the wheel, or what did you exactly expect to find in code in this regard? Why wouldn't he use exe file, because you know it is how it is meant to be used with Tor.

I am disappointed he didn't improve the support for pluggable transports, and didn't added support for fronting and meek, but he never promised that, or claimed it has been implemented.

That coin already has a solid base, worth maintaining, and some unique features, no other coin (that I am aware) has
so even maintaining it, taking care of bugs and updating libraries is a good job one can do.

Which unique feature is that you might ask? Integration with Tor. All nodes/wallets are inside of Tor network as onion services, thus no exit nodes are used, which is very important, and what many coins ignore.

Ring signatures are known issue, known to most of the members of the community, which cannot be solved until stealth profile becomes default. Reasons is there are not enough stealth users in the network, and without them Ring signatures don't work. Because of this he implemented option in the wallet which sets Ring size to 1, what disables security feature of rings signatures, but it enables the usage of stealth addresses IIRC.  

I expected to see some code for obfs4, not taking ones executable and using it yourself, sure don't reinvent the wheel but at least take the effort of implementing it in to the code rather than calling an exe, I consider that lazy.

Also one of the key points in outlining this is it's part of the whole "so little work done" picture, the Tor work you mention came from Shadow Cash, not XSPEC.

Shadow Cash also had Ring signatures working with a ring size of 2, so this excuse of reducing size to 1 makes no sense, even more so if it was done due to a future change which isn't out yet, but would change the way ring signatures work, why make a network insecure prior to a release?

I don't think you've even looked at the work he's done, bug fixes? hardly, upgrading libraries you could do in your first year of uni, the work has been highlighted on page 1.

I have studied information technologies and telecommunications, in something similar to the university of applied science, and we had much more programming hours in different coirses compared to regular uni computer science student, but I met no person who learned to code there. Many students, almost all who didn't already have a job as software developers, or at least did it as a hobby remained unskilled coders.

What you said about ShadowCashe and ring signatures doesn't make sense. How do you know it worked for them? Ring signatures as technology require enough participants using them. Monero never had issues with it because all wallets are using it. This is the reason XSPEC has announced that stealth trx are becoming default with  version 2.

Tor, could you point me to the Tor implementation/code of the ShadowCashe? I wasn't aware ShadowCash has implemented Tor? Not that I would mind it, but everything I saw points to the XSPEC developers, not necessarily jbg.

Tor pluggable transports is Tor pluggable transport. Everyone who heard about these obfuscation methods knew what to expect here, and was aware jbg didn't develop obfs4. Making Tor, and xspec  wallet to work with obfs4 was the point, not demonstration of coding skills.
He could have automate/make it better, but this is also working. Despite his or project's shortcomings, there is a solid base, worth maintaining IMO, and it looks like some steps in the right direction are being made by the community (hiring new developers E.G.), so I don't think this is how scam necessarily looks like.
Most people exaggerate, or lie if you will. I met like two persons in my life who didn't lie in their CVs, yet that doesn't mean companies where these people who lied work are scam.

Things are not always black and white. One can in theory delude community in some things (like most of anon crypto currencies did at some point.) yet still deliver, with intentions to maintain the project long term. Basically as long as people are using, buying xspec, and are ready to support its development, project should be ok and prosper. I think that you have actually helped xspec as a project, because awareness that project needs more development and developers had been raised.

While I think you had some nice observations regarding the amount of work, I can just repeat that I consider ShadowCash code solid even nowadays and worth maintaining. With more and more developers interested in code, probability that new bugs/issues will be discovered is increasing, and as I already mentioned, it looks like xspec community decided to hire new developers.

https://github.com/XSPECOfficial/spectre/commit/0601f129f2a73520eb9f2ca55682821f78d7da55

It's also in XSPEC, but not made by jbg.

ShadowCash is definitely worth maintaining, even though I would watch what the original developers are doing since they developed it and they know the theory behind it very well. They basically ported the code in another coin, and they have been maintaining it for real in the last year. I wouldn't be surprised if jbg will take part of their code and says it's 1.4.

What we are challenging here is the ability of jbg of developing it further, when he says he's thinking of implementing every feature you ask him (stealth staking!!! RingCT, hardware wallet integration, HD wallet, bulletproof, merging bitcoin core, cold staking, ...) and there are 0 proofs he can do any change on the core logic, he lied on his experience, he lies saying he's working full time when he's clearly not, he doesn't reveal 1.4 code after more than a month, he doesn't meet his own set deadlines, he lies on release notes, he probably lies on another developer working on the project, he's also a bad communicator recently, he's doing very amateur mistakes on the codebase, he says he doesn't have much coin when he probably owns more than 1%. And this list keeps growing.

What in all of this makes you comfortable in thinking that he can achieve anything of what he says? Or only still believe in anything of what he says?

I'm not sure what country you're from but where I'm from a bachelors degree = you can code, I've worked with developers who have as little as a 2 year diploma, bachelors degree, people with masters and people with purely self education, they can all code out of their studies but aren't overly efficient compared to some one with a bit of commercial experience, in saying that all of these people would still better the work done on XSPEC in the time frame given, so I don't agree with this at all.

If you look on page 1 where I've got a screen shot of Umbra, the Shadow Cash wallet vs the XSPEC wallet, you can see the TOR button in the exact same spot, the difference is it was optional in SC and it's mandatory in XSPEC, as a developer I'm sure you realise how easy it is to remove a bunch of If statement around the on/off for TOR, so this isn't anything to brag about over SC.

Also this idea of SC is fine, he's just maintaining it isn't accurate either, he's promising advancements over it, in year that XSPEC has existed, I wouldn't even call this basic maintenance.

Yes SC supported ring signatures, you can go right back to the earliest change relating to the line of code I've stated on page 1 where the ring signature went just from 2 to 1, the line of code where you see it being 2 is from Shadow Cash, the line where it allows for 1 is the XSPEC change over SC.

Your next argument will probably be "does it matter if it's an easy change", sort of like your argument around the obfs4 executable, it doesn't matter so much but if you are doing small jobs you would expect to see A LOT more work done than what we see looking back in time, instead what we have are tiny changes and these same items being claimed as key development points for each release.

So I'll say it again, in 1 year the biggest body of work is the donation system, this work would be well over 10x the time taken compared to everything else combined.
And if you still still factored this in, doesn't justify the little amount done in that time.

The only person who has had any argument to justify this amount of time is jbg himself, he has admitted now that little has been done and his excuse is he's had to learn the code base, if it takes him that long to learn the code base then it shows his skill level and doesn't change my initial argument one bit, to give an example a person working full time out of university on projects 5x+ the size of this will not make it past a 3 month probation if they can't adapt to the code base.

And your argument on resumes is just silly, I've been coding since a very young age but my resume only contains commercial work I've done, do you see a university graduate claiming his hobby and degree as commercial experience? If I seen a 25-30 year old claiming 20+ years on his resume it would get laughed at and would go straight in the bin, if I seen some one who had done 3 1 year projects over a 10 year window, it would get the same response, his claims are a project in his teens, a POS system for a bar and an ecommerce website which probably uses a CMS, so between all of this, his age and claim of 20+ years is more than just a small resume exaggeration, it's a huge lie.

I've put in a bit of effort with these findings, if you're going to argue things like SC didn't have TOR, please do a bit more research before trying again, I'm not sure what else I have to add on top of what's been said already and I'm not up for repeating myself more than I have already.

I over looked the developer on this one, 6 commits from him vs 166 from jbg and he's done a lot more, I focused on jbg due to the recent findings and knowing he's the current and only developer, I guess it does prove me wrong in one of my earlier comments where I said to mandica to prove me wrong that they've had a developer in the past, this is the proof here so I'll edit my comment out in relation to that, I want this thread to be accurate.

Still, my initial findings on jbg's work remains as is.

The thing that needs to be looked at now by mandica if he/she is the true owner, is what you're paying for in jbg, your coin is going to tank unless you sort this out, the true scam here is jbg, get a new developer, I'll monitor the github and if I see change I'll make a new thread clearing things up, for now though you have a developer who cannot deliver anything and unless this is changed it's going to be a sad ending for XSPEC and a waste of your money.

So I've sent mandica a private message to see if she has any control over the developer, but from what I'm hearing jbg is now the one fully in charge of XSPEC and if that's 100% the case and mandica can't get a new developer to take over, this project is as good as dust in my eyes.

I'll wait and see how her reply goes, so far her postings in here have cleared up nothing and appear to be more shilling, if she can clear things up about the development and what's being done about jbg I'll be honest in my approach and let the community know, for now though things still remain as you see in this thread.

I’m just quoting your last post instead of the one you quoted me on.

When calling something a scam, and calling out a specific person, yes I do deem it important to actually know what their name is.

We already knew V1.4 was late, what that guy tried to say was that on a Saturday JBG said V1.4 would be released within 48 hours when he actually said he would release an UPDATE within 48 hours. He did come on and give updates.

And to you, where in my post did I mention anything about Monero? I said Verge is shit. Never mentioned Monero once and I am of the crowd that XMR is by far the best privacy coin currently available. To say XVG is better technologically is a blatant lie. If you’re going to sit here and say XVG has better tech than XSPEC (not even counting whether from SDC inception or since XSPEC) then you clearly have an alterior motive. It took the XVG devs like 1 year with 3+ delays to release optional stealth addresses (Wraith protocol) which XSPEC has had since inception. It’s not natively integrated with TOR so it has exit node attack vectors. While you sit here and call out XSPEC, I’d love to hear a rebuttal that proves XVG has better tech. I’m 99.9% sure it doesn’t, but it does have a 40x higher market cap.

you have done a spectacular job writing on this scam coin i wasn't in on this from the begging something about this coin seemed a bit off

While I agree that bad, or shady things had happen, and are maybe still happening, IMO you are implying, assuming few things, not sure why. For example you say you will follow github, as if github updates are some kind of mettrics one can use to estimate successfullness or usefullness of a project.

You said for example you will continue checking github (what is ok of course) to estimate how is XSPEC as a project doing (Not really ok). I say as long as there are no security issues, and as long as these don't remain unsolved for too long, IMO XSPEC is a solid, even unique product among crypto currencies.

Below explanation of my view, and argumnets or 'arguments' you decide.

Bare with my please for a moment, below is the explanation why am I mentioning the following again.

XSPEC is well rounded coin. It is the ONLY coin atm with full, proper Tor integration that I am aware of. ShadowCoin did not have this, Monero doesn't have this. Nodes communicate inside of Tor network as onion services, use no exit nodes, and no other currency with optional Tor can achive this. So it is not only about Tor being default or not. It is also very easy to enable Tor obfuscation, obfs4 which is still considered to be the best method at the moment.

It has stealth addresses, uses ring signatures, thus it hides sender and receiver infro, and to some extent if obfuscates trx amounts, but not as good as Monero.

Just maintaining this state by fixing security issues is a good job, and doesn't make this tech or XSPEC as a project less useless.

You implied things here, that successful project, or useful product has constantly do evolve by adding new features and code (What is not case and I have mentioned popular Open Source projects as examples below.), and also that ShadowCashe developers should be used to further develop 'their' tech because they are understanding it better. I am stressing here that you also implied that ShadowCoin/XSPEC is technology developed by ShadowCashe developers.

Let us now first consider what have they (ShadowCashe devs) actually done here, and later let us check how other Open Source project work, function, and what is common in world of open source.

ShadowCashe. Do you think ShadowCashe developers have written, and designed, developed all, or most of their code? First it is a BTC fork. They have added two features to it besides developing wallet GUI, which is pretty trivial task for average developer. Stealth addresses and Ring Signatures. Did they developed these? Ring Signatures are algorithms developed almost 20 years ago, Stealth Addresses and trx are much newer and IIRC these were developed by Peter Todd previous ByteCoin and Bitcoin developer (And just look now where the Bytecoin nowadays is. It could be easly considered scam by your criteria because situation is definitelly worse compared to XSPEC, no one is maintaining it AFAIK.).

 Ring Signatures implementation of ShadowCashe developers had serious security issue (Despite them having open source code to use as a reference, as is or however), which was discovered by Monero developer, who was later paid (by ShadowCoin) to help them fixing it, what he did.

But let us check other open source projects like Linux distibutions, and let us see who is considered to be developer, what are common practies etc. Ubuntu for example, is 95% Debian, and Debian is 99% upstream code. Very, very, small part of a Linux distribution is developed by distribution developers, yet anyone who accuses these people of not being developers doesn't actually understand the situation. Putting all these parts together, testing , maintenance, it requires skills.

Long term distributions are esspecially appreciated among developers yet these types of projects don't change much or at all over years, except for changes which are necesaary to deliver security updates. Is Ubuntu 16.04 LTS bad distribution because it is three years old, and runs even older software? It is capable of doing what is meant for, most serious bugs are fixed, it is stable. It is usefull, works, and people don't have to upgrade to new versions of software and libs what requires one very often one to goe trough different configuration files, changing things, learning new syntax etc. How is this different to XSPEC and his features/abilities?

Are developers who 'build' distributions and software, who 'just' compile, package, or develope ebuilds or compile scripts, than test that upstream software actually not developers?

Not important that much but let me mention jbg again. gunner for example suggested how all projects jbg has forked and contributed, are just hobby projects, and how easy it is to do such things. IMO it is not that easy. This is not only about writing 20 lines of code for some project. One actually must understand a project or at least a part of it one is interested in or one is going to contribute, play with or whatever.
Of course I am not trying to proof with this that he is a mathematition/cryptographer or something, he never claimed for him self something like that (At least not that I have seen.). But I do think he is capable for the same kind of work ShadowCashe developers did. You and gunner have raised their work/capabilities to completely different, higher level, which I can not agree with. When I said I think he is capable, this still doesn't mean I think he is doing it (e.g. working full time).

Point of typing all this wasn't to claim shit didn't happen, but to give people bit different perspecitve on what successful project is, or can be.


I would really like to hear your opinion about 'private' coin projects you consider to be inovative, developed by high skilled experts, and worth investing? Or just any other project you consider OK. Beside Monero of course, although I muss say it doesn't look like Monero developers are in a hurry with I2P implementation. There is also another project I follow, still in development 'MobielCoin.com' (I have mentioned the address because there is another project, possibly a scam also called mobilecoin mbccoin.com.). It has amazing crew, so it should be amazing. Beside these two I would really like to hear you opinion regarding this.

I do not believe in this evidence. It seems to me that the coin is very promising. Private coins will soon be in high demand. I invest in this coin.

Wasn't 'Verge' previously called 'Dogecoin Dark' at some point? hmmmm... ;D - pls don't promote Verge as being something special - the marketcap is just due to John McAfee fake tweets and was Verge not in fact a DOGE clone? XMR was a clone of BCN using the same tech but then being successful in going their own way. I agree that XMR has very strong features but pls don't mention Verge.  :D

That's one of the big reasons why xspec didn't convince me when i was looking for another privacy coin to invest in.Their development and marketing is non existant compared to other coins like deeponion.And we all know what happens to coins who lacks good marketing.

You are shilling, the above quote is utter bs, GitHub has 100% of the code for all released versions of XSPEC, simple as that.
Going forward, you would have to wait for a release to get a full picture of the release, it could be the developers are holding back on the commits etc, but on past releases this is not the case, the entire full source code is up there.

Also from an open source project that the community is buying in to, you SHOULD commit you work and not delay as long as he has on new releases, leaves people with no clue of progress, still though like I said above, the released versions give you a complete idea.

I am not shilling, but you are being an asshole, and you are doing same thing as mandica does. What you said has nothing to do with my post, and you have totally avoided all points I made.

this is what i call a detailed info on a scam coin great job we should have an extra page on the forums for scams that should be updated frequently

Hey, what's wrong, someone was yelling on you? No!  Let us stop talking about code not being available, and let us talk about code which is avaiable! Tor integration, supportes obfs4, has stealth addresses,
 and ring signatures, which will start being useful when stealth becomes default. Still better than Verge, no?

Otherwise I do think that XSPEC as a project started going same route as DO and Verge, which is using lies for the sake of popularity, and hype. If this doesn't change, and if they don't get their shit together it will be dust in my eyes too, not that it matters.

Also, whatever happens with XSPEC, it has yet a long way to go to reach level of assholness of Verge and DO developers.

I didn't avoid a single point, I cleared them all up.
What you are trying to do now is confuse people who don't have enough technical understanding to read what's being said.
My guess is this'll be less than 5% of people.

Sad sad person, to make a claim that a full version release on GitHub being observed is not a good measure is as stupid as it gets, I'm not here to be nice to shills, I'll keep my nice nature for honest people, you're not honest.

You're having 0 impact here, should just give it up, to sum up your argument, "The code on GitHub is not a good measure".
Does any one actually believe this?

In their Slack channel Beachguy is complete jerk. 99% of time he is rude and just attacking peoples for their opinions.
And as I recall, jbg have called other users as cunts there.

Complete lies. Beachguy is blunt, not a “complete jerk.”

JBG is one of the most patient people I’ve ever seen on the internet. There’s zero chance he would call someone a “cunt” in the old slack channel. He answered all sorts of questions, often repeatedly.

Here is where XSPEC is headed. These are two updates from JBG himself this evening.

OK @everyone, I have a short update regarding project structure. Even before I needed to take some time off, I had been discussing with a number of longstanding community members about expanding the core team and formalising some kind of "governance" over the project. Given that me taking 10 days off caused such a large disruption, it's clear that these changes need to happen quickly so that the project can keep its momentum even if one member needs to take time off. We now have an idea of what we'd like this to look like, and I'd like to share this with you all. *First,* we're going to officially grow the core team to include several more people, including at least one more developer but also people with project management and marketing skills. <@384779540540424213> is also back in good health and will be participating actively in the core team again. *Second,* we are introducing bounties to encourage much wider participation in the development of the project. This will be managed via GitHub Issues - anybody will be able to "claim" an issue and upon their successful completion of it, the bounty will be paid to them. This will be funded from the staking donations. I'm working on identifying the areas where I think bounties can be best applied and will create issues soon, but I'd also like to encourage _anybody_ who has ideas for fixes or improvements to propose bounties. The core team will select the bounties that will be funded from staking donations, but anybody can fund a bounty if we don't select it and they want it to be worked on. We hope that these changes will "decentralise" development more effectively and also increase our rate of progress. _A specific update about v1.4 will follow in the next days._

Also, @everyone, once the core team is in place I want to hand control of incoming donations over to a designated person who will manage the bounties and make _results-based_ payments to me and Bryce as well as fund anything else that needs funding. This designated person will be chosen by the core team collectively, in a public and transparent way, and will be some longstanding, well-known community member. I want to make this change for several reasons, (1) I think philosophically a clean separation of the funding and the development is a good idea, (2) the constant accusations directed at me are taking a significant toll on my wellbeing and my ability to work effectively, and hopefully this will help, (3) the designated person should be able to more clearly weigh the various needs for funding (marketing, core developers, bounties, maybe exchange listing fees, etc) rather than having it managed by a developer with a more narrow view of the project.

it really was once, but that dude deserved it for his behavior :)

Firstly, a couple of things:

a) You state that you are a “senior software developer” - please provide verifiable credentials for this claim
b) I have met with @jbg in person and he is not in his 20s but somewhat older
c) Yes, XSPEC is based on and cloned from the SDC codebase and this has been stated from day 1 and discussed endlessly. Please see the original thread at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1704473.0 and the discussion there. At the time of XSPEC inception I was a follower of SDC and thought that the focus on a market integration was the wrong way to go and wanted to separate this out and continue a focus on privacy features. The main sticking point in the initial phase was to integrate Tor which is something SDC never did.

Your claim that “initially XSPEC made no claims of their coin being a fork of this project” (SDC) is simply not true. You haven’t followed the project for long enough.

Specifically addressing points raised:
The ability to set ring size to 1 for ‘spectre tokens’ was implemented as a way to be able to transfer ‘spectre tokens’ back into XSPEC without having to rely on the correct denominations being made available in the ‘spectre token’ pool. This was / is an issue as the network is growing and the pool of anonymous token denominations were insufficient to combine together to ‘re-create’ the desired amount of XSPEC. The ring-sig system is used for ‘spectre tokens’ and not for ’normal’ Spectrecoins. XSPEC uses two different tokens, i.e. Spectrecoin and ’Spectre tokens’ and the ring-signatures are used to sign transactions made in ‘spectre tokens’ and not Spectrecoin.

Very short explanation of ’Spectre Tokens’
‘Spectre Token’ / ST. ST can be minted / created whilst destroying ‘Spectrecoins’. The creation of ST outputs a group of STs totalling the same value (minus the transaction fee) of the destroyed Spectrecoins. That is, the creation of 1 ST will destroy 1 Spectrecoin. ST takes the form of anonymised spendable outputs on the Spectrecoin blockchain and each ST output has its own private and public key in the form of a key image. In the Spectre wallet the ST you are able to spend will appear in the ‘Private Balance’ field. Your ‘normal’ Spectrecoins will appear in the ‘Public Balance’ field. The spendable ‘spectre tokens’ will be the members of the ring to sign anonymous transactions. This requires a large number of spendable ‘spectre tokens’ in the pool. This is being improved in 1.4 by better splitting / combining algorithms. So, the ring signature discussion is reserved for ‘spectre tokens’ only and does not apply to public Spectrecoin balances. A senior software developer should have made this point in my view and if you had reviewed the history both of SDC and XSPEC you would see why a temporary ring size = 1 was allowed.

Also, it seems to me that @preshpr1nce fails to understand what obfs4 is for. XSPEC implemented a native version of Tor into the code base (this was not mentioned in your detailed professional review @preshpr1nce). Native meaning that you do NOT need to have Tor installed on your computer, XSPEC will connect using Tor and ONLY Tor when you start the wallet. All the XSPEC network runs under Tor and there are no exit nodes anywhere. This was the first phase of improving on SDC and we did that. It then turns out that Tor traffic might be blocked so we found the obfs4 protocol which is essentially to “hide” or “obfuscate” Tor traffic to make packet inspection more difficult. obfs4 is an addition to the Tor implementation.

In addition there has been a lot of work initially around compiling and SDC was working on similar issues for quite some time for people who are old enough to have followed SDC a while back. So, there is a lot of work around building the code as well as the code itself and making this more efficient.

So, for a senior software developer this is a pretty poor review. Now, @preshpr1nce - your credentials please and how could you miss out the fact that we integrated Tor into the code base in your review? How may lines of code was that again?

So, I sent mandica a PM yesterday, here is how it went:


Her response is to come in here and ask me to prove my background, I'm not the one trying to take money from people, I have absolutely nothing to prove.

jbg has admitted he is in his 20s, I've also come to learn his name, he's a guy in New Zealand, and yes in his late 20s, I won't expose his name out of respect but JBG = his true initials, you are outright lying right there.

We've been over the nitpicking about Shadow Cash, this isn't what the argument is about for the 5th time.

I've made a comment prior about the first developer and his work on xSPEC and Tor, go read it please, I said he's done more than JBG, my findings were focused on JBGs commits which are lacking, he is the current developer and the one driving it's future.

Regardless of your excuses for the ring size downgrade, you've hyped it as a big feature change (Improvements to ring signatures)
It's not an improvement, and now you're claiming it relates to a feature in 1.4 (Spectre Tokens) which is yet to be seen, typically you would change this as required, all you've done is removed anonymity from spectrecoin, you're now saying an anonymous token is around the corner which will take over the public coins?

I don't care what's coming, explain why in 9 months of JBG developing he's done nothing yet you've hyped these minimal useless changes as a big deal?
What a joke, you're a liar also, just explain my simple question, why in 9 months has a days worth of work been done outside of the donation system?
I don't care for anything more than that.

Rather than explaining my findings you're still trying to discredit me, this is not how you should go about things, you've shown the value of XSPEC in the process, it should not be this hard.

I'm not trying to discredit you, BUT, the dual system of 'normal' Spectrecoin and anonymous 'Spectre tokens' was always there and was part of SDC as well and is how Monero works in essence. The ring signatures are used by the 'spectre tokens' and not by the 'normal' Spectrecoins. If you read the code or even use the wallet you see this:

https://i.imgur.com/QqDuRTn.png

https://i.imgur.com/mJwPnpc.png

The private balance is your anonymous 'Spectre tokens' and the public balance is your 'normal' Spectrecoin which are much like Bitcoin or others and transact like Bitcoin and others. You sign the transaction with your private key etc.

https://i.imgur.com/uOh1xjQ.png

Here is what it looks like in the block explorer when you split and combine 'Spectre tokens' and what the anonymous outputs look that can be combined into Spectrecoins again. You will see the blue address. That is a 'normal' UTXO and the anonymous outputs are the ones marked "anonymous". The ring signatures apply only to the anonymous outputs, just like Monero or PIVX or others. You should know this as being a software developer and you should know that ring signatures are not applied to 'normal' UTXOs.

Please study some privacy coins before you start making comments. And, you display you credentials to make people believe your "analysis" so it becomes relevant, don't you think?

I say your analysis and understanding of software development is poor.

Wow, thank you of course for giving us the truth. We appreciate this and thank you for taking the time to find these facts. It seems to me that calling a scam project is a very difficult decision because there are so many factors for this.

Was just about to invest in this. much as his business involvement in the past doesn't matter much, the false information given is a killer, proven beyond doubt that this is a fake, we need more guys like you, thanks a lot.

Thanks for the good jobs for showing the negative sides of this coin, exposing its weakness and other faults with solid arguments making this coin look more like a scam. I had invested some good money , but  with so much uncertainties, doubts and speculations about it, it better to get out before its price drop to zero.

I have answered @preshpr1nce who is clearly not a software developer and I have nothing more to say here. I suggest as before that any supporters of XSPEC will refrain from posting replies to this FUD and let the trolls toil in their own ignorance. If you want discussions about tech that's fine but keep it in the other thread.

Good Bye from this thread.  :)

You expect me to put my identity online after exposing your coin so what? you can attempt to make my life hell? get real, I do not need to put anything up to validate my claims, you are the one who needs to validate claims, your post about private vs public is great, you've just admitted this feature exists in SDC but you're claiming it's a development of XSPEC? I guess this is why I seen no commit history relating to this from JBG, Also how about you give us some proof of Brycels existence and JBGs development experience? this should matter far more than a guy on a forum.

I'll admit I've never installed the XSPEC wallet on my computer, why would I as some one who doesn't hold any of the coins? I've also never installed a privacy coin wallet on my machine as I have no use for a privacy coin, I'm invested in not one privacy coin so to come out and say I know nothing about reading commit history due to this is false, I also do not need to sit back and read the entire source code of a coin to see lack of work, the joy of having a complete commit history over a period of time in relation to a project is we can see the EXACT work done on a given area over a period of time, I have better things to do than read your entire source code, but with such a lack of a commit history it didn't take too long to go from curious to amazed, so I went through this area, I've also claimed in this thread that I've focused on JBGs commit history, never once have I claimed to have read the entire source code, I've also stated the developer prior to JBG has done work, my comments are not bias, I've clearly stated these things in this thread, so nice job trying to twist things, I still encourage people to read the whole thread and if you have an understanding, the commit history by JBG

Regardless of the public vs private system being something I lack experience with, it doesn't change the fact the commit history is lacking, you've STILL not addressed why this is the case? You've just taken time to try find an unrelated area to try prove me wrong.

I'll also say it doesn't require a senior developer to work this out, people with a basic understanding can clearly see the lack of work in the commits from JBG and I suggest others take a look and decide for themselves, I've not lied about my job, I am a senior developer, but I don't have to prove this to any one, simply because it doesn't really matter and your calling for me to prove it is weak, why don't you prove a thing or two? Like I said I have JBGs details, age, city he lives in etc, I won't post this up so why would I dare post my own details? even after you've straight up lied saying you've met him and he's older, I'm still holding back on posting his ID, so why would I post mine?

You've lied and you've ignored being called out on it completely, I've been honest in this thread, here are some areas I've admitted fault:

1. I didn't look past JBG, while I should have, it probably wouldn't have made any difference to this thread, I would of just perhaps said JBG has done no work rather than XSPEC (bare in mind he's been the developer for 9 months and still is the main and only developer)
2. I've admitted that I've never used the XSPEC wallet or read in to the private vs public system code, if some work had been done on this it would of been on my radar, but it appears you're making claims now from an SDC feature.
3. I've admitted to have not read the entire source code, but at the same time I've never claimed to have done so, only the commits have been observed.

I've even tried to speak to you directly in PM to help you sort things out, you have no control now though, it's JBGs project, the guy who doesn't do any work.

To put this all to rest you only have to do 2 things now:
1. Explain a good reason for JBGs lack of work
2. Explain why you lied about JBGs age after it's even been admitted by JBG and is clearly online

I would also say provide info on why 1.4 is late, but in the scheme of things the above 2 points are far more important, I can live with road maps being a bit delayed.

Also there is one key point to be observed from your final comment, if you had truly proved me wrong you would be encouraging every one to keep this thread alive so people can see you are right and I'm wrong, yet you've just called for this thread to be left to die, there's only 1 reason a person would do this, deep down you know who's right and who's wrong here, if you proved me wrong it would do you and your coin good and you would be calling on your shills to make sure it's seen, yet you're calling for them to leave it.

Even JBG appears more honest than you, I'll give him credit for that I guess.

I'm not doing a Mandica here, any one can read the above quote and decide for themselves.
Your claims = GitHub isn't a good measure to determine work DONE (we're not talking about upcoming work here)
My claim = All the work done, all the commits for related work are on GitHub for the public to see, call me an asshole, that's ok, but to say I've not answered your question? what more would you like?



Who's being the asshole here? the guy has no agenda, he holds the coins, if he wants to use font to get a point across he's free to do so.
Once again, and let me yell this for you, WE'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT AVAILABLE CODE, WE ARE TALKING ABOUT A COMPLETE RELEASE OF A VERSION LACKING WORK
Your available code claim comes back to the whole "It's coming" argument, this thread is not about the future or holding a crystal ball, it's about observing the work which has been done on the released versions.

Jbg promised 1.3.5 to Mac in 48 hours. But did not delivered it. That person asked him about that and said that you promised that 1.3.5 in 48 hours. At that point jbg lost it and started that. So in my opinion "that dude" did not deserve it.

I think that you are wrong here.

I wasn't going to reply to this nonsense but I laughed so hard at your comment:


Yet you said this in an earlier post:


Please make up your mind  :D :D :D

1. The difference between Spectrecoin and Shadowcash: Have you forgotten to mention Tor hidden service, that isn't in the ShadowCash or any other coins (DeepOnion, Verge, Bytecoin, Zcash...)? Do you know the big difference between Tor hidden service and Tor (exit nodes are involved)?
2. Well
3. Version 1.4, that is completely rewritten, is being developed for half a year. So far, this is a private code, it is absent from the GitHub, in order to Tokenpay does not steal it. Until it is released, we will assume that you are right.
4. You conducted a very long investigation, but it was enough to read official wiki:

TLDR: its a scam, and you might have an IQ >80 if you bought it

I agree that guy is an asshole, but that's not exactly what I have meant with my statement.

So why are you very greedy what this coin die? I dont think that we need to be hurry about this.
We need to give the developer team time to change every single of issue then if it can not fix, just let it dies.

The quote you've referenced from my anti FUD thread does not apply here, this is not a FUD thread, it's a show me proof thread.
If you read my post in the quote you've stated, I make comments about the threads like "Bitcoin is going to die" etc, these threads hold no value other than some guys speculation, this thread on the other hand shows proof through work, my god you shills are digging real low now.

Wow, you have edited your post because previous was obvious lies (Words you put in my mouth, I didn't say.), so you made another one which is more slimy btw. I am actually glad you did it because it sheds some light on what possibly your intentions/reasons are.
I have made meaningful comparison with other open source project, like Linux distributions and talked about practices which are common for many if not most of Open Source projects.

How you put things out of context, like this for example: "The code on GitHub is not a good measure" is unbelievable.
Adieu everyone.

IQ bigger than 80? So people with IQ 145 should consider it?

I'm not wrong at all, while I won't post his name I'll say this, go dig around his GitHub profile a bit and you'll find his complete name, first, middle and surname, from here you can look him up, jbg admitted to owning a bar which didn't work out, he has admitted to being in his 20s, if you search his full name you come across an interview video of a New Zealand guy with his full name, they talk about the bar, if you then look further in to this guy you find some of his online profiles which has his date of birth and it's the same guy, he's 29, same guy also owns an eCommerce system which jbg has admitted to, the guy in the interview video looks late 20s also.

There is absolutely no denying this.

If you're calling some one out as being wrong, show some proof, it's what this thread is about after all.

Regardless this thread focuses more on the code and lies, being 29 if he didn't lie about his experience and had produced some work, I wouldn't really care about his age.


This is the lowest reply in the whole thread, can any one back me up here on the fact he's edited his post and now claims I've edited or made up a quote? I don't need to make anything up and I've been honest all along.
Maybe I need to start archiving the thread to prevent this from happening again, just more proof he's got nothing useful to say I guess.

You don't accept pm from newbies. Could you enable that?

Editing posts, really?

Given that the facts mentioned on this thread are true, this is truly alarming. I actually had high hopes for XSPEC but now I see why the value has tanked badly. I guess the nice logo design fooled everyone too.

My god, the irony in someone trying to insult other people’s IQ by saying that by buying XSPEC they have an IQ less than 80. Yet he uses a “greater than” symbol. LOL, amazing.

Also, since you clearly lack the attention span to read the thread you would see this project is far from a scam. Has issues? Sure, but they are being resolved. Actually some due to these FUD threads bringing some of the problems to life. There is a great community of talented people now working on this, so whether or not people want to say JBG didn’t do enough on the project, that’s much diffferent than a coin being a scam. And I won’t make the distinction until we see what V1.4 brings.

Wow, thats the Onion quote of the year.

Go back to shill DeepOnion please, you can't even flame.

ok, good finds of gunner833 and preshpr1nce and quite interesting for investors (especially for very cautious, hesitant, and risk-averse investors).
jpg seems to be caught and embarrised by you because he obviously hasn't delivered enough results within that quite big time frame.

but does this really make the whole project a scam or would it even be "proof" for a scam?

i would bet you would find similar things in many coin projects if you would just dig deep enough into them.
some of them might indeed be scam projects.
but in this one i'm not sure about that.
there seems to be still a good team behind it and the technical structure of the "shadowcoin" is pretty nice and solid.

as it seems the team is trying to solve the issues and make up for the done mistakes.

i think jpg should admit his mistakes and give away a big part of the work into other hands what he obviously already does (at least partly).

although jpg might have delivered too less of programming work he could have still done some more work around it than it seems to us.
maybe he spent alot of time with researching the code and whatever else.
not all of someones work can 100% be controlled through physical results.
we cannot really tell.

and also the coin is already working well so maybe it wasn't too urgent to improve things on the technical side.

but i still agree with you guys that it was just not enough of what jpg has delivered until now.

i will hold my coins and hope that other programmers will take over the work now and in the future.
and maybe jpg will still deliver something on what he has promised.

To me, as someone who is not an expert in programming or cryptocurrencies, it is very difficult to understand which project is a scam and which is not. This is a real problem for most people in this forum, because scammers who create such projects - are becoming smarter and smarter.

In my opinion your view is balanced. Calling it a scam or not is subjective.

But we agree on something important: jbg hasn't done much work. Please explain it to the community :) since they are still questioning this, which is quite obvious to anyone who looks at the github repository. Is he really working full time as he stated then? He might have done some other work, but what? From June to December there is only a week of coding work in September, what has he being doing in all this time? He only recently said that learning the code base requires time. That's true, but not 6 months with very little code changes.

And I agree jbg should just list his mistakes and restart. But he hasn't done so, it's taking months for him to admit a few, which might say something about the moral of the character.

Excellent explanation bro. Thanks a lot, you saved many of us and from little to big investors. Yes, now I can see they are SCAM. Who knows how many scams are around us! That's pretty scary for me, I don't have much to invest and lose. Everyone be careful.

Good findings OP. How I wish I have coding abilities so as to be able to inspect any Cryptos projects I want to anytime.

and how exactly can you see that now?
just because a developer didn't do as much work as he pretended the whole project suddenly is a scam?
also without his work the coin was already a good working product before that and it still is.
although this coin is not really different than the former shadowcoin, so what?
it has still a very good technical structure.
and besides of this one developer there is obviously a great team behind it.
let's wait and see what will be added to it in the next months to become an even greater coin.

It's his own judgment, you can disagree, but please bring some facts to prove the opposite and not only random claims.

You can wait and check in the next months, I have been waiting for months already and not much happened.

preshpr1nce, can you answer, is a Tor hidden service a wallet colour, version numbers, the name or logo, also what is the difference between Tor hidden service and Tor, and in which coins is Tor hidden service used?

tor hidden service is not any of those but, very simply, it hasn't been done by jbg and that's why it is not listed in any of his changes. He has done only UI, library updates and the ability to send money to him, in the less than 2 months (Dec-Jan) he has worked on the project out of the 9 months (Jun-Mar) he is claiming he worked full time on it.

12 March, 1.4 was due on February, no one knows when 1.4 will happen (jbg announced news about it 3 times, last time 7th of March, still hasn't disclosed anything certain). 1.4 code still not public on github after promising so at the end of Jan, 1.4 release still not done.

From his today few messages, it seems he hasn't even started doing linux packages, which were due with 1.4 as you can see in the website roadmap.

i think it's fair to read the response to this thread from one of the team members:
https://github.com/bitcoinx2/spectre/wiki/Proof-that-XSPEC-is-NOT-a-scam

i think it's a good thing that one of the team behind this project admits some made mistakes and doesn't deny your exposed facts but clears some things up and explains their sight from "behind the scenes".

please don't consider me as a "shill" or whatever because of this post.
i am just a small investor with about 500 coins who also thinks critical and trys to see things objective and from both sides.

i see your points which are mostly facts which are checkable and verifiable.
your points showed that there are some promises of one developer not delivered and some things not as they were supposed to be.
i think you have done nice research and your findings are helpful for many people who are involved into this project.

but i just think because of that it is not fair to call this project a scam.
you just showed some weaknesses and mistakes being made of one single person.

i have no further proofs of anything besides the official definition of a "scam", which definately does not describe it being a scam if one person doesn't deliver his promises on time and even not if he doesn't tell the truth.
all of this doesn't make project a scam.

and it is always difficult (sometimes even not possible) to judge about someones work only based on the actual results you can see.
of course you obviously have enough experience to estimate and evaluate the neccessary amount of work for the actual results to this moment.
but still you cannot be 100% sure if that's really all the work which that person had done all the time.
i don't have any facts to prove this but this should be common understanding.
maybe you are right on this one but this point cannot really totally be proven as you haven't seen him all the time what he has done for the project or not.

i know my statements are pretty close to the content in the linked response above.
but this was exactly my opinion on this the whole time although i'm not involved with the team myself as i mentioned above.

thanks for you reply, I have read that page but unfortunately does not clear up anything of what we are questioning.

That page says basically 3 things:
1. the project is not jbg dependent
2. the project is actively developed
3. jbg is legit because Gandalf86 knows him for long

I think these statements are inaccurate because:
1. if jbg leaves, this project is very likely to die, if it's not dead already. As jbg also said (but it's an excuse to me), one reason of the lack of work is that he needed time to learn the code base (you definitely need time to learn a code base, but definitely not 7 months, which are the months of missing development from github). If this is true, I would expect a new developer to take months to learn the code base too, in the best case scenario. Developers are not robots or machines, you don't just replace them and expect that everything will be exactly the same. You are already very late with your road-map, you will be more late if jbg leaves, and you'll lose more investors and the competition will go ahead more in the meanwhile.
2. This is false until contrary proof. Again only 2 months of work in github out of 9. The points also are a bit ridiculous. One of them says that the 0 balance bug is a race condition. The 0 balance bug is an UI issue, race condition?! Also the 0 balance bug is not fixed yet, it's still happening to some users with the latest version! I would love to see the commit that jbg did to fix this, as I can't find it. At this point, I wouldn't be too surprised if it's not there at all.
3. if jbg fooled you for long, it does not make him more legit.

You need to understand that you're not investing in tech when you invest in this coin, you're investing in your trust on jbg and all the claims he does, claims that cannot be proved. He also has been proved as a liar, a bad project manager and a bad communicator. Good developers are usually good also at communicating, estimating and managing projects, that's why they then become project leads and mentors.

Great research mate! But it's not a big surprise that one of 97% dead ICOs of 2017 is a scam. I hope this year will be different but still looks like it's not a big chance.

The author of this topic and jbg (spectrecoin dev) are great lads, that synergistically created FUD and delayed release of a new version. This lowered the price to 60 cents, and made it possible to rally again to $ 6 (where the price has been recently), after the release of a wallet 1.4.
The author of this topic did not conduct a large study, he wrote exactly 4 points and for each of them there is an answer: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3055715.msg31812046#msg31812046 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3055715.msg31812046#msg31812046)
He did not write anything new - this was written in the official wiki half a year ago: about ring size = 1, the world's first coin with Tor hidden service (exit nodes are not involved), OBFS4...
So Spectrecion has Stealth addresses, split/combining algorithm, Ring signatures, and still allows you to disable privacy if you do not want it - using ring size = 1 (will be removed). Or using Public addresses - as it is done in the PIVX, PARTICL - good privacy coins.
You mentioned deeponion, and if you are interested in its security, for comparison, then there is not even a ring_size = 1, because there isn't ring signatures. Deeponion isn't privacy at all at this moment, there aren't ring signatures, stealth addresses, split/combining algorithm - proof official roadmap (https://deeponion.org/), it's called Deepsend, Q2 2018 that isn't implemented yet. Deeponion uses Tor (exit nodes are involved) so it's not anonymous. Deeponion coin requires that you manually download and copy the OBFS4 executable file: https://github.com/deeponion/deeponion/blob/master/doc/setup-obfs4.md (https://github.com/deeponion/deeponion/blob/master/doc/setup-obfs4.md)
It will also just run the executable file: https://github.com/deeponion/deeponion/blob/413090c51575690ea6697db35b8e3e1e544b32af/src/net.cpp#L633 (https://github.com/deeponion/deeponion/blob/413090c51575690ea6697db35b8e3e1e544b32af/src/net.cpp#L633)
Also I can write verifiable proofs about Verge address/ip/amount-leaks (http://xvg.keff.org/) or about Monero IP-leaks (https://github.com/DotNetRussell/MoneroUserScraper), but this does not mean that they are scam.

I will expect more in-depth research and more reasonable criticism from you, I hope this will help the developer fix some really important things and will motivate the developer to release the new version faster.

fixed it for you Deeponion and XSPEC coins both require that you manually download and copy the OBFS4
XSPEC will also just run the obfs exe.

straight up scam coin +1 to the researcher!

actually the scammers left and XSPEC is actually trying to do good work now. The topic here should be WISP Scam as XSPEC kicked @jbg hard in the buttocks.

+1