Bitcoin Forum

VOTE on the NEM second auditing and sock puppet removal or NOT. Discussion here.

Reason : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=654845.2260

Yes, in wake of the 6 free stakes that were just handed out recently, I vote yes.

6 stakes is enough to crash the price of NEMstake, for the moment.

will pm you, but i will be quite busy in the next few days. However, I think we should aim to be more transparent. I don't like the node guy secret method because that means no one can check on them !

Some of NODE's methods were questionable . . . . (a lot of controversy on their thread over it) . . . even with the "intuition" (witch hunting) they only found a couple of sock masters and most of them only had 2 stakes (nothing which affected NODE's distribution).
 

If there was a way to inactivate these particular stakes I would do that.

No way to do that, since AE is completely decentralized, theres no "admin" to talk to about this matter

So I started this thread: http://forum.nemcoin.com/index.php?topic=2279.new#new (http://forum.nemcoin.com/index.php?topic=2279.new#new)
figured we could use with regards to a second public audit. Even if we don't do a second public audit, I think my proposal would still be a good idea. (My plan was originally brought up by ARGpentem, I thought he had a good idea, so I went with it)

Here is a problem: It's impossible to catch all sock puppets just by activity or taint analysis. You can't even do taint analysis with Nxt investors as all accounts are connected closely via exchanges such as Bter and Dgex.  Plus it's really easy to fool the system by transferring BTC to an exchanges and back.

As for account activity, people can have more than one active account that they use to post.  

The easiest solution to "sock puppet" problem is to no have "equal stakes per investor" as that system by it's very nature encourages sock puppets.   It should be a system where anyone could contribute up to 2 BTC (max) investment. That would cut 99% of socks as it starts to hurt anyway investing more than 2 BTC on a new IPO.

Another trick that could be used is to have a trick that is not known publicly. That is what happened with nodecoin, as most sockpuppets there weren't suspecting developers were logging users IPs /time each time users were using the client  (for example, to create account or just while users were "testing" the system).

This.  This makes the whole issue irrelevant.  

As well there's no conclusive proof that inactive accounts are sockpuppets.  There's many people who lurk and read Bitcointalk but simply aren't interested in any discussion on here.  The "call for participation" wasn't intended literally, it was legal wording to get out of any financial liability for running a securities.   While someone might not be active on Bitcointalk - they may be active on other social media websites or be really effective in viral P2P advertising.

My point is that we have too many "group 3", retroactively taking away their stakes (these people waited half a year) means NEM is going to create a lot of enemies overnight and I think that's more FUD worthy than any sockmaster boogeymen.  We know in NODE's case that (we take away the bull$hit intuition examples), they only found an extremely small number (compared to 1000 stakeholders) of sockpuppets.  So I stand by my conclusion that taking away stakes in mass is just going to piss off people and they'll be NEMs' worst enemies and they'll talk away any subsequent interested people.



The original issue here was someone scammed Pat of 6 or 8 tokens but that has nothing to do with sockpuppets, that was some guy who was looking up names on the stakeholder list and creating a copy cat name which look the same.

Then the people photoshopping banned photos to get NEMstake.

You know NEM must be really promising if people are resorting to weird ways to get it.


 

We don't have to take their stakes away, but we should try to at least message them and give them a chance to respond. Like ask them if they are a sock puppet, if so, who's account (up to 2 accounts controlled by 1 person is okay in the rules). If there are no replies, then we can consider taking stakes away, or if we can find proof that a person has more than 2 accounts.

I thought about it and in the long run its most likely not a big deal. I do have to give it up to the guy (sorry I forgot his handle) who admitted what happened. He could have just said nothing but in this type of environment honesty is crucial. So, he has my respect for that.

But back to the original topic, I am a professional auditor and I think that there's no harm in conducting a second audit or an audit of the first audit, so long as there is the community willpower to make such a thing happen.

 I think anyone that had puppets has already converted to Nemtokens on the Asset exchange or will pretty fast if a new audit is on the cards. It dosnt really matter if they sold or kept their tokens as they will redeem them for NEM simply be sending the token to the issuing address

Sounds good to me. Let them get out while NEM is cheap and let others come into the system instead.

Right now we are not issuing assets (temporarily) because someone scammed us out of 6 stakes.

You should have done before now it's too late

there is no chance to manage a new audit in a appropriate way now. the sockpuppets have probably already sold the nemstake.
Or do you want to audit the nemstakes as well?

Face it. Its too late for changes now.

i voted no with 10 of my puppets  :D :D great vote!

~CfA~

Only accounts with member status can vote.

as of right now, 20 people want a second audit, and 25 people don't want one. I don't think we can call it off yet.

ARGpentem will you be helping out with the audit if it happens, we need the community, dev and marketing team is quite busy.

Can you guys hurry up and release already. I want my stake to buy Qora while the price is low.

'A new Stakholder List doesent make sense,  everyday hoders changen.  The first distrubution was nice to know but know everybody can make a own picture.

Hi bro, why not ?

K OP, what's the plan?

What was final supposed to mean?

1. UP did an audit

2. A commitee did an audit

3. A public audit was done as well

*note* I got mine on the AE


This will harm NEM. Who started up this whole sockpuppet thing anyway.?
Isn't their many things that need to be done that we haven't done yet?

FUD trolls...CfA, ARG, etc. Obvious troll is obvious, etc.

A new audit has some pros and cons:

  + new sockpuppets may be found
  - <censored>
  - some may become angry like in the 1st audit (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=496112.160 )
  - extra work ... but maybe it is now cheaper than earlier :)
  + <censored>
---------------
= I think that if a new audit can be done in the similar, "discreet" spirit like the 1st one, then ... why not.

Great idea, ARGpentem there's your game plan right there. Let the NEM community know what you guys find the audit.  In fact, do another audit after that one, just to be the safe side. Report back to this thread when you guys are finished!

Heh, the sock puppets came out to vote "no" in force in the last 10 hours.

Why would sock puppets even care to vote now -- as at least 500 stakes have now moved to AE -- a decentralized system where developers can't stop anyone from selling them?   Two, there is not enough data. Nem only has  account activity / creation date and taint analysis for BTC only (not Nxt deposits).  Thi isn't enough for any kind of audit.

The case is not so black & white...

Basically nobody can prevent the audit as the audits have been public.
Everyone, starting from John Smith from Albuquerque to Wu Hao from Lhasa, can do the audit by him/herself: the data is publicly available.

The audit would have some benefits. And if the audit is accomplished with discreet, it could be quite harmless - with those censored benefits.

Agree^^^

All these people should work on ways to make NEM better. This is not one of them. This was already done. It's over, and the community has voted.

Why do we put up a vote, then go against the community decision?

Agree with You, Chris001

Not very happy with what is going on in NEM these days. I bought my stake for 1600 dollars. It used to go up and down, which is natural. Since these new guys took over NEM, it went only down.

I checked final stakeholder list, ARGpentem is not there. He is not original stakeholder, he is buying stakes from AE. He said that he lost 1 million dollars before, so I guess he is not poor guy. He is overly active when it comes to sockpuppets. He created this poll, even though there was no demand for it.

He restricted it to "members", which disqualifies third of Nemsters. Almost 68% of nemsters that actively follows AND have atleast member ranking is against new auditing.

This whole thing is very negative, it creates lot of uncertainity. It makes sense that NEM price is just falling and it is not just because of NXT. Dont let some whale manipulate you guys. Stop making investors unhappy.

You are opening pandora box. Who and how will decide, who is and who is not sockpuppet? Some extroverted blabla guys?
NEM was social contract between Utopianguy and investors, result of this contract was "final stakeholder list". Today NEM stake is 1000 dollars.
How can you just take 1000 dollars from someone, what gives you right, to do so. Will there be vote on every case?

I see just bad decisions. Also, why is logo of NEM tomoe and not cube, when cube was liked by community and tomoe is not.

What is wrong with you people, why you go against will of community? I dont get it.
I swear NEM is turning into Qora.

EDIT: I dont blame core team, I understand they are busy with coding. Just felt like community departed from original legacy. Thank you Kod and Pat. I like the idea with technical approach at launch much more.  :)

Code47 wrote what I feel about everything, even the cube part.

Why buy NEM if someone's going to take it from you?  We don't need that uncertainty.  We need assurance that the stakeholder list is final (barring some major abuse) and that any tokens we buy (1 or 100) will count as NEM at launch.

It's time we present confidence not uncertainty.  As we speak NEM is 25K to 27K NxT which is normal range but arguably it should be 32K if people weren't subject to these scares.

I'm not going to engage in any of the FUD I had to read through in this thread. We've addressed this stuff on multiple occasions.

What I do want to address is the whole second audit thing. There will be no second audit of the list as it is at least not from the core team. It just doesn't make any sense.
We're certainly not going to consider any results from NODE since little information is revealed on how they are identifying puppets and imho what they're doing isn't the right way to handle such things.
We are however in the process of desgining how stakes will be claimed. We're looking to make it as hard as possible and as time consuming as possible to claim multiple stakes from one machine. We all know that this isn't a 100% deterrent but we think it's the only thing left that makes sense and is fair.

Think about what puppets will do with their stakes anyway. They're going to sell them which is only distributing NEM further. As long as there are no huge whales around (which is exactly what we're trying to avoid with a technical approach) a few puppets won't hurt NEM. What will hurt NEM is starting this puppet hunt all over again.

Why open up votes on btt ? Every single person on btt can vote even the ones who haven't heared about NEM before - how much sense does that make ? Wanna have a vote among the community do it in our forum :)

This does not make sense as I buy off AE exchange. So you want to bother me as much as possible if I buy and support NEMstake in the AE exchange? You guys should be clear about what you want. If you don't want me to buy more than 2 then say it then I am going to sell off everything I have but be clear about it.

I thought we were talking about the stakeholderlist are we not ? If you bought on the NXT AE then you are not on that list.
Obviously we're not going to regulate the free market.

Okay. Thanks.

Well Pat - as I've said before, it's not clear to people whether there is a limit on the AE or not.  I was under the impression that limit of two tokens was lifted a long time ago (since it represents trading which would had happened if NEM launched), but there's some vagueness on that subject.

Any clarification on this? I was considering buying more stakes

for me it doesn't make sence to limit that now. how can you control that anyway. everyone can have multiple nxt accounts and multiple BTT accounts. as you probably wont look for sockpuppets in there, because he payed a lot for the stake already...
and how is it, if you have already a free stake, that is not on the AE? can you buy 1 or 2 then? doesn't make sence ...

I'm pretty sure we're not going to stick to that rule. There's no real way of enforcing it anway and also the AE is to be considered the free market and we shouldn't try to regulate that. 
I can't say 100% sure since this hasn't been discussed with everyone.

YES: NEM have many socks and second auditing is needed.
Many socks are voting.It is not fair.

Yeah, prove it or shut the fuck up.

You know very well he can't prove it.

I can understand you guys can reach your limits with the constant questioning and accusations. Why not just passively endorse a "3rd party" audit conducted by fellow NEM enthusiasts in the community who have nothing to do with you on a personal level. As was pointed out earlier its easy for anyone to conduct most of the audit on their own, they just have to take charge.

At this point I don't care, I read the last 20 pages of the moderated thread and agree with Kod that people with skills who want to help out might better put their time to use working on NEM-related projects. If I was a programmer, well I'd make my own software for my own assets first but later I'd work on NEM stuff too.

We've seen many people claiming that there are a lot of puppets but so far noone has shown any form of proof. That's why I reacted like I did. Just post proof or shut the hell up. What's the point ?

Usually I would support projects from the community but this is something that will do nothing but make another fuzz about socks and piss people off.

It doesn't make sence, to do anything about that now.
Face it: its too late! The coin is already on the market. The market should be able to freely trade it.

The team should concentrate on going further with the coin and promoting it.
Threads like this only hurt the coin. Please close it.

Dude you guys need to stop getting nuts over at Lets Talk Bitcoin.

There's an air of civility over there that you're clouding in an attempt to defend your coin. Calling their author's articles "crap" (even if they are) isn't going to win you any favors.

sometimes you just gotta let people believe what they want to believe. hopefully others who are serious will put in their due diligence and own research and come to their own conclusions.

in general i thought the story kind of had a shystery air to it but i didnt want to say anything.

some say that any press is good press, so don't let it bother you too much

I consider it good publicity.  Many people came into Bitcoin just from all the news about it hitting $1000+ in late 2013.

Yes his article is full of misinformation. Mind you - there's no centralized page detailing NEM.  To understand NEM, you have to go through a hundred pages of posts and download an alpha and frankly that's too much work in this day and age where people have an attention span of 5 seconds. There needs to be a media package or an information website.  Even a Wikipedia article would be a start (Ethereum and NxT has one..)