Funny you mention bter. Is it a joke? Bter is (half) dead at this moment. Centralized exchanges suck terribly. This should be taken as an opportunity for VIA and CH.

Escrow for bitcoins is necessary. Decentralized exchanges are needed more then before. If Black/ Bit Halo and Nighttrader can do this , why not ClearingHouse? Syscoin devs also claim they are working on an escrow. Is it not one of CH development priorities?

will we have a XCH/BTC pair when the burning period ends?

22nd? Any problems?

Launchdate: 22nd august 2014 - 02:00 PM  (UTC)

Revelation, I'm not really quite sure where you find your information about BTCdrak not being able to code or that he is "shady".  But you seem intent on disparaging him, so I'll chime in and let you know where I managed to get my information about him.

First I would like to disclose to the community that I am a large Viacoin holder.  I genuinely believe in the project.

I was fortunate enough to participate in the initial offering.  I stumbled across the ANN the day before the presale ended and managed to get 14 BTC in the presale.  I'd alerted my business partner to Viacoin, we had lunch and discussed the coin and he went on to contribute 75 BTC in the presale.  

I'm a believer that the next generation of cryptocurrency would run off it's own blockchain because the limitations of BTC were obvious to me.  I read "The Story of Viacoin" on the Viacoin blog and it resonated with me enough that I was excited about this project.  I'll admit I was very concerned that the core developer chose to remain anonymous but as I read more in the forums I'd learned that Btcdrak was a veteran member with a strong reputation amongst both developers and traders, and it put my concerns of his identity at ease enough so that I wouldn't dismiss this coin and I decided to participate in the presale.  One thing I noticed was his attention to detail, and how professional and almost flawless the Viacoin presale went from beginning to end.  His execution was impressive, and in my mind this is one of the major things that I look for in an entepreneur / core dev. and intuitively I felt that if he executed like this on the presale, then it's more probable than not that he would hold that same standard to all of his work.  But more so, I never felt like I was being sold on Viacoin, it more felt like I stumbled on a gem, and Btcdrak was just doing his thing whether or not I invested, he didn't care.  

So the presale happened, and within a couple of days a number of exchanges started picking up Viacoin, I think it was like 5 exchanges in 48 hours.  This was impressive.  Again, Btcdrak never promised anything and overdelivered.  

Then a very fortunate event occurred.  I was interviewing developers for some projects that my partner (Otoh) and I were thinking of starting up in either the Viacoin or Darkcoin ecosystem (we are also large holders of Darkcoin).  Well, one of the programming candidates out of Croatia had told me he was an investor in Viacoin as well.  The candidate was a fairly strong developer having worked for over 20 years in software development, he had experience in Unix/Linux, PHP, Perl, Java, C, C++, he had previously worked at Blue Martini software, and he was a graduate from a top university in the US (superior to my alma mater UC Berkeley).  I came to find out he had worked with Btcdrak on various projects over the last decade and he said that he knew him in real life.  Being fully aware Btcdrak did not want his identity revealed I chose not to inquire, but I asked him what he thought about Btcdrak.  His response was pretty much that a.) Btcdrak was extremely fair and honest and b.) that he was a very strong programmer and incredibly smart.  He went on to tell me that when he realized that Btcdrak was the person behind Viacoin he chose to invest in the coin.  While we did not move forward with this candidate (as we were looking for someone with more mobile experience) we have stayed in touch and he's referred us other qualified developers, leading me to firmly believe he was reliable in what he said.  

As a result of this fortunate discovery, my biggest major concern about this project had been resolved and what I had initially suspected about BTCdrak's level of work turned out to most likely be true.  A.) Because of the high praise of his integrity I didn't need to worry about his identity as it is extremely unlikely that this is a scam. and B.) He was a sharp individual and strong developer so I should feel confident that he will continue to overdeliver on this project.  

As such, I decided to increase my position in Viacoin considerably.  And sure enough over the next few days Btcdrak announces hiring both Grynn San and then Peter Todd, again never promising, but overdelivering.  

So Revelation, I'm not sure where you get your information about Btcdrak, but I thought I'd share with everyone where I got mine.  Also, for what it's worth, my partner and I don't make too many investments, but now when we do they are fairly considerable in size.  The last large investment we made was in Darkcoin where we acquired one of the largest stakes.  But we are not simply just coin holders.  We do a lot behind the scenes.  It turns out we were pretty much instrumental in why DRK was added to Bitfinex.  In addition to that, I introduced Evan Duffield to their legal counsel who is currently helping them structure the Darkcoin Foundation (which will soon be announced) of which I am a founding member.  We like to do everything we can to help our investments grow (and sometimes unfortunately things don't work out), and we'll happily offer the same help to Viacoin should Btcdrak or the community need anything.  But my gut tells me Btcdrak can handle all of this just fine.  He got this.

Awesome news!!!

We already have twitter account 

https://twitter.com/Root_Coin