The BBC and other news outlets say yes but no evidence of it has been provided.

Still no update?

Not bad for a two year old coin.

We have indeed become friends.

I'd be 100% behind this project if there was one hint of compromise in working methods to allow my contributions to be worthwhile.

It has been incredibly frustrating to see my efforts of the last 12 months go to waste because of a lack of community engagement and team work.

Very fair point.  For the public record, I recently agreed to assist another project with some project management work but real life issues lead me to go AWOL and renege on that undertaking.  Communications should have been better but they weren't. I have too much going on at the moment. Its a fair cop. 

Being a sensitive soul I took a bit of offence to indirectly being referred to as a FUDer a few posts back.

For this reason I thought I'd jot down my position on the Spreadcoin project in a more detailed way so that I at least can have my say in a single post that can be referred to.

These are purely my own opinions so please treat them as such.  I still have a large stake in Spreadcoin. I post this hoping to open a debate that so far hasn't been forthcoming.

The vision I bought into.

An innovative, blockchain based, decentralised service provision experiment.  The plan was to create an overlay network consisting of service nodes. It was discussed and agreed that the best way to achieve a large service network would be to create paying nodes that perform either no service or a very minor one so that the network could grow while work on the first services could happen. I thought that the idea was to create an API so that once the service network existed, anybody could develop their own services.

Separately, I believed that PoBN was going to be the centre-piece cryptographic challenge that a core group of the Spreadcoin team would work on once the service network was growing in mainnet while other groups worked on other services.

The vision 12 months later.

Georgem  decided that service nodes cannot exist without providing a service.  Georgem decided that the first service is going to be a block explorer.  Neither of these decisions were made in consultation with either the dev team or the community.  Indeed, this change of direction was made 9 months after taking over the project which wasted a large amount of the dev team's work.

My primary concerns.

In the last 12 months the only release from this project has been the pretty wallet with vanitygen.  Progress is too slow.  Statements about the project surviving problems in the past miss the point.  Good momentum is needed if support, financial and otherwise, is to grow.

Georgem refuses to work alongside other developers or to discuss progress or problems either publicly with the community or privately with the core dev team.  The continual failure to engage with anybody has lead to significant frustration among a number of people.  Not just me.

Several people on the core dev team have invested large amounts of time and money into public relations and business development in conjunction with georgem's timscales but each time new investment is attracted, the glacial pace of progress with the project and missed deadlines dowses any new interest. 

What I ask Georgem to consider.

Evaluate your skills.  If you don't have the right skills, bring people on board who do.  You have said before that you can't learn working with somebody else.  If this is true, are you really lead dev material?  You need to lead this project, not just code.  I believe you are failing at the moment.

Pause for a moment and consider the number of  experienced and successful experts in their fields who have been alienated from the team.  I'd like to hear your views on why you think this has happened.

Consider code reuse.  See my comment about learning from others.  Reusing code doesn't mean you are taking a shortcut or that you are copy and paste dev.  Code reuse when done properly is best practice. 

Reconsider your “no blank servicenodes” approach.  By developing the overlay network and block explorer at the same time I believe you are setting yourself up for a fall.  Do things in a modular way.  Not only is it a more versatile approach, it is easier to debug and usually more scalable.

Ask the community what the first service should be.  Discuss.  Engage.  Agree.  Stop treating Spreadcoin as your personal project.

Talk to people!  Stop disappearing for weeks on end, start telling people what is happening and start sticking to your promises.

Learn to love investors.  You can't talk about needing to pay your bills and then belittle investors in the same breath. The project needs investors and it needs you (and everybody else) to cater to their needs.


What do I think will happen next?

It's all down to Georgem actually proving that he either has the dev skills to deliver or the wider IT skills to manage the project and backfill skills gaps.  If neither of these things happen, then SPR is dead in the water.  I don't believe that the altcoin scene is going to be a growth area for long enough for Georgem to build a service network from first principles. 

Dozens of amazing opportunities have been missed.  I believe that Spreadcoin would have been a top ten coin without any compromise on decentralisation or code quality if various bits of advice had been followed.  Hindsight is a wonderful thing but significant and radical change is needed if this project is to succeed. 

Time to step up and become a leader Georgem.

Why can't you tell us anything else?

No hint of an ETA or comment about what you are currently working on?  Any challenges that you'd like to share with the community? 

So how is work on service nodes coming on Georgem?

Big data has always been secondary to engaging the community and releasing paying service nodes for me.  I would never rush anything in if it wasn't fit for purpose.

It is because you dismiss those who are in a position to help the project most as having violent mood swings that people are losing confidence in you.

16 years of experience managing large IT projects says that projects with one lone star refusing to collaborate with his team always ends up with some level of failure whether that mean total failure or a compromise on quality and benefits.

I hate all violence.  Including US foreign policy.  Why not change your avatar to a peace symbol?

My wife is a Muslim who was born in a war zone. Her and her family are the most peaceful and loving people I know.  My issue is not with Islam, it is with the black banner which you are using as your avatar and what it represents.

This isn't the place to discuss this. If you don't like it, report it and put him on ignore.  Come on people, this is a coin ANN thread.

I'm out too.  I've given hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of pounds to this project and I've got no faith that anything is going to be delivered.  I've donated time from my day job and private life and it isn't worth it any more.

One year since the takeover and we have a pretty wallet and vanitygen.  Progress is just too painful and Georgem steadfastly refuses to use any of the vast amount of experience and assistance thats available to him or even harness the power of the community.  Stay tuned became insulting a long time ago.  This project is extremely centralised while we have one dev working in private without engaging us.

I've got a bag of SPR still but liquidity prevents me from selling it.  Maybe one day in the future I'll check the price and be surprised.

The number of nodes operated by the companies in the list is commercially protected information.  I.e none of the companies on the list were prepared to disclose the size of their data gathering network.

However, informal conversations with contacts employed by companies that may or may not be part of that list lead us to believe that 100 to 250 full nodes is required to get a decent picture of the Bitcoin network.

The core update is becoming more and more critical, especially with the release of 0.12.0.

Maybe this should be a bounty?

My only criticisms are that communication is non existent and progress isn't reported.  This makes it very hard to contribute.

How can a team work together if they have no idea what the lead dev is doing?

I make no assumptions but I'd like to think that georgem would ask for help if he was struggling.  What he is setting out to do is achievable and there are plenty of people out there ready and willing to help if he would let them in.

This is a community project but at the moment it feels like georgem is running this solo.