TL:DR
I came across few suspicious things about XSPEC and I contacted jbg (lead (and only?) developer of XSPEC) privately. After the chat I had with him, I am still not sure if I trust the guy. Then after some thoughts and recent events, I have decided that it’s best for everyone to know what I know, and judge for themselves.
I will not invest long term in SpectreCoin (XSPEC) as almost everything jbg says to people is very difficult to prove and some might even be lies. Note that this is my personal conclusion, and it is based on the facts explained below.
LONG VERSION
I have been looking for a coin to invest long term and I have come across XSPEC on this forum a lot, so I decided to take a deeper look.
I am myself a software developer, so I do look quite closely to the code and its change activity. From the github commits, it seems that jbg started working on the project in June last year. There was only a few commits from June to December. From the end of September to the start of December, there was only one commit. From December onwards there has been more commits.
Then I examined these commits further: most of them were UI changes. In the 8 months (Jun 2017 to Jan 2018) there were only 3 changes to the core (most of the codebase is ShadowCoin): a quick fix on ring sizes, OBSF4 and a new feature that enables people giving stakes to the developer (!). All the rest were UI fixes and some library upgrades. That means the codebase is basically ShadowCoin with a few UI bugs fixed plus the ability to give money to the developer. ShadowCoin was a good coin regardless so at least this has inherited all the good bits.
I then checked who have been making these changes. I know that there should be two developers, each with 20+ years of experience, actively working full-time on this cryptocurrency. Weirdly when I looked into who made the code commits, only one person (jbg) had been making commits in the past 8 months. I could not see any commits done by another account.
This already sounded suspicious so I researched more and have come across his real name! This is super weird for a privacy crypto developer who claims to be anonymous. I then found also out he is in his twenties (20+ years of dev experience in his twenties?) and he used to have a bar business for two years (20+ years of dev experience on his twenties with 2 years with a bar business?) which went bankrupt with a $90k+ tax debt. Also he is now running an ecommerce business (he claims he works full time on XSPEC? Anyway website also looks quite amateur to me).
At this point I decided to contact him privately on slack. To summarize the discussion:
- About his age and his experience, he said he claimed to have 20 years experience because he had been paid for a software project he made at school when he was 9. He agreed that he might have over-exaggerated this but commented that it's kinda ok as people usually do this.
- About the bankrupted bar business (two years), he still counted this as dev experience since he developed the PoS system for the bar.
- About the mysterious second dev, he said he is a cryptographer and he is working on stealth staking that will be available in Q2 2018. I asked if the community could see any of his work, not only stealth staking, but he said I should wait until Q2.
- About the no commit period between the end of Sept to the start of December, he claimed that they were working on the UI rewrite and stealth staking. Both features were supposed to be hidden from public for now, so no way to check this.
Here is what I assess the facts given so far:
I thank him for being really transparent as he was open to discussion and didn’t deny my findings. However, everything becomes more suspicious. jbg is definitely knowledgeable in the crypto space, he knows his stuff, and always answers everyone’s questions on Slack. His coding ability is certainly good enough for library upgrades and quick UI bug fixes.
Unfortunately jbg is trying to look much more experienced than he actually is. Exaggerating his work experience is problematic because it is skewing people’s expectation and assumption when investing. We would naturally feel assured as we expect him knowing how to run, scale and lead a team, working in multi-disciplinary complex projects, and so on. This is really suspicious especially in the crypto world where scams are everywhere.
Not only his own dev experience did not check out, it is even more suspicious when there is no commits from the second dev, so-called cryptographer, on the repo. If there really had been some work done by two full-time developers since June last year I would at least see some public commits from them both.
When he claimed that both stealth staking code and UI rewrites are hidden features, I found it really suspicious. Stealth staking code to be hidden I understand, but UI rewrites? He said he does not want to make the UI rewrite public but since December he clearly has made public commits on UI changes. That makes no sense.
I honour his narrative on hidden development work but it is only his word for the last 8 months of development. As it stands, there is no actual proof apart from UI bug fixes and library upgrades. The current github commit history is definitely not enough to justify 8 months work by 1 or 2 full-time experienced developers. From my research, he's also running another ecommerce company on his own, that is a web application. I remain doubtful on the part where he says he is working full time on Spectre too. Suspicious.
As I mentioned at the start, I was going to leave the project silently after speaking with jbg as people should do their own research and make their own conclusion. However there had been a suspicious activity that made me post this publicly. Literally a day after our chat, I noticed that the github repository has been moved to a new one. This means if he or his mysterious teammate did do private commits during Sept to Dec last year, we would probably not be able prove this anymore.
And a new github account called Bryce has miraculously showed up! This account has done no commits so far, even though it joined in September, but it has now created his first pull request! And of course it is about a library upgrade, no structural change. This is now too suspicious.
In the crypto world I am used to account for worst case scenarios and, in my opinion (and I stress this is my opinion!) the worst scenario for this case is:
- jbg is a developer who found a good abandoned coin and tried to work on it
- he created a nice community around it, he studied about crypto and SpectreCoin specifically very well so he is able to answer all the community questions
- he is lying about his developer experience so he can look more valuable
- he is also lying about another developer/cryptographer as Bryce does not exist
- always from my research, he has an ecommerce company so he can work on the coin only on his free time, not working full time as he said
- the only contribution that he can realistically offer is quick bug fixes as well as speaking to the community. That's why he is always available on slack
- aside from other features he could have done, somehow he found time to implement the feature where the community can donate him money
- his main motivation seems to be getting donations as he certainly is trying to keep the thing going. As the main revolutionary stealth staking is scheduled for Q2, he would have had 6+ months worth of donations by then. It is quite a good deal for him if you only have to do small bug fixes and answering all the common community questions on slack
- he says that he does not have much coins so he's not interested in the coin price. However people have been donating a lot of coins to him: averaged ~$6000/month only on stakes donation at the actual rate, plus all the ones he received previously, plus the ones he owns on his own. These donations means a lot to the country he lives (yup I found out where he lives) as it has a very low average salary.
This is my worst case scenario that I deduced from the information I found. It might not be true, but it is possible.
If you count the number of times I wrote the word "suspicious", you'll understand why I am not going to invest now. It is probably better to wait and see the end of February when 1.4 is scheduled with a full UI rewrite. This is also suggested by jbg and I will pass this on but bear in mind that he is happily receiving donations in the meantime.
Few last things:
- I am not going to reveal jbg identity or how I found it. But I have proofs of our conversation, and I can share this if necessary (with all personal information censored).
- I already spent too much time on this and I need to move on
. For this reason I don't think I am going to reply.
- I really hope jbg will prove what I wrote wrong with the delivery of the Spectre road map on time.
- I hope cryptographer Bryce really exists
- crypto is full of smart people and scams, try not to invest on words, but invest on facts.
Thank you for this research! The amount of accounts shilling xspec on this forum is supremely annoying and another red flag in my opinion. Of course I looked into the coin too and decided to pass because I don’t invest if the team is not known. I also found some threads on Reddit if i recall correctly that went through the revolving door of developers or team members at xspec. Glad to know I’m not the only one on all of bitcointalk that doesn’t trust the future of xspec!
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