i also think he wanted to promote NEM with socketpuppet accounts but IMO it was a wrong approach from the start,

As a stakeholder of Nem I would like to ask & know:  how many stakes does UP hold?

None knows for sure. He did remove 1 that was uncovered during the recent fallout and he told me that the others were removed during the audit.
If true he owns 1 stake + what he get's as founder and for his work.
He also said that he never meant to cash out any of them anyway.

It's up the you if you're going to believe this or not. Think about what happend though. Mistakes were uncovered and he immediately stepped down. That doesn't sound like someone who was just in it for the money. He could have left with all the raised funds months ago.

Its a conspiracy if it would true then NEM starts to be a serious rival of NXT while NXT trust of initial stakeholders is holding still most of NXT coins. So some of them may behave hostile to NEM because NEM has a big potential to threaten the NXT. And the most hated should logically be the founder of NEM project. They were waiting while people started buying stakes because it made NXT price growing. Now people are almost cashing out NXTs. This is not my theory, this is a theory of my job collegue but it seems to be working. So now has come the best time to start a tongue-offensive.

EDIT: IT seems that CfA explained the situation in many other threads. These ideas seem to be wrong also.

Sorry I don't use Bitcoin often, is that the same as a Bitcoin address? A theft was carried out as someone used an old bitcoin address >>> Looks random but it wasn't, appeared in many google results.

Just checking  

You seem very knowledgeable.  Can I ask you something?  Or anybody else? My password is 34 characters long.  No dictionary words, no spaces, all more or less random numbers, letters, and symbols.  NXT says it needs to be 35 or longer I think.  Should I move the NXT to another account? 

Also the idea for the auction came from the community so it wasn't designed to milk anyone unless the idea was to milk themselves ?
It's one thing to display concerns but it's just wrong to spread completely incorrect facts.

Good point. Uncaimed stakes should be divided and distributed to claimed stakeholders. This should be simple and fair.

One thing I can honestly say about this project. If you honestly wanted a say in what happens with the leftover stakes, you do have a chance to be heard. Not everyone involved with this coin is a "developer". Try getting involved and you'll see what I mean. Or, you can just sit back, watch, and make comments.

As a stakeholder I wish to add my support to the core dev team and have no intention of going anywhere, I read the thread numerous times a day, remain interested and committed to the original cause. One thing I would propose is that everyone takes time and gets some rest. Lets learn from the many things that UP did right not the one thing he did wrong. His decisions (mostly) always seemed to be considered and with an end objective insight. Please lets not start messing with the distribution of NEM or changing elements off the cuff. If people want a debate about a particular change or enhancement here is probably not the best place, a better place is probably on Trello where a request can be made and the full short and long term impact considered.

When is the last day to claim the coins?

Why not just destroy / not generate the unclaimed coins?

Send it to social impact investments if that is going to be a problem. No need to re-distribute. This will give NEM a real coin that "walk the talk" or "put your money where your mouth is".

Don't worry. We'll consider doing this once we know how many unclaimed stakes there are.

It is ok. We need money for promo and marketing and competitions (maybe), social impact investments. So many things can be done with it. I am least of all worried. We should only worry about it when we cross the bridge.s.

Still possible to do that. Not a bad idea actually.

Don't think it'll be that many but there are plenty of options how we could deal with them.

-another auction
-a sell to veteran memebers
-bounties
-faucet

Thruth is we'll probably discuss this once it's clear how many we're really talking about.

The dev team only gets 10% for half a year of work, which is not too much. The remaining amount is to keep NEM develop sustainable for at least another year and if things go well, we want to get a few people working full time on this. That is only realistically possible by reserving 25% of NEM.

No idea, but that will have to be decided in the days to come. UP has spent a lot of his personal time and money working for NEM (more than 99% of stakeholders), so I feel he should at least get something.

As far as I know, UP only had one sockpuppet that he intended to use, which is legal under the rules (you can have 1 other stake). The other ones he created just to promote the thread and he was planning to donate those to the devs for development and marketing.

I'll be happy to answer any questions anyone else has relating to NEM. I think Jaguar or Gimre will come and start a new official thread and we will regroup in a day or two.