This reversal in attitude in two weeks or so between saying 'it's fine, just get on with it' and 'this is massively important issue that needs fixing now' is stark. The fact that this very problem was discussed around the time they were talking up the recent submission to bittrex for review and dismissed should ring all sorts of alarm bells amongst the whales and bigger holders and signal that at the very least, there needs to be an honest discussion about how the 'team' is running the project and how much they actually value community input. Given their history as a community, they'll likely simply plug collective fingers in ears and careen on to the next misstep instead.

To be honest most of the 15-20 or so guys who are consistently on the slack have been involved for so long now & are mostly either team members or whales anyway, so they aren't really likely to care about another month or so to wait. For what it's worth, I don't think this latest delay will have any effect on the success or failure of ionomy anyway, since there really isn't any outside expectation at this point for them to deliver anything. People who were on the fence at the beginning of the ICO will have long since chalked this up as vapourware, I would imagine.

They've apparently set themselves an 'aggressive target' of the 15th, but I'd honestly be shocked if it was complete by then. So the open beta for gravity or crypto gravity or whatever it's called is realistically probably not going to happen before early February. Oh well. I'm sure it'll be spun as miraculous, innovative and wonderful nonetheless in the meantime by the whales.

In the interest of accuracy and to avoid people twisting out of responding based on semantics, I believe you mean the 'roadmap' rather than the whitepaper. Amusingly, the project is still stuck at stage one despite being a good seven months in. Yes, yes, I know the common retort to this is 'they made Crypto Gravity a much bigger project than it was originally intended to be'. However, I can't help but think the decision to delay releasing anything this long will ultimately cost them as the anticipation amongst the thousands tens of actual users is reaching fever pitch -- anything less than an incredible success story at this stage could lead to significant dissatisfaction in the ranks of the non-whale (or as Wildy lovingly refers to them, 'small fish') investors.

I also note with interest that rdewilde's (and this is by no means a dig at him; at least he's worked on something and delivered it) android wallet currently appears to sit in the 10-50 downloads category in the play store. Of course I realise that the use of a mobile wallet for a token that can't actually be used for...well...anything, really, other than producing more tokens of the same type, probably isn't the most realistic barometer of ionomy's actual user base. It's fascinating nevertheless that of their 'thousands' of users, only 10-50 have apparently thrown their support behind the community & rdewilde by downloading the wallet.

Thanks, that's pretty much what I remembered, but I couldn't find the archive -- kudos for finding that one so quick.

These were just titles handed out to people who invested in GAW or contributed to the community in the days of hashtalk, if I remember correctly. They don't mean that he was literally the founder of GAW, though I can totally understand the confusion. As with most of these things, there are numerous terms and phrases used within the community that make sense largely only to the community itself.

The 'founder' title lives on in Ionomy, by the way.

My apologies, I wasn't looking to argue with you. I agree that more transparency and better communication would be great, but I genuinely don't think they'll deliver that when we've gone this far into the project already.

With respect, poor communication and transparency have been points that have consistently been brought up both by people here and their own users on their slack and forums going back to XPY.io. Every few months they say 'we'll try and do better!' and then a further three months will pass without any official information.

Whilst I'm sure the subscribers to Ionomy appreciate the gesture, i very much doubt they will be better in the future.

I think what he means is that (with the benefit of hindsight) the attempt XPY.io made to salvage paycoin post-Garza was doomed from the start.

Is this the link you mean? To be fair to Huey, and as much as I enjoy laughing at the ionites generally, I don't think he ever claims to have met Garza or the GAW team in person. This isn't a Roger Ver & MtGox level of shadiness we're talking about here. This just strikes me as being (and I've said this before) the words of a very trusting and naive investor who probably genuinely did believe at the time that GAW and the wider paycoin community was going to kickstart taking crypto 'mainstream'.

I'm not disputing the fact that trying to continue with paycoin even after Garza had left and the 'community' was decimated was foolish. It clearly wasn't going anywhere and clearly wasn't going to work. Honestly, though, this project is exactly the same as most crypto projects. It's being run on a relatively small budget from crowdfunding, and relies heavily on volunteer and part time staffing. There are numerous holes in the business plan, strategy and most notably their communications because honestly, it's a largely amateur outfit.

The bar for entry with crypto projects, particularly ICOs, is very, very low. There are enough people who are either desperate for ideological reasons for crypto to succeed or who are obsessed with chasing the dream of being an early investor in something that blows up like Bitcoin that if you even project yourself as half competent, you can raise enough cash to either make an exit scam seem attractive, or keep a 'company' afloat for a while.

Oh, Sharkie. Never change.

According to someone on slack, bittrex is 'lined up' but 'on hold for the game', whatever that means, so I think our good friend and resident ion PR man sharky's proud proclamations of it being 'imminent' a month or so ago were somewhat premature. Maybe he missed that bit of the super secret meeting of the whales? With YoBit looking increasingly like it's dying a death, that leaves them with just their internal exchange, not that they're all that bothered.

I think when they refer to their user base, they mean the total number of people who have signed up to ionomy.com rather than wallet numbers. I still don't think they have thousands of active users (i.e. users that have logged in and made trades/purchased new stakers/skins etc), but they haven't released any official numbers for that platform so we have no real way of knowing. They probably have a decent collection of emails from running that platform for quite a while, though, so I guess they're hoping that a mail shot with a download link to the app stores etc will entice users who may have forgotten the platform/lost interest into downloading and testing.

I don't think we'll see the game before the years end, though, as they were talking about finalising a social media invite system before they launch the beta; we already know how long it takes to gestate these things.

I'll give ladrx the benefit of the doubt for that comment, but it's worth remembering that this is exactly the kind of thing that the ionites love to criticise bitcointalk for -- the constant (alleged) obsession with trying to link ion back to Garza. It seems redundant to be continually flogging what seems to be a very dead horse when there are far more legitimate avenues of questioning clearly available.

The 3RE thing is interesting, but (and I'm playing devils advocate here) I'm unclear of its relevance to ion other than that it shows that most of the main Ion 'team' are 'working' formally together.

There's a different Gravina on LinkedIn listed as being in Singapore as an accountant. That seems a more likely candidate if any, surely? Honestly the Boston link above seems like a big leap and an attempt to somehow tie this guy to Garza, which is a bit unfair.

Thanks for dredging that up! You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but I don't think that centre pic is the same person as left and right. Thanks anyway again.

Again, totally agree. I can't see non-crypto people being particularly interested in the ecosystem, and in my opinion given the way they've engaged so far with the wider crypto community and the divisions that already exist between cryptos anyway, I can't see there being many crypto folks who will engage either. If they deliver an absolutely cracking game that then somehow goes viral then they might stand a chance of getting things off the ground for a bit, but realistically I just don't think this team can deliver that based on their performance with XPY.io.

Oh yeah, I totally agree. To be honest I find it difficult to believe that there will be any 'external' users from outside the group who chat on slack (other than the kids of MrCoins and others) who would even have the faintest interest in beta testing the game. I certainly don't get the impression there is a large user group champing at the bit to get on the game.

To be honest, its like the majority of crypto projects in that it's half baked and appears poorly run, poorly communicated and overall poorly thought out.

Without sounding like a nitpicking arse, and with the greatest respect to you, I'm sure you realise that their business plan hinges on them getting enough users in to expand that currently rather threadbare community and make it desirable enough for 3rd party game devs to accept those terms. If they don't get the users into the community (and as I've said before, I just don't think they will -- the whole concept just seems a bit too clunky in my opinion for casual mobile gamers to truly engage in the ecosystem), it won't work. For all of their grandstanding and bravado, I'm sure MrCoins et al are aware of that.

With regards to the app stores -- they seem fairly confident that they've found a way around the TOS, so I guess we'll see what happens when they finally get round to making a first release.

Just curious, do you have a source you could point to for Matlack being Garza's childhood friend? I've seen that insinuated on bitcointalk a few times and I've never seen any evidence that was the case. I'm just trying to be balanced here, and from what I can see Matlack was simply another naive investor duped by Garza for a bunch of money who appears to have made some baffling decisions since then as the de facto community leader. I don't think he was ever friends per se with Garza -- but I'm open to being proven wrong, of course.


Again, I think (and correct me if I'm wrong) that 'Team Paycoin', which later became XPY.io and then eventually Ionomy were (supposedly) a completely separate entity to 'The Paycoin Core Development Corporation'. The lack of action from the Core Dev team was cited as a reason for XPY.io to split off and form Ionomy, in fact. However, I notice that 'Grav' posted in that thread with a some vague insight into what the 'Core Dev' team were doing at the time, and I believe he's most likely the Singapore contact and owner of Graval PTE -- so that shows that there was at least at one point some co operation and communication between the groups.

Regardless, Ion apologists will point to the fact that 'Team Paycoin' i.e. Matlack and co technically didn't gift cryptsy the Prime. I'm by no means their biggest fan, but I think its important to stick to the heaps of issues they genuinely don't have easy retorts to, as you've already stated, like the frankly ridiculous ongoing problem with the company registration, or the fact that they're essentially shitting out free coins and offloading them through 'promotions' to their enraptured tens of fans for BTC they can easily cash out. I don't necessarily think they're corrupt, but it's abundantly obvious that neither the team running the project nor the main user base have learnt any lessons from XPY either under Garza or, more latterly, under the vague development offered by XPY.io.