Crypto needs this..  It's the only thing that's going to slow down the scams.

I encourage people to be sceptical at all times.  That's one of the reasons I've chosen Opal to invest in, I know where the developers minds are at from their past performance.

Perhaps if people were more sceptical with Mt.Gox, or LTCGear, those things wouldn't have happened so easily.  If someone questioned either of those, would you have said "It's amazing how people are always on the offensive"?

You don't want to be sceptical after it's too late. At the very beginning of something is the best time.

Your system is new.


How can you prove that any of the claims are not any of your own wallet addresses?  

If you have an automated system where people donate and load wallets
If you have an automated system where people can claim coins
If you have an automated system where it "logs" transactions

You're telling me that you also are incapable of:

Having an automated system where it skims coins on a regular basis from itself, using different wallet addresses? Of course you could.

It's like give me all the "money", I'll be in charge of all the distribution and all of the recording of transactions.  I'll run the whole system, you just keep feeding it.

Very suspicious, sorry.

Right now your faucet system is small. But if it ever grows in scale, this can be an undisputed problem.

If there is an Opal faucet, I'd rather see it running on the official Opal website by an Opal developer who is already trusted by the Opal team.


Ok, so that makes sense.  Instead of skimming, it was something similar, but not quite so evil.

You wanted to setup a donation site so people you visit locally (family and friends I assume, near your geographic location), could get a hold of some crypto without buying any.

(using your own words basically)

It would be better to just buy $50 or $100 worth and donate them to your family and friends or whatever "local" group of people you are talking about.

I don't get the motive behind this from the person holding the faucet site for multiple currencies.

The only think I can figure out, is that people donate coins to the site.

It legitimately hands out coins. But at the same time, it skims coins on a regular basis to it's own internal wallets "off site", changing the wallet address often, or simply posting false "coins remaining" balances.  A true money maker for person getting devs to support the site by advertising it and donating coins to it, and getting them to link to it.

If that's wrong, then what is the motive? "I'm just a good guy, trust me?"

The dev is busy staking and minting new coins

I feel like this is the same excitement when people were buying ltcgear shares. Different animal altogether, but same hype.

What is it that everyone is buying here? Here's no roadmap, no real technology other then a weird POS reward system.

Other than trading this coin, who will want it?

I'm a little late commenting on this, but I bought a lot of Opal when it was around 3200 sats.  I fully expect to see that price return and probably double.

So if you can buy Opal under 3200 sats, you're getting a great price in my opinion.

Exactly.

So that includes my hard criticisms, and the explanations that disqualify any issues I raise.

Controversy keeps the thread alive, and more postings, which means better recognition on Bitcointalk.

So indirectly, I'm helping. A healthy debate on where Opal is going, just leads to more posts, more recognition, and more new people catching the wave.

Based on what I said, I think I should keep posting my thoughts because I'm actually helping here.


How is this better than holding and staking the normal way?

I went to bitsofnews.net and it is a complicated site. I wasn't sure as an Opal holder how I could earn more Opals via that site?

If you know me by now, I usually speak my opinion.

This Opal embassy would be nice to have its own website, and just refer to it with a small description and a link.

I hate seeing these huge graphics cluttering up the thread.

Maybe the Opal embassy can have it's own thread instead?

Sound interesting.

I hope any type of development like this always happens on TESTNET and not the live network.

Most people won't download, install, and take the time to figure out new software unless they have a good reason.

... "But colored coins can do all these things"

Yes, ok, but here are some semi-rhetorical questions:

1) Is there a huge community currently using the opal version of them?  No. It's new.  Ok, but isn't the point of colored coins to trade assets?  If it's empty and desolate trading, why would I be the first?

2) If I use it, do I have to go find other people to want to use the opal version of them?

3) Who is using the opal version of them now?   Who will be using the opal version of them tomorrow?

4) Ok, ok, ok, I'll bite. Before I do, let me see a few screenshots.  Oh, there are none?  How about a youtube? none?

5) How come I didn't read about this on cointelegraph or coindesk.com ?

6) Why hasn't supernet announced anything about this?  Wasn't that the point of the supernet community, to cross-promote and share achievements with its sister coins?

7) jl7777 has done extremely well building up excitement and getting people to invest in his "offerings". Was he consulted about the best way to launch colored coins? He could have given some good free advice about this, and should have helped give you ideas prior to launch.

Sending you a PM.  Everything is working fine on mine.

That sounds like someone investing in Bitcoin back in 2010

"Just picked up a couple thousand for the hell of it"

--- imagine where you'd be if you had 2,000 bitcoin now? 

So buying into Opal makes sense - you never know.  But I can guarantee you, it's going to have to be a long term investment.

I thinking the biggest disconnect from investors to devs is all these industry terms popping up all over the place.

OPACITY, still don't know what that is, how to use it, why I want it, or if it's good or not.  A youtube video talking and demonstrating OPACITY might make more sense.

Same with OPAL DRIVE. Every since storj, is that arm of the project dead? Is it functional? I don't know.

COLORED COINS, I've heard a lot of excitement behind them, but no one is actually promoting and using them are they?

What is a fundation? Or is that a typo?

It might be a good idea to talk about some of the benefits of becoming a board member of the foundation. Obviously it is a volunteer position.  Are there any benefits?

I'd like to see the devs and foundation members get some sort of compensation, and not just by donation.

I suggest a hard fork soon.

Opal has earned enough respect by exchanges and the community to hardfork the coin.

I recommend that Opal increase the transaction fee to 0.05 OPAL (let's be brave here).  (peercoin does it with 0.01 tx fee)

Then 50% of the transaction fee gets destroyed for minters, and 50% gets sent to a hard coded wallet address which is funding for the foundation including the dev.

(Even if someone modified their client to avoid the 0.025 OPAL being sent to the foundation address, 99% of people wouldn't go through that hassle.  Most people aren't evil and selfish or technically able)

Oh, and all coins going to the hardcoded foundation wallet address are transaction free? Something like that...

The Opal Dev could hold the keys to it.   If we trust him to dev the coin, we should trust him to manage the foundation wallet address too.

Today it wouldn't amount to a lot of coins. But in the future it could.  Plus it would be hard coded funding that is different the ico, premine, or anything else that fails other coins.

If someone has a better idea, suggest it.  

It is important that everyone read this, and find a way to get involved:

http://whit.opal-coin.com/this-is-your-coin/


That post by Bass is obviously written from the heart.  I believe in him, and I believe in Opal.  I think it is time for everyone to get involved somehow.

In order for something to catch on, it needs a marketing strategy, not hope.

This is the biggest problem with every coin.

Whomever comes up with the right marketing strategies wins.  Not all marketing strategies cost money, some just take time and effort.

Anyone have any solid ideas?

If you go back and read the AMHash thread, you'll see that as of Dec 8th people were talking about problems with some cloud mining company named hashie?

This was a snowball effect for everyone buying mining services. The whole landscape started having problems at the beginning of December 2014

I don't know much about hashie or AMHash, but if you do your digging it is almost like Chris was buying services from hashie and reselling them as his own?  I don't know.

Anyone have any experience with what happened to hashie or AMHash that can make sense out of what started happening to all these mining clouds during December?

It wasn't just ltcgear that did this..

Quoted Dec 8, 2014 from AMHash1 thread:


A lot of stuff starting happening early December, right till the end.   So I think when Chris got scammed by whatever cloud services he had stock in, he just continued the scam for his own customers.

That's why I continue to believe (until proven otherwise) that this statement is still written by Chris posting as a 3rd person, and it's actually true:

Turns out that they don't pay out.   I mined there for 24 hours, and I even found a hamradiocoin block while doing it.

48 hours later, no payout, and all the blocks I was part of mining were confirmed already.

Do not use pool.gethashing.com

Their pool doesn't even talk about how often payouts occur, how many minimum coins you need to earn, nothing.  AVOID

Arguably, this new litecointalk user might be Chris, since what he posted sounds quite plausible and revealing.

(What this user wrote, and the way he signed, is the same as posted on the ltcgear news page)

From Litecointalk, posted Mar 25, 2015 - by newuser archetype:


So if you read it, it appears that Chris got screwed himself.  So rather than be honest about it, he just repeated a similar scam and ran off the the money.  It might have seemed like the easiest and most tempting thing to do...

Right around Dec 25th when the AMHASH problem began, is when ltcgear stopped paying everyone too.  

At least now we know why this probably happened.  It also explains why Chris feels he was forced to do this to everyone.....

All I know is that we need to spot these things before the happen again. I got scammed too by ltcgear.  I did what everyone else was doing.  It seemed like a good investment at the time, and had such a long history.

I didn't realize how quickly it could all fold, and I should have seen it.

If crypto is going to succeed, we need to stop relying on gov't to protect us from making stupid naive investments.  Learn from this like I did.  I hate seeing these kind of scams and everyone running to the police expecting them to fix it for them.

Let's be smarter.  Any ideas how this could have been avoided? Same situation, a cloud mining. But what have we learned here?

Is Cryptsy's "Mintsy" any better?

Whoah! That is ultra cool !!

Looking there I see people from all over the world using it:

LU1CLM-7: Test from Buenos Aires Argentina 73

YO3FVR-10: Testing twitter gateway. Best 73!

DL2SFO-5: test from germany

IZ4WNA-7: Ciao a tutti da Bologna. 73

KB0DWT-10: Hello from KB0DWT-10

M0HSE: Greetings from London

My guess is that he's buying as much time as possible to funnel the coins and money in different places to hide his tracks.

It's a sad state of affairs.  Hopefully everyone learned from this..

As a community we need to develop better escrow so someone like him doesn't have access to 100% of funds at all times (both fiat and the coins he mined) and be accountable to no one.

Ask your buddies how often they pay out. There's nothing posted.  That's the #1 thing a miner is most concerned about.