That's my thought as well. The development is behind schedule, so they have to keep putting off the introduction of the actual coin.

Although, if they just don't release a wallet, they can just relabel HP as PC, divide all amounts by 400, and do the "conversion" without an actual coin in existence. I'm not sure what technical issue would prevent that.

There is no substantive difference between HashPoints and PayCoin at the moment. Who cares when it "switches?" Right now, they're just different names for the same thing. It's like if he's pushing back the date to convert from pennies to dollars.

What matters is the Dec 19th date for being able to sell PayCoin for BTC. If there's no "switch" by then, or if the BTC can't be directly withdrawn, or if anything, really, that keeps people from liquidating happens, there will be a hard market shock.

The switch from HP to PC is meaningless. That's not the thing that matters.

GAW, destroyer of shortwave.

Is the point of this to force GAW to disclose details of their operations? The "likely transmitting stray radio emissions" thing is kind of strange otherwise.

I can see it if it's a way to impose transparency, but I don't see your standing. Did you find someone who lives next to the "data center" and can't get a cell signal?

I was talking about ways the entire system could fail. I put the Amazon thing there because it speaks to legitimacy, but it's not necessarily fatal. There was nothing implied about what entities are allowed to make whatever claims.

Actually, the Amazon thing is the least problematic of the "what ifs". If there's some sort of debit card proxy that works with existing payment systems and allows instantaneous conversion, it doesn't matter that much if Amazon takes it directly.

There's a HUGE amount of risk.

I'm not saying it won't work, but there are roughly a gazillion ways it could fail.

What if more people try to divest than the support fund can handle?
What if Amazon doesn't really take it directly?
What if no merchants ever want to keep the coin, despite its price support?
What if the technology isn't functional?
What if the support fund isn't appropriately separated from the rest of GAW's finances?
What if the wallet is hard to use?
What if the payment mechanism is hard to use?
What if no one ever hears about it outside of the insular crypto community?
What if GAW loses the bids and doesn't have a Prime Controller?
What if there's an attack on the Prime Controllers that succeeds?

Gosh, I can think of about a million others, too. The risk is high here, but so is the reward. Such is crypto.

touché

because the internet is serious business, y'all.

People say awful, douchey things online. No one ever takes it seriously. I doubt Mr. Garza is giving two thoughts about an anonymous message board threat of physical violence.

https://bitlendingclub.com/loan/browse/lid/6340/consolidation-of-btcjam-loans

It's like people have no concept of risk and leverage. Maybe they're the ones who bought all of those subprimes before 2008.


Loaning money to that guy would be a bad idea. I think this is a good idea that has a decent shot at working. I still won't bet the house on it. It's a risky investment. Using terms like "will" instead of "might" or "should" is a bad sign.

Links? Hashtalk is kind of a mess to get around.

Yeah, if it lasts for more than four hours, you're supposed to call a doctor.

What's interesting to me is how they've moved PayCoin from a cool, sexy idea that had a lot of appeal, but also a lot of experimental components, into one that's not very innovative, but much more likely to be functional out of the gate.

I thought the initial idea was pretty slick, with the tiered system and blockchain compression for the lowest tier of miners. The whole thing looked like something that could actually pull off nearly instant transactions without the blockchain overload for new miners and wallet holders. A lot of that was very new, however, and probably wouldn't have worked perfectly right away.

Now, it's a PoS coin that can support different kinds of value transfers. They could really just clone the NXT codebase with a minor tweak and come up with something that matches the new description. The big difference between PayCoin and NXT is the large fund providing price support. That's really critical. Instead of giving new functionality as well as price support, they're now counting on just price support to pull in consumers and merchants. That's a big advantage, but there isn't the level of new tech they first described.

I'll stick with it for now. Price support is a big deal. But I sure felt a lot better supporting actual innovation, too.

If GAW released their financial data at the level of detail required of any publicly traded company, there would be far fewer questions. Apple is publicly traded, and we know a lot more about their balance sheet than GAW's.

I don't think it's fraud because of the way the terms of service are written. There might be other legal problems with it, but they're pretty upfront about what they could possibly be doing. Direct renting of mining power is only one possibility.

I agree there's some solid backing here, but Cantor Fitzgerald isn't part of it. It's a guy who works for Cantor Fitzgerald. The press release from GAW is very clear about this.

No, you could be right. The problem if you're right is that instead of renting out mining power, they're possibly selling an unregistered security.

I'm with you. His involvement doesn't preclude a scam, but it does mean that there was probably an actual business plan, and he performed some amount of due diligence. There is no way any professional investor wants to be near a ponzi scheme. I highly doubt this guy thinks this is a scam.

Why do people think that Cantor Fitzgerald is involved? All the PR says is that a Cantor Fitzgerald partner is co-founder. One guy with a personal investment, not the whole firm.

Zero sum means there's a constraint on the game such that all gains are offset by equal losses. If someone gains X, another person loses X, and X + -X = 0.

Here, there's no such constraint. The stock market has been zero-sum for specific lengths of time in the past, but it doesn't have to be. In practice, it's not overall. Because economies grow and people become more productive, the value of the stock market grows over time.

In practice, there are going to be winners and losers, but there's no constraint saying that has to happen. In fact, there's more won than lost in the stock market overall, so it's not zero-sum. The sum is greater than zero.