The coins no longer exist. They're not at any address whatsoever. Another way of destroying coins is, as you say, sending them to an address for which there's no private key, but if anything the destruction is even more clear when the coins simply no longer exist anywhere.

They could, of course, create an arbitrary number of *new* coins, but that's a different problem.

The fee for a transaction is the difference between the input total and the output total. The destination for the fees is set in the block that contains the transaction.

So here's an example of a bitcoin transaction:
https://blockchain.info/tx/e967550ef95d28a95a4ea2e679b8b9463cea28943d3053ef65d7f5fe109ce3ad
Click to find the block it's in:
https://blockchain.info/block-index/757279
In the top transaction you see listed there, you can see where the fees (0.25520967 BTC) are sent, along with the 25BTC reward for mining the block.

Here's the paycoin transaction that destroyed the coins:
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/xpy/tx.dws?a5709810941a93fd8060c830dd0a725d2b11cf916e1e48b62f581b86b1f5f437.htm
Click through to the block (the "block height" link):
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/xpy/block.dws?66506.htm

You can see that the destroyed coins leave the addresses that were inputs to the transaction, and don't go anywhere. They're gone. The blockchain never lies.

So they really are destroyed, but the question remains about why they only destroyed those coins, and not all of the hyperinflation coins. Not that the answer isn't obvious.

You said he wouldn't have anywhere to hide. I pointed out that he does.


Corpses don't evolve, they decay. If you can't smell the decay then nobody here can help you.

Why? There are several dozen countries that don't have an extradition treaty with the US.

In the "what in the world is going on in his head" category ...



Hey, we bought a crappy browser plugin and never got it working, what more do you want?

Last week? Correct me if I've got this wrong, but the coins that were supposed to be destroyed, but weren't, were here:
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/xpy/address.dws?119166.htm

Then starting two days ago (not last week) the coins were moved, and combined with others, here:
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/xpy/address.dws?P9HwdnKRZD5niS7ua9pSV4DnjKxRPHw73Y.htm

(@gawceo's response was that he would "look into it" but of course nothing happened as a result.)

Then yesterday they moved to exchanges:

(From a deleted HT article.)

This is @gawceo's non-response:
https://hashtalk.org/topic/31586/test-coin-and-compounding-update/3

And today this was published:
http://www.miningpool.co.uk/burned-paycoins-come-back-to-life-appear-to-be-sent-to-exchanges/

It's not a great article (no offense to the author) because it just explains what happens without citing the details that would make it possible for anyone else to check. Maybe coinfire or someone will pick this up and do a more thorough investigation and report.

EDIT: More data from the 31586 HT thread, in a comment from tekneeks:

Just the fact that all this happened points to some serious disarray inside of GAW. It's tempting to suspect that Josh understands blockchains so poorly that he thought that when attention died down he could quietly sell off those coins and nobody would notice. 

This one got buried under a flood of meme shit and red herring chases, so I just wanted to bring it back to the front page. It's both damning and verifiable.

He didn't say they had 50 *employees*, just "We have over 50 at this company." He might be including Team Paycoin. That's what he's counting when he talks about dev staff:



IOW, not employees, but people who have lost big money on paycoin and are desperately trying to come up with something that will save the day, since GAW isn't going to do anything.

One of the comments says, "Think positively, I think it is still high, considering the fact that there are no features yet."

To which someone else replies, "This ^. It is higher than a lot of alt coins, even ones with more features."

At ninety cents and still overpriced. Unusually realistic by HT standards.

Pointing out that you said something idiotic isn't the same thing as sticking up for a scammer dirtbag.

I started following this train wreck when I saw the hashcoin white paper. A lot of it was just technical gibberish, and what wasn't gibberish was dumb. (I know there are some over on GH who think the white paper had some good ideas in it, even if it was poorly executed. I've seen their explanations. I think my first impressions of the white paper were right.)

Now it's the drama that keeps me here. You've got a televangelist sort of guy who has botched everything he's touched regarding paycoin/paybase, and a faithful (but dwindling) group of followers. It's like a faith healer who sends people away sicker than they arrived, but somehow that doesn't dissuade the faithful.

There are the debunkers here. But also some people who latch onto the most inane theories, like the Mordica thing. Are they deliberately trying to create a "fog of war" situation in which the real evidence is obscured by all the stupid stuff? I'm inclined to follow Hanlon's razor on that one.

Etc. Fascinating stuff.

I was just responding to the idiotic idea that the only reason a company wouldn't publish a roster of their technical staff is if they were engaged in criminal activity.

In GAW's case, if they have anyone on staff you can safely bet that they don't have credentials worth bragging about. It wouldn't surprise me if they have no dev staff left any more and have outsourced what tiny bits of development that have occurred to the sort of third-world developers who do simple web development for five bucks an hour.

Not publishing a roster means a lot less than the fact that they've done no development of any significance since paycoin/paybase was released. A little integration with APIs from other web sites, such as stripe and gyft. A "vault" mockup and a "validation" form that doesn't seem to do much. Stock charts on paybase. Anything I'm forgetting? And they had at least a few devs in early January. For the more recent stuff, a mediocre dev with a little website experience and no crypto experience could have done it all in a few days, maybe a couple of weeks if they're very new at it.

Has Josh even promised anything lately that would take any dev power? He's trying to get the community to do the work. He's got "team xpy" doing whatever they're doing to try to salvage some value out of their investments. The buyback, in the unlikely event it actually happens, doesn't require any significant software dev.

Everything that's going on, and everything he's promising, is consistent with GAW having little or no significant development staff.

Dude. Stop and think for just a few seconds. LOTS AND LOTS of companies are tech companies and tech companies asking for investments are asking for investments based on what their technical staff can supposedly produce. That's one of the more inane things you've ever posted. VERY FEW of them post a public roster of their technical staff. There are very good reasons that they don't do this.


I never gave GAW a penny. How about you?

Are you kidding? Very, very few companies make a roster of their technical staff public, for all sorts of good reasons that have nothing to do with breaking the law.

He posted a image about SOME twitter account. It's the same as this:
https://twitter.com/account/deactivated
You wouldn't even need to deactivate an account to take a screen grab of that.

Why do people assume it was coinfire's twitter account?

How do you tell the difference between people trying to expose fraud, and people trying to muddy the water? Because a lot of the shit that flies around here looks more like the latter than the former to me.

The smoking guns must not be very significant if what was in the file at the time wasn't enough to justify a full investigation, but even so it's yet another reason that a bunch of non-lawyers rehashing public info here can't possibly be helpful to Josh. That's why I was surprised that you of all people would describe this question-gathering as "gathering stuff for his attorneys to use to see what evidence is going to be used against him." Most of the suggested questions would be easily deflected, and the few that are potentially good questions are just rehashing things that have been evident for quite a while.

Why does he do it? Easy. Josh offers to answer questions. He deflects the easy ones, then claims he has to stop because the lawyers are on his case or whatever. It satisfies the HT faithful more than silence would. It gives the remaining believers some talking points that they repeat faithfully (i.e., the bullshit about how the landscape changed after paycoin launched and it's all about government regulations now). It helps them rationalize Josh being on their side against all the haters, and how maybe it will all work out, etc. Few people who post in this thread are in his target audience. It doesn't have to make sense to you, just to them.

You've seen the SEC investigation. If there was any sort of smoking gun in that file, any incriminating facts that aren't currently public knowledge, then having a bunch of non-lawyers here rehash a bunch of things that are already public wouldn't be helping his attorneys, it would be distracting them (if they paid any attention to it at all) from the meat of the investigation. Unless what's already public actually is the meat of the investigation.

You also said the bulk of the thousand pages was "just things people have sent in." You reported that your source said that they needed more information "or else more resources won't be spent on this." So they're trying to "determine if it warrants any sort of major investigation," but they don't have enough information in hand to justify spending more resources on it. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=857670.msg10212034#msg10212034)

My guess is that the SEC sent Josh a "letter of concern." There wasn't enough in the file to justify the resources for a major investigation, but there was enough for a letter that would send him scurrying to his lawyers. His lawyers recommended that he shut down the mining operation, which would be a no-brainer if he didn't have enough mining hardware behind it go legit. They then sent a letter to the SEC saying that while they dispute the SEC's interpretation, out of an abundance of caution blah blah blah. And if the SEC didn't have enough information to justify putting more resources into the investigation, and hasn't gotten anything new, that's probably the end of it as far as the SEC is concerned.

Obviously the premine occurred. I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

By "theft" you mean "premine"? He talked about needing more coins for investors because the ICO was in such heavy demand or something along those lines. I'm not saying that was true, just that it was the explanation the HT faithful were given for the size of the premine.

I found an article here were he seems to be waffling over whether or not to premine, arguing that it ultimately doesn't make any difference as far as their customers are concerned: 
https://hashtalk.org/topic/17638/decision-to-mine
You can see where the plan was evolving there, even if his reasoning is entirely bogus.

Josh, my questions all relate to this, which is inexplicably still showing on paycoin.com even though it's so obviously bogus:



On paycoin.com you say "PayCoin™ uses a new Hybrid Flex Blockchain." But the code on github makes it clear that this is false. Why haven't you deleted that false claim?

You say "Paycoin launches with more merchant acceptance than any other cryptocurrency in history." This wasn't true at the time, and still isn't true. In fact you tweeted "Tomorrow, we will launch a crypto payment platform that allows you to purchase items from large mainstream merchant websites & our own site" (https://twitter.com/gawceo/status/549279002612232192) and you knew that would not be true at launch. It was launching the very next day and you were making a promise you knew to be false. How do you justify that?

On that same page you promise "Proof of Reserve." You claimed to have one hundred million dollars in investments. The same page, under "Coin Adoption Fund," says "PayCoin™’s ICO launches the world’s first Coin Adoption Fund – a fund whose sole mandate is to grow the cryptocurrency by spreading adoption world-wide." These promises were key in convincing people to invest in paycoin. Will you agree to allow an independent auditor to verify that you had $100 million in funding, and to summarize where those funds have been spent, and how much remains?

On that same page you promise something called a "Hypass Card." I don't have a question about that, I just wanted to point out that this sounds like "Hype-ass Card" and that seems appropriate for a hype-ass coin like XPY.