What is going on with allegations of Vanillacoin fraud?

[americanpegasus]

So, I found this interesting concept called ZeroTime, apparently pioneered by some anon who goes by "john connor": https://github.com/john-connor/papers/blob/708f488c8c17e08a12bc4bdb4fc5ac1e2aaf6e24/zerotime.pdf 
 
I'm not learned enough (only to the sevunth grade!) to understand all that, but I think it means that bitcoin's scalability problem has been solved.... right? 
 
Ok, AWESOME.  Is there a cryptocurrency that uses this?  Yes: Vanillacoin, currently even listed on Poloniex and has been rising in price since inception. 
 
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=977245.0 
 
 
 
Sounds groovy, right?  Well, perhaps all is not as it seems.  When I tried to check out http://www.reddit.com/vanillacoin I found this posted by user ptole who has claimed /r/vanillacoin for himself: 
 

VNL had a flawed distribution period with his coin generating x10 the expected supply in the first month, which he would not acknowledge. His solution for this was to simply turn PoW off! That's why the PoW goes off and on, it's because the distribution is crazily out of spec - this isn't how it was going to work originally, but of course you can't verify that because if you weren't on the original forums they've now been deleted entirely. Convenient. His wallets had a flaw for nearly two months which allowed people to generate coins basically at-will by using the exploit - they could guarantee blocks came to their wallet with a simple exploit. I personally believe he was using this exploit himself. He turns PoW on/off at will with very short notice. He's changed the original distribution specification multiple times. The only block explorer in existence is untrustworthy - some wallets are completely unlisted and cannot be found on the explorer, yet they can still send coins to an exchange and sell them (I've done it myself). The numbers for balances are flat wrong in many cases. He's released purposefully gimped mining code both for GPUs and FPGAs which even novices in that realm of coding can improve, so it's quite clear what his motivations are. Now he is making up complete lies about legal action in an attempt to intimidate me out of providing the community another uncensored platform. This is par for the course with john connor, he is a fantastic developer with some great ideas but unfortunately he cannot be trusted one bit when it comes to looking out for his community and doing what he says he plans to do.

 
 
WAT? 
 
Can anyone elaborate on these claims, help explain if Zerotime is/isn't as revolutionary as something like Cryptonote, and either prove or disprove the claims that it had a mucked up launch? 
 
If Zerotime really is this amazing technology that scales, then we have an incredible contender for the next big thing... but any valid cryptocurrency MUST have a fair and verifiable launch.  Randomly changing the algo and distribution just because is not ok.  In this case, a new fork of Zerotime is necessary.... Or, perhaps Zerotime isn't that great after all and we can safely ignore the whole issue.   
 
Anyone who knows anything, please elaborate.

[solid12345]

Honestly i'm so jaded with the whole crypto scene I don't think there is a single developer who isn't at least somewhat shady, even for the biggest and best coins.

[monsterer]

If Zerotime really is this amazing technology that scales, then we have an incredible contender for the next big thing... but any valid cryptocurrency MUST have a fair and verifiable launch.  Randomly changing the algo and distribution just because is not ok.  In this case, a new fork of Zerotime is necessary.... Or, perhaps Zerotime isn't that great after all and we can safely ignore the whole issue.   

Zerotime is similar to instant-x in Dash - both attempts work by adding another consensus mechanism on top of POW. Both of these have a constant network attack cost, which means that the cost of double-spending 0 confirmation transactions under these schemes is very low, compared to POW.

[guytp]

I've read through all the VNL posts on here from start to finish whilst researching it as I found the technology and code stack a lot more interesting than many of the alternatives.  The below post says all originals were deleted but I'm fairly sure I managed to dig these out not long ago - there are just many different threads for its various phases rather than one large ANN plus there's the original VNL forum and the current VNL forum.

From memory what happened was something along the lines of:

• Coin is launched stated as beta - very clearly advised throughout there may be issues
• Some issues and a fork happen, re-launch with new wallet to resolve issues - most people are fine with this as very clearly beta labelled
• People are CPU mining only and solo mining - coin is designed to not allow anyone to pool-mine or GPU mine at this point
• Some people start coming up with workarounds to dump significantly more hash rate than intended
• New release created to counter this
• Some people very annoyed here at their right to mine
• Pooled mining created
• Pool implemented a way so that if any one person was monopolosing network hashrate most of their coins didn't end up with them (cannot remember if faucet, destroyed or other) after some retrospective wallet changes deployed by network
• Those impacted who "lost" a huge amount of coins were very annoyed

My take on this is that at all points it's been badged as beta and all the discussion threads made it very clear at these stages in the coin's initial launch that people shouldn't be monopolising it or trying to hammer the hell out of the coin like every other pump and dump.  A few very vocal people appear to have spent months upset over it and shouting.

There's a degree of worry from looking into it as a coin for the perceived centralisation that the dev has a degree of impact to be able to fork/change - but this is also a very small number of nodes at this point in the game so it's not impossible principle to fork away.  Take your own risk assessment though.

I'm happy enough with VNL as something different to the other stacks.  I believe it looks good and works pretty well - I don't consider what happened to be fraud having read through it all but make your own judgements.

To counter the side of "the only block explorer in existence" being unreliable.  I'm actually writing a multi-currency block explorer at the moment and have the entire VNL index in my database.  It seems consistent to me for anything I check against the "official" explorer.  I think POS blocks could be represented slightly differently but the overall blockchain seems valid to me.

[statdude]

I too saw this and wasn't sure where the discussion ended

[john-connor]

VNL had a flawed distribution period with his coin generating x10 the expected supply in the first month, which he would not acknowledge. His solution for this was to simply turn PoW off! That's why the PoW goes off and on, it's because the distribution is crazily out of spec - this isn't how it was going to work originally, but of course you can't verify that because if you weren't on the original forums they've now been deleted entirely. Convenient. His wallets had a flaw for nearly two months which allowed people to generate coins basically at-will by using the exploit - they could guarantee blocks came to their wallet with a simple exploit. I personally believe he was using this exploit himself. He turns PoW on/off at will with very short notice. He's changed the original distribution specification multiple times. The only block explorer in existence is untrustworthy - some wallets are completely unlisted and cannot be found on the explorer, yet they can still send coins to an exchange and sell them (I've done it myself). The numbers for balances are flat wrong in many cases. He's released purposefully gimped mining code both for GPUs and FPGAs which even novices in that realm of coding can improve, so it's quite clear what his motivations are. Now he is making up complete lies about legal action in an attempt to intimidate me out of providing the community another uncensored platform. This is par for the course with john connor, he is a fantastic developer with some great ideas but unfortunately he cannot be trusted one bit when it comes to looking out for his community and doing what he says he plans to do.

 
 
WAT? 
Anyone who knows anything, please elaborate.

Blockchain evidence or it didn't happen.

Thank you for your support.

[Nxtblg]

Blockchain evidence or it didn't happen.

Thank you for your support.

Now that you're here, I saw a Pastebin dump of a chat in which you said you have a ~10-year-old patent whose tech you're adapting for Vanillacoin's instant-transactions feature. Would you mind sharing the patent number with us?

[shanem]

Any coin at the top volume of bittrex will sure have some allegations of fraud or scam in cryptocurrency.
I am not sure if it is real or fake. At long as the coin has volume, then it is still worth buying the coin.

[r0ach]

Blockchain evidence or it didn't happen.

Thank you for your support.

I haven't looked into the inner workings of this coin yet, but can you answer the following question?

Why was a number less than 1% chosen for stake?  My personal belief is, keeping coins online and not in cold storage is a security risk.  If the stake percent is that low, nobody is being rewarded for that risk, not many people will stake, and there goes network security.  About 2% seems like the lowest magic number to me where people will see staking as worth bothering with.  This is assuming transaction fees are destroyed and not recycled.

A currency is also not meant to be inflating or deflating, it should be kept as stable as possible.  The goal of the inflation number should be to replace the estimated amount of lost coins while also increasing security from staking as a side effect.

[bitcoin carpenter]

Check the new white paper John is going to tax the miners and give the tax to nodes.

Awesome idea.

[newb4now]

Check the new white paper John is going to tax the miners and give the tax to nodes.

Awesome idea.

This sounds like a bad idea to me

[bitcoin carpenter]

Check the new white paper John is going to tax the miners and give the tax to nodes.

Awesome idea.

This sounds like a bad idea to me

Increased distribution, stronger network, instead of renting hash you can just use the wallet and keep a node running .

Why is this a bad idea?

[Blawpaw]

as this already been proved!?

if these allegations are true this would mean that the coin has been heavily pumped and it is already being dumped... so this might be a warning for people who has invested in VNL....

Better watch out!