MasterCoin: New Protocol Layer Starting From “The Exodus Address”

[caveden]

I don't believe this is true. A government (or any other entity) cannot maintain a peg indefinitely unless they have a indefinite amount of resources with which to do it (and no, money printing doesn't count ).  

Panamá and Hong Kong have their currencies pegged to the USD for decades now, don't they?

AFAIK, all cases of failed pegged currencies were in situations where the money issuers also attempted to use money creation to manipulate interest rates (or any other price). As long as it only creates and destroy currency with the goal of keeping a parity price with a foreign currency, I fail to see what's the great danger.

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[bytemaster]

Lets look at all parties self motivated actions.

The escrow agent has every opportunity to scam the people who hold GoldCoin.  Assume this agent is in a foreign country where their actions are not 'illegal' because they couldn't operate legally in the US without being regulated as the issuer of a digital currency.  This means there is no legal recourse if the escrow agent scams you if you can even detect that it was the agent doing the scamming.

Now I would start out entirely legit to earn some trust and establish a market.   Then once the market 'expects' me to intervene to bid the price up if it falls to low, I would start trading GoldCoin for real Gold as fast as I could without triggering a panic sell.  If I did my job right, the confidence game would cause other players to speculatively keep the price pegged until I had converted as much GoldCoin to Gold as possible.   I would use my escrow power to prop up the price as I kept selling.   At the end of the day the escrow fund would be depleted in an attempt to keep the price propped up against my own selling.  

Of course, no one would know that I was both the escrow agent and the 'attacker' and I would walk away with a ton of free money.

Here is the major problem:  the system depends upon some party trading 'something for nothing' or 'nothing for something' and this violates what I would consider to be an economic 'law' similar to the law of conservation of energy... all trades must be 'equal value for value' where the result of the trade is that both parties feel they have gained value.    If you want to design an alt-coin you must have a proper grasp of certain economic 'rules' that must not be validated:

1) Prices cannot be calculated, averaged, added, or otherwise manipulated by math operations.
2) All transactions must represent an exchange of about equal value (in the opinion of those making the trade, before the trade each party values the other item more than the item they have in their own value system)
3) There is no such thing as a 'unit of value' only relative values between all goods that are different for every individual and time.
4) Arbitrary numbers, ratios, and constants must be avoided at all times.  Reliance upon any such 'number' is usually a sign of price fixing which the market will find ways of bending some place else.

These rules can be applied to every system that is proposed and will reliably identify the problem areas.  Violating them is like ignoring gravity and aerodynamics while inventing an airplane.

[dacoinminster]

I'm about to go offline for the weekend, so please don't expect any answers from me before Monday.

First, I'll clear up this misunderstanding:

Lets look at all parties self motivated actions.

The escrow agent has every opportunity to scam the people who hold GoldCoin.  Assume this agent is in a foreign country where their actions are not 'illegal' because they couldn't operate legally in the US without being regulated as the issuer of a digital currency.  This means there is no legal recourse if the escrow agent scams you if you can even detect that it was the agent doing the scamming.

Now I would start out entirely legit to earn some trust and establish a market.   Then once the market 'expects' me to intervene to bid the price up if it falls to low, I would start trading GoldCoin for real Gold as fast as I could without triggering a panic sell.  If I did my job right, the confidence game would cause other players to speculatively keep the price pegged until I had converted as much GoldCoin to Gold as possible.   I would use my escrow power to prop up the price as I kept selling.   At the end of the day the escrow fund would be depleted in an attempt to keep the price propped up against my own selling.  

Of course, no one would know that I was both the escrow agent and the 'attacker' and I would walk away with a ton of free money.

Here is the major problem:  the system depends upon some party trading 'something for nothing' or 'nothing for something' and this violates what I would consider to be an economic 'law' similar to the law of conservation of energy... all trades must be 'equal value for value' where the result of the trade is that both parties feel they have gained value.    If you want to design an alt-coin you must have a proper grasp of certain economic 'rules' that must not be validated:

1) Prices cannot be calculated, averaged, added, or otherwise manipulated by math operations.
2) All transactions must represent an exchange of about equal value (in the opinion of those making the trade, before the trade each party values the other item more than the item they have in their own value system)
3) There is no such thing as a 'unit of value' only relative values between all goods that are different for every individual and time.
4) Arbitrary numbers, ratios, and constants must be avoided at all times.  Reliance upon any such 'number' is usually a sign of price fixing which the market will find ways of bending some place else.

These rules can be applied to every system that is proposed and will reliably identify the problem areas.  Violating them is like ignoring gravity and aerodynamics while inventing an airplane.

What you say would be 100% correct if the escrow fund was run by a human being, but it is not. Its behavior is built into the protocol. The software everyone runs determines what the escrow fund does, and anybody running software with different rules for the escrow fund behavior would create a hard fork in MasterCoin (that is, their version would not be accepted by the rest of the network). It would be just like if somebody tweaked the bitcoin code to have different rules.

See you guys Monday!

[bytemaster]

The value of GoldCoin is always equal to  the Value of Backing /  Number of GoldCoins.   

Presumably someone wants GoldCoins so they have to 'buy them' and if they are bought from the Network the purchase price goes into the backing / escrow fund and this builds up the supply. 

So all GoldCoins are bought at todays price, then the price of Gold doubles relative to Master Coin and the backing is now only 50%.

You then posit that people will continue to trade these coins at near face value because, eventually, demand for GoldCoins would push the price above market value despite only having 50% backing.    Assuming Gold is in a bull market, the backing behind the GoldCoins would continue to fall toward 0 even if the Escrow fund never had to intervene. 

There is only one way to resupply the fund and increase its backing, and that is for new money to enter and pay above market price for GoldCoins which would allow the fund to 'issue' at the new price.   Unfortunately, this would mean someone paying full price for a GoldCoin and converting that into a 51% backed asset.

If everyone wanted to convert their GoldCoin back into MasterCoin then the result would reveal the fractional reserves for what they are and everyone would get $0.51 on the dollar. 

Because all information is public the 'smart money' would start to sell as the reserves shrank.  This would put downward price pressure, which would then cause the fund to start consuming the reserves it does have to payout those who want to redeem at face value.  Sure, you have daily withdraw limits and employ other tactics used by banks to prevent runs.  Unfortunately, you have no way to raise capital while the price is below market and everyone knows it.   It then becomes a game of musical chairs where everyone races to the exits.

The only way to manage this system is to have a way to bring in more capital when the price moves against the escrow account.  Unfortunately, no rational individual throws good money after bad which means that absent a legal means of collecting a debt, the Escrow fund must start out with a multiple of its initial value.    Thus $200 in Master coins to create $100 worth of GoldCoin.  This would allow the escrow agent to safely control the price as long as it traded in a safe range.    Of course, the original source of these funds would have to come from someone and it wouldn't be people buying GoldCoin because they will only pay $100.   It has to come from people shorting GoldCoin.... and because they are short, their funds are held in escrow until they buy it back and take their profit or loss.     And *tada* you now have BitShares. 

Conclusion, your escrow funds are undercapitalized and will always result in a bank run / bank holiday / daily withdraw limits until there are no funds left.    If you properly capitalize them someone has to take extra risk... 'be short' and provide the capital in case the price of GoldCoin rises against MasterCoin.   The only time you are 'over capitalized' is when MasterCoin appreciates after issuance of GoldCoin so to the extent that MasterCoin could grow in value faster than everything else your system would work, otherwise it is SOL.

As soon as you have two human actors (short and long) you no longer require an oracle, aggression factors, withdraw limits, or arbitrary time delays.

Once you have fixed your collateral / escrow system you are now at a point where the difference between BitShares and Master Coin is only in the transport layer.   You want to use the bitcoin chain and I am creating an alt-chain network.   As a result you will have an order of magnitude higher transaction costs and lower throughput.  This will dramatically impact your market.

[dacoinminster]

The value of GoldCoin is always equal to  the Value of Backing /  Number of GoldCoins.   

Presumably someone wants GoldCoins so they have to 'buy them' and if they are bought from the Network the purchase price goes into the backing / escrow fund and this builds up the supply. 

So all GoldCoins are bought at todays price, then the price of Gold doubles relative to Master Coin and the backing is now only 50%.

You then posit that people will continue to trade these coins at near face value because, eventually, demand for GoldCoins would push the price above market value despite only having 50% backing.    Assuming Gold is in a bull market, the backing behind the GoldCoins would continue to fall toward 0 even if the Escrow fund never had to intervene. 

There is only one way to resupply the fund and increase its backing, and that is for new money to enter and pay above market price for GoldCoins which would allow the fund to 'issue' at the new price.   Unfortunately, this would mean someone paying full price for a GoldCoin and converting that into a 51% backed asset.

If everyone wanted to convert their GoldCoin back into MasterCoin then the result would reveal the fractional reserves for what they are and everyone would get $0.51 on the dollar. 

Because all information is public the 'smart money' would start to sell as the reserves shrank.  This would put downward price pressure, which would then cause the fund to start consuming the reserves it does have to payout those who want to redeem at face value.  Sure, you have daily withdraw limits and employ other tactics used by banks to prevent runs.  Unfortunately, you have no way to raise capital while the price is below market and everyone knows it.   It then becomes a game of musical chairs where everyone races to the exits.

The only way to manage this system is to have a way to bring in more capital when the price moves against the escrow account.  Unfortunately, no rational individual throws good money after bad which means that absent a legal means of collecting a debt, the Escrow fund must start out with a multiple of its initial value.    Thus $200 in Master coins to create $100 worth of GoldCoin.  This would allow the escrow agent to safely control the price as long as it traded in a safe range.    Of course, the original source of these funds would have to come from someone and it wouldn't be people buying GoldCoin because they will only pay $100.   It has to come from people shorting GoldCoin.... and because they are short, their funds are held in escrow until they buy it back and take their profit or loss.     And *tada* you now have BitShares. 

Conclusion, your escrow funds are undercapitalized and will always result in a bank run / bank holiday / daily withdraw limits until there are no funds left.    If you properly capitalize them someone has to take extra risk... 'be short' and provide the capital in case the price of GoldCoin rises against MasterCoin.   The only time you are 'over capitalized' is when MasterCoin appreciates after issuance of GoldCoin so to the extent that MasterCoin could grow in value faster than everything else your system would work, otherwise it is SOL.

As soon as you have two human actors (short and long) you no longer require an oracle, aggression factors, withdraw limits, or arbitrary time delays.

Once you have fixed your collateral / escrow system you are now at a point where the difference between BitShares and Master Coin is only in the transport layer.   You want to use the bitcoin chain and I am creating an alt-chain network.   As a result you will have an order of magnitude higher transaction costs and lower throughput.  This will dramatically impact your market.

You are right that a "run" on a currency with an unhealthy escrow fund could crash the price, although the actual draining of the escrow fund would happen on a much longer timescale.

The scenario you described is exactly the reason that the aggression factor backs off when the escrow fund is unhealthy. The escrow fund is designed to "unwind" as gracefully as possible when people abandon one of these currencies.

This is why the currencies are "meta stable". They can hold their value for many years, but they can't absolutely guarantee the currency will stay solvent forever. It's a tradeoff for not having to trust a central issuer (like Ripple or Colored Coins). There are also scenarios where balancing long positions and short positions to provide this functionality doesn't work either (for instance, margin calls break that model in extreme moves).

I'm going offline right now, but I'll try to catch up on any questions again on Monday. Thanks everyone!

[CIYAM]

I realize this may seem rushed to you guys, but my first revision of this idea was published Jan 6th, 2012. I've been percolating on it for over 2 years and getting feedback for over 1.5 years, so it doesn't seem rushed to me at all - it seems positively glacial

Maybe we have different perspectives about time-frames - I have been working on building the CIYAM system since 2000 (initially it just a weekend hobby project) and have worked on it full-time since mid-2006 with the open source project launched late last year (initially it was a closed source system).

I also expect to still be very busy working on it in another 10 years.

[bytemaster]

GoldCoins will act like a ratchet that can never go above the price of gold (because the escrow fund will increase supply) but can always fall with the same risk and volatility as MasterCoin.   The only way for the escrow fund to prevent the price from falling is to allocate a larger percentage of the escrow fund toward redeeming the first in line.    

So when the value of MasterCoin falls, the smart thing to do is to sell GoldCoin as fast as possible before its price can fall to match the loss from the backing.  So lets say Gold goes up by 10% relative to MasterCoin on Day 1, the value of GoldCoin will not go up to match for the simple reason that no one would trade 110 MC  for 1 GC backed by 100 MC... they would be trading something for nothing.

Now your claim is the market knows the escrow fund is going to start bidding up GoldCoin to boost the price.  To do this it enters the market and makes a trade no other market participant would make... trading 110 MC for 1 GC and taking a 10% loss.  Every time the escrow agent does this the value of the remaining GC goes down because some of their backing was stolen to give to the first person in line for the exit.   *instant bank run*.

The system is so bad that it fails the instant MasterCoin falls relative to the other asset.   It would be better if the Escrow agent never acted at all, at least then there would be no benefit to being first in line for the exit!

[d'aniel]

I don't believe this is true. A government (or any other entity) cannot maintain a peg indefinitely unless they have a indefinite amount of resources with which to do it (and no, money printing doesn't count ).  

Panamá and Hong Kong have their currencies pegged to the USD for decades now, don't they?

AFAIK, all cases of failed pegged currencies were in situations where the money issuers also attempted to use money creation to manipulate interest rates (or any other price). As long as it only creates and destroy currency with the goal of keeping a parity price with a foreign currency, I fail to see what's the great danger.

It's trivial to create a currency with a perfectly stable peg: just maintain 100% reserves in the same asset you're pegging to.  Decrease this reserve ratio, or swap out the reserves for ones whose price has less than a guaranteed perfect correlation with the pegged-to asset going forward, and you increase the risk of being overrun and the peg breaking.

The scheme presented here proposes 0% of the reserves be held in the pegged-to asset, and all of them to be held in a new and unnecessary asset with no established liquidity, whose price has no reason to be anything other than completely uncorrelated with that of the pegged-to asset.  It strikes me as maximally risky.

[ripper234]

I love this thread, keep coming back for more.

Willet, I found this pearl via your link to Impossibility Trinity - thanks!

FYI, there are now 1,791.515 BTC ~= $186,317.56 in the fund.

[btcdrak]

What you say would be 100% correct if the escrow fund was run by a human being, but it is not. Its behavior is built into the protocol. The software everyone runs determines what the escrow fund does, and anybody running software with different rules for the escrow fund behavior would create a hard fork in MasterCoin (that is, their version would not be accepted by the rest of the network). It would be just like if somebody tweaked the bitcoin code to have different rules.

That makes it worse, because now an attacker can predict the behaviour and therefor it's no longer speculation. This statement alone has killed any remaining confidence in the scheme.

[btcdrak]

Because all information is public the 'smart money' would start to sell as the reserves shrank.  This would put downward price pressure, which would then cause the fund to start consuming the reserves it does have to payout those who want to redeem at face value.  Sure, you have daily withdraw limits and employ other tactics used by banks to prevent runs.  Unfortunately, you have no way to raise capital while the price is below market and everyone knows it.   It then becomes a game of musical chairs where everyone races to the exits.

what I think OP has failed to understand is pegging works because the peg is a black-box. It's basically a confidence trick to maintain an illusion. Once the parameters are known of the peg (i.e how much money and how the escrow behaves), it's no longer possible to maintain the illusion - it's like the magician has shown how the trick is done and it's no longer amazing. But that's not even 50% of the problem, now, smart and rich investors simply have more data to do 'insider trading' effectively, and worse, that insider information has been distributed to everyone. MasterCoin, one coin to ruin itself and destroy a bunch of BTC in the process.

[vokain]

 

I keep seeing questions about why I need "so much money" to do this. I don't. I'm proceeding with this project regardless of how much money I raise, albeit very slowly.

The question of why I need "so much money" to quit my job is an entirely different question, and has to do with my personal budget, my wife's desire for stability, children in private school, mortgages, and so on. For a long, long time I hoped somebody "cheaper" would give this a shot, but I got tired of waiting.

Also, I keep seeing the claim that I need $1M to quit my job, which I have never said. I don't actually know the number - it depends on what I can sell to my wife, who has a desire for stability and security to an extent that many of you would consider unreasonable.

good luck  

And now, here we are, when today’s parents believe they need a 7-passenger SUV for the “safety” of their children, they need to take trips to Disneyland for family entertainment, and they need to put their kids into exclusive private schools and even fancy preschools, as well as horseback and violin lessons from trained professionals in various surrounding towns,  in order to keep them ahead in “the increasingly competitive world out there”. By pure coincidence, all of these needs happen to be very expensive ones that clever entrepreneurs and companies are making a lot of money from.

Did you ever notice how you never see a strong international trend of parents spending more time with their kids, or people canceling their TV service and reading more, or local parks and natural areas becoming increasingly flooded with parents playing with their children? Hmm.. why is this? Is it because we’ve learned that these activities are not good for our kids so we have wised up and replaced them with organized and expensive activities? Or is it because nobody is making money off of these alternative ways and nobody gets to look rich doing them, and thus the Marketing and Social Competition Engine is not tricking us into doing them?

Dear Mr. Money Mustache,

I’ve done it! I have lit the fire of Mustachianism in my own heart, and can suddenly see what should have been obvious from the start: the entire basis for most of the modern US lifestyle is complete bullshit, we are all wasting almost all of our money every day, and we could all be vastly better off if we just stopped doing it. I want to be free, and happy, and rich, and I want it NOW!

There’s just one problem. I have a spouse who is still deeply cocooned in the system. He (or she) still loves the fancy shoes, massages at the spa, video game systems, the $2500 bikes, the Apple-brand computers, or the Porsche Cayenne Turbo S minivan  for carrying around our 10-pound baby. I love her, but I can’t seem to get through to her. I’m shouting through the 8-inch-thick foggy shell of hardened Consumer Mucus that has formed over her entire body, and I can see those eyes I fell in love with staring back at me from deep within that shell. But I can’t seem to break her out of it. How can I do it?

Where are you guys getting these numbers... The ERE guy is like a hippie freak dude and lives out of an RV, right?

Screw him and get on board with Mr. Money Mustache! Thanks goes to calin

Here is how MMM lives retired for the last 6 years on less than $27k a year with him , his wife and 6 year old kid in their $400k house in Colorado: My Deprived Life: Raising a Family on Under $27,000 per Year

That link has photos of his house and toys.

Here is list and comparison of their expenses for 2012 vs 2010 and 2011.

I am now a self-proclaimed Mustachian! I will be debt free October this year and will then be able to stash about $30k for 2014 and $48k for 2015 and on... if I don't get anymore raises or other income (NOT!).

That will see me retired in 12 years from now at the age of 50. Not too bad. Even better if I get married and start living with 2 incomes in the household.

[Viriatto]

Alot of Open-Knowledge in this thread!BTC)

[Meni Rosenfeld]

Yes, I will still control the funds I use to purchase MasterCoins. That's why I can go all in, while the rest of you have to decide if I'm nuts, a scammer, or maybe could really pull this off

I would like to emphasize that, since you control the exodus address, it is important that you buy only few mastercoins and furthermore that you are completely transparent about how much you buy. Of course, this doesn't apply to buying them on the free market later.

As implied above, I actually intend to buy a large number of them - probably around 24 hours after the announcement. I really believe this will work, and I want to own as many of them as possible.

In other words, you're taking none of the risk and getting all of the reward?

I like you but I really don't like where this is going, you'll need to be extremely transparent (and with reasonable expectations set forth in advance) for this to make any sense.

[bvt]

Yes, I will still control the funds I use to purchase MasterCoins. That's why I can go all in, while the rest of you have to decide if I'm nuts, a scammer, or maybe could really pull this off

I would like to emphasize that, since you control the exodus address, it is important that you buy only few mastercoins and furthermore that you are completely transparent about how much you buy. Of course, this doesn't apply to buying them on the free market later.

As implied above, I actually intend to buy a large number of them - probably around 24 hours after the announcement. I really believe this will work, and I want to own as many of them as possible.

In other words, you're taking none of the risk and getting all of the reward?

I like you but I really don't like where this is going, you'll need to be extremely transparent (and with reasonable expectations set forth in advance) for this to make any sense.

That's the main of several issues I have against his project.

1) He controls the "exodus" address which means any bitcoins he sends is still in his own control and not at risk of being lost even if MasterCoin fails.
2) There's no explanation of what the expected expenses are. Is it salary for developer(s)?
3) In his white paper, he tries to appeal to greed and how important it is to get in "early". He wants investments/donations (don't know what to actually call it) to be sent quickly and rewards early bitcoins with more "MasterCoins". Why? Seems like cheap sales tactics to me. Let the product sell on its own merits.
4) Even if this turned out to work properly at all, he controls majority of the MasterCoins (so far).
5) He refutes all above mentioned criticism as "anti-capitalism" and "egalitarian". Which is misdirection from the actual criticism. It's the warped risk/reward ratio and circumstances of this being handled and misrepresentation under "project development".


It seems very rushed and he claims to have been working on this for a long time. It really doesn't matter if he initially had this idea in 2009 or 2013. Provided content or any proof of concept seems ... lacking. He went on to disregard reddit users because it's a "cesspool of ignorance" and deleted his own thread. He did not provide any insightful information to the criticism he met there. He danced around every reply. He's essentially giving himself a free pass if this fail because he has written a "disclaimer" and that he promises the return what funds remain at the point of the failure. So he could essentially give this a go for a 6 months period and return half of the funds and keep the rest? He would still keep 100 % of what he put in and 50 % of everyone else's.

I disregard the escrow issues raised, as there are other people more suited than me to address it. I don't expect him to quit his job, but I just don't understand why he's in such hurry to get funds sent to him. Or why he thinks it's necessary to use, what I consider, cheap sales tactics. He posted this in "Project Development", but in reality he's raising funds before any proof of concept.

Personally this raises huge red flags. This whole thing seems out of touch of reality. But maybe that's just me. I think this will inevitably be the downfall of this project before it even starts.

[ripper234]

Willet, did you actually delete the reddit thread? If so, why?

I trust you, but people have raised good points which I also raised myself:

1. This is a tad rushed (you could have waited 2 weeks between posting the 0.7 and 1.0 versions).
2. Trusting you is harder than trusting a board of trustees. I know you aimed very high for someone to hold the money for you, but Perfect is the enemy of Good. It's better to have some reasonable board (I don't care if I'm in it or not, actually I prefer not to be in it to conserve my precious time, but am willing to serve on it if needed).

The points above are not "make it or break it" for me. This is still a very interesting project, and I would like to see where it goes.

Point #1 can't be changed at this point ... the economical properties of the protocol have reached "1.0" stage and now can't be changed without a huge fuss. Point #2 can still be fixed, and I believe it would help everyone's trust in the protocol.

[ripper234]

Another possible route to increase is starting to work on some preliminary budget.
It can be conditional on the amount of money raised.

[ripper234]

He went on to disregard reddit users because it's a "cesspool of ignorance" and deleted his own thread.

The reddit thread seems live & well. It's hard sometimes to conduct productive discussion over reddit (as well as bitcointalk), I think he has been very responsive in bitcointalk. He's only one person after all, it's not reasonable to expect him to answer every post on every channel.

[bvt]

He went on to disregard reddit users because it's a "cesspool of ignorance" and deleted his own thread.

The reddit thread seems live & well. It's hard sometimes to conduct productive discussion over reddit (as well as bitcointalk), I think he has been very responsive in bitcointalk. He's only one person after all, it's not reasonable to expect him to answer every post on every channel.

The reddit thread says "[removed]", does it not? There's a possibility that a moderator removed it, but I assumed he did. I don't know. I think part of the problem is that it suddenly "launched" and asked for funds that he might have got a bit overwhelmed.

I've had 2 of my posts deleted from this thread and I made no claims of scam, but I admit one was a tad harsh. I first read the reddit post and his white paper, then went on to read this thread. The "cesspool of ignorance" remark combined with everything else raised the red flags for me. I think he wanted maximum exposure and I think it's fair to expect him to respond appropriately and address the issues raised.

[ripper234]

He went on to disregard reddit users because it's a "cesspool of ignorance" and deleted his own thread.

The reddit thread seems live & well. It's hard sometimes to conduct productive discussion over reddit (as well as bitcointalk), I think he has been very responsive in bitcointalk. He's only one person after all, it's not reasonable to expect him to answer every post on every channel.

The reddit thread says "[removed]", does it not? There's a possibility that a moderator removed it, but I assumed he did. I don't know. I think part of the problem is that it suddenly "launched" and asked for funds that he might have got a bit overwhelmed.

I've had 2 of my posts deleted from this thread and I made no claims of scam, but I admit one was a tad harsh. I first read the reddit post and his white paper, then went on to read this thread. The "cesspool of ignorance" remark combined with everything else raised the red flags for me. I think he wanted maximum exposure and I think it's fair to expect him to respond appropriately and address the issues raised.

I actually missed the "removed" bit.

If there is a post you feel was deleted without "a just cause", a post that actually adds to the conversation, feel free to send it to me (ron@bitblu.com) for review. I can then post my opinion about it, if you'd like.

(Assuming you still have / can get access to the post text).

From the 1.5+ years I've known him (mostly in the forums, not personally), I've seen Willet as fair and rational, not a scammer or someone to ignore people. He might have overreacted to your posts due to the state he was in, after having to battle real trolls (mistakes happen).