PROOF that XSPEC is a SCAM

[preshpr1nce]

So I've sent mandica a private message to see if she has any control over the developer, but from what I'm hearing jbg is now the one fully in charge of XSPEC and if that's 100% the case and mandica can't get a new developer to take over, this project is as good as dust in my eyes.

I'll wait and see how her reply goes, so far her postings in here have cleared up nothing and appear to be more shilling, if she can clear things up about the development and what's being done about jbg I'll be honest in my approach and let the community know, for now though things still remain as you see in this thread.

[Mrmogz]

So I've sent mandica a private message to see if she has any control over the developer, but from what I'm hearing jbg is now the one fully in charge of XSPEC and if that's 100% the case and mandica can't get a new developer to take over, this project is as good as dust in my eyes.

I'll wait and see how her reply goes, so far her postings in here have cleared up nothing and appear to be more shilling, if she can clear things up about the development and what's being done about jbg I'll be honest in my approach and let the community know, for now though things still remain as you see in this thread.

I’m just quoting your last post instead of the one you quoted me on.

When calling something a scam, and calling out a specific person, yes I do deem it important to actually know what their name is.

We already knew V1.4 was late, what that guy tried to say was that on a Saturday JBG said V1.4 would be released within 48 hours when he actually said he would release an UPDATE within 48 hours. He did come on and give updates.

And to you, where in my post did I mention anything about Monero? I said Verge is shit. Never mentioned Monero once and I am of the crowd that XMR is by far the best privacy coin currently available. To say XVG is better technologically is a blatant lie. If you’re going to sit here and say XVG has better tech than XSPEC (not even counting whether from SDC inception or since XSPEC) then you clearly have an alterior motive. It took the XVG devs like 1 year with 3+ delays to release optional stealth addresses (Wraith protocol) which XSPEC has had since inception. It’s not natively integrated with TOR so it has exit node attack vectors. While you sit here and call out XSPEC, I’d love to hear a rebuttal that proves XVG has better tech. I’m 99.9% sure it doesn’t, but it does have a 40x higher market cap.

[HartleyDrake]

So we've all been seeing a lot of hype around XSPEC on this forum, some members claiming it's a scam, others calling for proof, I've put this together to give my take as a senior software developer on what I feel proves it.

First off, a member on here under the name gunner833 found some interesting points about the xspec developer, you can view these findings here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2839833.0

2 key points from this thread, the developer is in his 20s yet has claimed to have 20+ years experience, the developer also owned a bar for 2 years which wen't bankrupt, leaving him with $90,000 in tax debt... you can read his thread for more details, you can also see the shills claiming this isn't a big deal or just a small white lie, make your own mind up on this.

Now putting that aside, let's look at what xspec actually is:
It's a complete mirror copy of Shadow Cash and the Umbra wallet, they've changed some colours and the logo/name from the Umbra source code, picture below gives an idea
https://i.imgur.com/dONQGrz.png

Shadow Cash is a dead project, initially XSPEC made no claims of their coin being a fork of this project, they've been called out for this and admit it is, but claim they're making improvements to ring signatures and have added obfs4 to the project.

Doing a bit more digging, I wanted to see what these improvement claims were and also wanted to see how they've implemented obfs4 to their coin, I was very shocked with what I found, even for what I consider a scam project they've done such little work it blows my mind.

Now remember, XSPEC is open source and their project is on github, you can view the full commit history of the project which also proves they only have 1 developer for any one questioning this, here is what I found by going through their code commits:

1. The "ehancements" made to ring signatures:
Here is a code snippet of the only changes in their source code relating to ring signatures, here is the original code from Shadow Cash

if (!wallet->AddAnonInputs(RING_SIG_2,

This bit of code uses a ring size of 2 in shadow cash, now let's look at the "enhancements" made by Spectrecoin

if (!wallet->AddAnonInputs(nRingSize == 1 ? RING_SIG_1 : RING_SIG_2,

So what we have here for those who can't read code, "if value of nRingSize is equal to 1 then use a ring size of 1 other wise use a ring size of 2"
So what has changed? pretty well nothing, they've allowed for a ring size of 1 which is a bad move, a ring size of 2 is stronger than a ring size of 1, Monero has a minimal ring size of 5 I believe.

Here is another code change commit by XSPEC, they've changed this from Shadow Cash

tr("Confirm send coins"), tr("Are you sure you want to send?\nRing size of one is not anonymous, and harms the network.").arg(formatted.join(tr(" and "))), QMessageBox::Yes|QMessageBox::Cancel, QMessageBox::Cancel);

To this

tr("Confirm send coins"), tr("Are you sure you want to send?\nRing size of one is not anonymous.").arg(formatted.join(tr(" and "))), QMessageBox::Yes|QMessageBox::Cancel, QMessageBox::Cancel);

They've removed this message from the warning alert "and harms the network"

So the so called enhancements to ring signatures are anything but, and to me it looks more like an absolute nothing change just for the sake of saying "I've changed it", he's made the anonymity weaker by reducing the ring size, perhaps he views transaction speed marketing as something more important than anonymity on a stealth coin, a smaller ring size = less secure but faster, larger = more secure but slower, this change could of been performed by a very junior developer in a few minutes, yet this downgrade is being pushed as one of the big changes

2. obfs4 implementation:
This is the second biggest point around XSPEC, they've implemented obfs4 which Shadow Cash did not have, you can find open source code online for obfs4 implementation so I wen't digging through the XSPEC code expecting to find this, what I found blew my mind, here is the code snippet which shows you the obfs4 implementation in XSPEC

  if (stat("obfs4proxy.exe", &sb) == 0 && sb.st_mode & S_IXUSR) {
      clientTransportPlugin = "obfs4 exec obfs4proxy.exe";
    }
#else
    if ((stat("obfs4proxy", &sb) == 0 && sb.st_mode & S_IXUSR) || !std::system("which obfs4proxy")) {
      clientTransportPlugin = "obfs4 exec obfs4proxy";

To sum up what this small block of code does, it executes the obfs4proxy.exe process, there is absolutely no code in XSPEC for the obfs4 other than executing an exe file, now let's take a look where this .exe file came from

\Tor Browser\Browser\Tor\Pluggable Transports\obfs4proxy.exe

So if you install TOR on your computer, you'll find the obfs4proxy.exe file in the TOR Pluggable Transports folder, so this great obfs4 implentation by XSPEC is nothing more than taking an executable file from TOR which runs along with the wallet, just like it does the TOR browser

That alone is enough to prove to me this is a very very shady project, so I've dug through pretty well all of their commits to see if they've actually done any work over the last year, extremely surprised no one has brought this up yet, but their changes are as follow:

1. Changing wallet colour, version numbers, the name and logo
2. Upgrading to newer versions of libraries
3. Executing the TOR obfs4 executable
4. Allowing for an insecure ring size of 1

All up the above changes are less than a days work for even a mid level developer, the interesting part of going through their commits is there are actually examples of nothing commits, cutting code, moving it up a few lines and recommitting just to increment the number of changes shown on GitHub.

The biggest body of work they've done is their donation platform and website.. very shady if you've got time to setup a donation platform but do no work on the actual coin.

Also the developer has made claims of big things coming in Feb, here we are in March and we see no changes on Github, no new version, no changes, just the prior things I've listed above.

The other concerning thing is the poor spread on this coin, you can view it's richlist and see the top 10 hold over 30% of XSPEC and the top 20 hold over 40%.

We will see shills in here trying to pick at the most minor detail of this post, but let me just start off by asking for some one to explain the above code findings? If you've come here to defend this coin then realise the code findings are what this thread is mostly about, so I want to see some points around that rather than the typical garbage from the XSPEC shills.

you have done a spectacular job writing on this scam coin i wasn't in on this from the begging something about this coin seemed a bit off

[d0d15]

So I've sent mandica a private message to see if she has any control over the developer, but from what I'm hearing jbg is now the one fully in charge of XSPEC and if that's 100% the case and mandica can't get a new developer to take over, this project is as good as dust in my eyes.

I'll wait and see how her reply goes, so far her postings in here have cleared up nothing and appear to be more shilling, if she can clear things up about the development and what's being done about jbg I'll be honest in my approach and let the community know, for now though things still remain as you see in this thread.

While I agree that bad, or shady things had happen, and are maybe still happening, IMO you are implying, assuming few things, not sure why. For example you say you will follow github, as if github updates are some kind of mettrics one can use to estimate successfullness or usefullness of a project.

You said for example you will continue checking github (what is ok of course) to estimate how is XSPEC as a project doing (Not really ok). I say as long as there are no security issues, and as long as these don't remain unsolved for too long, IMO XSPEC is a solid, even unique product among crypto currencies.

Below explanation of my view, and argumnets or 'arguments' you decide.

Bare with my please for a moment, below is the explanation why am I mentioning the following again.

XSPEC is well rounded coin. It is the ONLY coin atm with full, proper Tor integration that I am aware of. ShadowCoin did not have this, Monero doesn't have this. Nodes communicate inside of Tor network as onion services, use no exit nodes, and no other currency with optional Tor can achive this. So it is not only about Tor being default or not. It is also very easy to enable Tor obfuscation, obfs4 which is still considered to be the best method at the moment.

It has stealth addresses, uses ring signatures, thus it hides sender and receiver infro, and to some extent if obfuscates trx amounts, but not as good as Monero.

Just maintaining this state by fixing security issues is a good job, and doesn't make this tech or XSPEC as a project less useless.

You implied things here, that successful project, or useful product has constantly do evolve by adding new features and code (What is not case and I have mentioned popular Open Source projects as examples below.), and also that ShadowCashe developers should be used to further develop 'their' tech because they are understanding it better. I am stressing here that you also implied that ShadowCoin/XSPEC is technology developed by ShadowCashe developers.

Let us now first consider what have they (ShadowCashe devs) actually done here, and later let us check how other Open Source project work, function, and what is common in world of open source.

ShadowCashe. Do you think ShadowCashe developers have written, and designed, developed all, or most of their code? First it is a BTC fork. They have added two features to it besides developing wallet GUI, which is pretty trivial task for average developer. Stealth addresses and Ring Signatures. Did they developed these? Ring Signatures are algorithms developed almost 20 years ago, Stealth Addresses and trx are much newer and IIRC these were developed by Peter Todd previous ByteCoin and Bitcoin developer (And just look now where the Bytecoin nowadays is. It could be easly considered scam by your criteria because situation is definitelly worse compared to XSPEC, no one is maintaining it AFAIK.).

 Ring Signatures implementation of ShadowCashe developers had serious security issue (Despite them having open source code to use as a reference, as is or however), which was discovered by Monero developer, who was later paid (by ShadowCoin) to help them fixing it, what he did.

But let us check other open source projects like Linux distibutions, and let us see who is considered to be developer, what are common practies etc. Ubuntu for example, is 95% Debian, and Debian is 99% upstream code. Very, very, small part of a Linux distribution is developed by distribution developers, yet anyone who accuses these people of not being developers doesn't actually understand the situation. Putting all these parts together, testing , maintenance, it requires skills.

Long term distributions are esspecially appreciated among developers yet these types of projects don't change much or at all over years, except for changes which are necesaary to deliver security updates. Is Ubuntu 16.04 LTS bad distribution because it is three years old, and runs even older software? It is capable of doing what is meant for, most serious bugs are fixed, it is stable. It is usefull, works, and people don't have to upgrade to new versions of software and libs what requires one very often one to goe trough different configuration files, changing things, learning new syntax etc. How is this different to XSPEC and his features/abilities?

Are developers who 'build' distributions and software, who 'just' compile, package, or develope ebuilds or compile scripts, than test that upstream software actually not developers?

Not important that much but let me mention jbg again. gunner for example suggested how all projects jbg has forked and contributed, are just hobby projects, and how easy it is to do such things. IMO it is not that easy. This is not only about writing 20 lines of code for some project. One actually must understand a project or at least a part of it one is interested in or one is going to contribute, play with or whatever.
Of course I am not trying to proof with this that he is a mathematition/cryptographer or something, he never claimed for him self something like that (At least not that I have seen.). But I do think he is capable for the same kind of work ShadowCashe developers did. You and gunner have raised their work/capabilities to completely different, higher level, which I can not agree with. When I said I think he is capable, this still doesn't mean I think he is doing it (e.g. working full time).

Point of typing all this wasn't to claim shit didn't happen, but to give people bit different perspecitve on what successful project is, or can be.


I would really like to hear your opinion about 'private' coin projects you consider to be inovative, developed by high skilled experts, and worth investing? Or just any other project you consider OK. Beside Monero of course, although I muss say it doesn't look like Monero developers are in a hurry with I2P implementation. There is also another project I follow, still in development 'MobielCoin.com' (I have mentioned the address because there is another project, possibly a scam also called mobilecoin mbccoin.com.). It has amazing crew, so it should be amazing. Beside these two I would really like to hear you opinion regarding this.

[Endorphinity]

I do not believe in this evidence. It seems to me that the coin is very promising. Private coins will soon be in high demand. I invest in this coin.

[mandica]

So I've sent mandica a private message to see if she has any control over the developer, but from what I'm hearing jbg is now the one fully in charge of XSPEC and if that's 100% the case and mandica can't get a new developer to take over, this project is as good as dust in my eyes.

I'll wait and see how her reply goes, so far her postings in here have cleared up nothing and appear to be more shilling, if she can clear things up about the development and what's being done about jbg I'll be honest in my approach and let the community know, for now though things still remain as you see in this thread.

I’m just quoting your last post instead of the one you quoted me on.

When calling something a scam, and calling out a specific person, yes I do deem it important to actually know what their name is.

We already knew V1.4 was late, what that guy tried to say was that on a Saturday JBG said V1.4 would be released within 48 hours when he actually said he would release an UPDATE within 48 hours. He did come on and give updates.

And to you, where in my post did I mention anything about Monero? I said Verge is shit. Never mentioned Monero once and I am of the crowd that XMR is by far the best privacy coin currently available. To say XVG is better technologically is a blatant lie. If you’re going to sit here and say XVG has better tech than XSPEC (not even counting whether from SDC inception or since XSPEC) then you clearly have an alterior motive. It took the XVG devs like 1 year with 3+ delays to release optional stealth addresses (Wraith protocol) which XSPEC has had since inception. It’s not natively integrated with TOR so it has exit node attack vectors. While you sit here and call out XSPEC, I’d love to hear a rebuttal that proves XVG has better tech. I’m 99.9% sure it doesn’t, but it does have a 40x higher market cap.

Wasn't 'Verge' previously called 'Dogecoin Dark' at some point? hmmmm... - pls don't promote Verge as being something special - the marketcap is just due to John McAfee fake tweets and was Verge not in fact a DOGE clone? XMR was a clone of BCN using the same tech but then being successful in going their own way. I agree that XMR has very strong features but pls don't mention Verge.  

[Islapdonkey]

So I've sent mandica a private message to see if she has any control over the developer, but from what I'm hearing jbg is now the one fully in charge of XSPEC and if that's 100% the case and mandica can't get a new developer to take over, this project is as good as dust in my eyes.

I'll wait and see how her reply goes, so far her postings in here have cleared up nothing and appear to be more shilling, if she can clear things up about the development and what's being done about jbg I'll be honest in my approach and let the community know, for now though things still remain as you see in this thread.

I’m just quoting your last post instead of the one you quoted me on.

When calling something a scam, and calling out a specific person, yes I do deem it important to actually know what their name is.

We already knew V1.4 was late, what that guy tried to say was that on a Saturday JBG said V1.4 would be released within 48 hours when he actually said he would release an UPDATE within 48 hours. He did come on and give updates.

And to you, where in my post did I mention anything about Monero? I said Verge is shit. Never mentioned Monero once and I am of the crowd that XMR is by far the best privacy coin currently available. To say XVG is better technologically is a blatant lie. If you’re going to sit here and say XVG has better tech than XSPEC (not even counting whether from SDC inception or since XSPEC) then you clearly have an alterior motive. It took the XVG devs like 1 year with 3+ delays to release optional stealth addresses (Wraith protocol) which XSPEC has had since inception. It’s not natively integrated with TOR so it has exit node attack vectors. While you sit here and call out XSPEC, I’d love to hear a rebuttal that proves XVG has better tech. I’m 99.9% sure it doesn’t, but it does have a 40x higher market cap.

Wasn't 'Verge' previously called 'Dogecoin Dark' at some point? hmmmm... - pls don't promote Verge as being something special - the marketcap is just due to John McAfee fake tweets and was Verge not in fact a DOGE clone? XMR was a clone of BCN using the same tech but then being successful in going their own way. I agree that XMR has very strong features but pls don't mention Verge.  

First of all, i own a shit ton of spectrecoin, so it's in my best interest for it to succeed. However, you claim to be the founder of XSPEC and have yet to defend the coin from a technically standpoint. You just been jabbing at any irrelevant info you can find to deflect from the topic at hand.

 As much as i hate it, this guy laid out a claim filled with lots of verifiable proof and i just read thru the entire 6 pages and have yet to see one individual actually defending the platform with info that could be verified. The whole thread is made up of ppl claiming fud ( i guess stating your opinions with verifiable proofs is now considered fud)

 I do understand that all codes might not be available on github but it doesn't negate he fact that the op post is to the tee. No matter how much someone wants the sky to be yellow, it's not fud to state that the sky is blue. Simple as that. What he laid out is currently true.

  I bought my spectre stash of a shill from a friend, i did no investigation into the coin. honestly i invested cos i expected it's growth to emulate deep onions (and yes i know deep onion is prob shit too), so this is my first time really investigating the coin and it does not warrant the countless shill ( i never really paid it any mind but yes there has been a ton of shill on this forum)

 So Mr or Mrs founder, rather than averting from the topic at hand, you should admit that he is right and you can either retort with an improved tech or keep whinning/averting like a common shill

[destroyer01]

That's one of the big reasons why xspec didn't convince me when i was looking for another privacy coin to invest in.Their development and marketing is non existant compared to other coins like deeponion.And we all know what happens to coins who lacks good marketing.

[preshpr1nce]

So I've sent mandica a private message to see if she has any control over the developer, but from what I'm hearing jbg is now the one fully in charge of XSPEC and if that's 100% the case and mandica can't get a new developer to take over, this project is as good as dust in my eyes.

I'll wait and see how her reply goes, so far her postings in here have cleared up nothing and appear to be more shilling, if she can clear things up about the development and what's being done about jbg I'll be honest in my approach and let the community know, for now though things still remain as you see in this thread.

While I agree that bad, or shady things had happen, and are maybe still happening, IMO you are implying, assuming few things, not sure why. For example you say you will follow github, as if github updates are some kind of mettrics one can use to estimate successfullness or usefullness of a project.

You are shilling, the above quote is utter bs, GitHub has 100% of the code for all released versions of XSPEC, simple as that.
Going forward, you would have to wait for a release to get a full picture of the release, it could be the developers are holding back on the commits etc, but on past releases this is not the case, the entire full source code is up there.

Also from an open source project that the community is buying in to, you SHOULD commit you work and not delay as long as he has on new releases, leaves people with no clue of progress, still though like I said above, the released versions give you a complete idea.

[d0d15]

So I've sent mandica a private message to see if she has any control over the developer, but from what I'm hearing jbg is now the one fully in charge of XSPEC and if that's 100% the case and mandica can't get a new developer to take over, this project is as good as dust in my eyes.

I'll wait and see how her reply goes, so far her postings in here have cleared up nothing and appear to be more shilling, if she can clear things up about the development and what's being done about jbg I'll be honest in my approach and let the community know, for now though things still remain as you see in this thread.

While I agree that bad, or shady things had happen, and are maybe still happening, IMO you are implying, assuming few things, not sure why. For example you say you will follow github, as if github updates are some kind of mettrics one can use to estimate successfullness or usefullness of a project.

You are shilling, the above quote is utter bs, GitHub has 100% of the code for all released versions of XSPEC, simple as that.
Going forward, you would have to wait for a release to get a full picture of the release, it could be the developers are holding back on the commits etc, but on past releases this is not the case, the entire full source code is up there.

Also from an open source project that the community is buying in to, you SHOULD commit you work and not delay as long as he has on new releases, leaves people with no clue of progress, still though like I said above, the released versions give you a complete idea.

I am not shilling, but you are being an asshole, and you are doing same thing as mandica does. What you said has nothing to do with my post, and you have totally avoided all points I made.

[PaxtonFabian]

So we've all been seeing a lot of hype around XSPEC on this forum, some members claiming it's a scam, others calling for proof, I've put this together to give my take as a senior software developer on what I feel proves it.

First off, a member on here under the name gunner833 found some interesting points about the xspec developer, you can view these findings here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2839833.0

2 key points from this thread, the developer is in his 20s yet has claimed to have 20+ years experience, the developer also owned a bar for 2 years which wen't bankrupt, leaving him with $90,000 in tax debt... you can read his thread for more details, you can also see the shills claiming this isn't a big deal or just a small white lie, make your own mind up on this.

Now putting that aside, let's look at what xspec actually is:
It's a complete mirror copy of Shadow Cash and the Umbra wallet, they've changed some colours and the logo/name from the Umbra source code, picture below gives an idea
https://i.imgur.com/dONQGrz.png

Shadow Cash is a dead project, initially XSPEC made no claims of their coin being a fork of this project, they've been called out for this and admit it is, but claim they're making improvements to ring signatures and have added obfs4 to the project.

Doing a bit more digging, I wanted to see what these improvement claims were and also wanted to see how they've implemented obfs4 to their coin, I was very shocked with what I found, even for what I consider a scam project they've done such little work it blows my mind.

Now remember, XSPEC is open source and their project is on github, you can view the full commit history of the project which also proves they only have 1 developer for any one questioning this, here is what I found by going through their code commits:

1. The "ehancements" made to ring signatures:
Here is a code snippet of the only changes in their source code relating to ring signatures, here is the original code from Shadow Cash

if (!wallet->AddAnonInputs(RING_SIG_2,

This bit of code uses a ring size of 2 in shadow cash, now let's look at the "enhancements" made by Spectrecoin

if (!wallet->AddAnonInputs(nRingSize == 1 ? RING_SIG_1 : RING_SIG_2,

So what we have here for those who can't read code, "if value of nRingSize is equal to 1 then use a ring size of 1 other wise use a ring size of 2"
So what has changed? pretty well nothing, they've allowed for a ring size of 1 which is a bad move, a ring size of 2 is stronger than a ring size of 1, Monero has a minimal ring size of 5 I believe.

Here is another code change commit by XSPEC, they've changed this from Shadow Cash

tr("Confirm send coins"), tr("Are you sure you want to send?\nRing size of one is not anonymous, and harms the network.").arg(formatted.join(tr(" and "))), QMessageBox::Yes|QMessageBox::Cancel, QMessageBox::Cancel);

To this

tr("Confirm send coins"), tr("Are you sure you want to send?\nRing size of one is not anonymous.").arg(formatted.join(tr(" and "))), QMessageBox::Yes|QMessageBox::Cancel, QMessageBox::Cancel);

They've removed this message from the warning alert "and harms the network"

So the so called enhancements to ring signatures are anything but, and to me it looks more like an absolute nothing change just for the sake of saying "I've changed it", he's made the anonymity weaker by reducing the ring size, perhaps he views transaction speed marketing as something more important than anonymity on a stealth coin, a smaller ring size = less secure but faster, larger = more secure but slower, this change could of been performed by a very junior developer in a few minutes, yet this downgrade is being pushed as one of the big changes

2. obfs4 implementation:
This is the second biggest point around XSPEC, they've implemented obfs4 which Shadow Cash did not have, you can find open source code online for obfs4 implementation so I wen't digging through the XSPEC code expecting to find this, what I found blew my mind, here is the code snippet which shows you the obfs4 implementation in XSPEC

  if (stat("obfs4proxy.exe", &sb) == 0 && sb.st_mode & S_IXUSR) {
      clientTransportPlugin = "obfs4 exec obfs4proxy.exe";
    }
#else
    if ((stat("obfs4proxy", &sb) == 0 && sb.st_mode & S_IXUSR) || !std::system("which obfs4proxy")) {
      clientTransportPlugin = "obfs4 exec obfs4proxy";

To sum up what this small block of code does, it executes the obfs4proxy.exe process, there is absolutely no code in XSPEC for the obfs4 other than executing an exe file, now let's take a look where this .exe file came from

\Tor Browser\Browser\Tor\Pluggable Transports\obfs4proxy.exe

So if you install TOR on your computer, you'll find the obfs4proxy.exe file in the TOR Pluggable Transports folder, so this great obfs4 implentation by XSPEC is nothing more than taking an executable file from TOR which runs along with the wallet, just like it does the TOR browser

That alone is enough to prove to me this is a very very shady project, so I've dug through pretty well all of their commits to see if they've actually done any work over the last year, extremely surprised no one has brought this up yet, but their changes are as follow:

1. Changing wallet colour, version numbers, the name and logo
2. Upgrading to newer versions of libraries
3. Executing the TOR obfs4 executable
4. Allowing for an insecure ring size of 1

All up the above changes are less than a days work for even a mid level developer, the interesting part of going through their commits is there are actually examples of nothing commits, cutting code, moving it up a few lines and recommitting just to increment the number of changes shown on GitHub.

The biggest body of work they've done is their donation platform and website.. very shady if you've got time to setup a donation platform but do no work on the actual coin.

Also the developer has made claims of big things coming in Feb, here we are in March and we see no changes on Github, no new version, no changes, just the prior things I've listed above.

The other concerning thing is the poor spread on this coin, you can view it's richlist and see the top 10 hold over 30% of XSPEC and the top 20 hold over 40%.

We will see shills in here trying to pick at the most minor detail of this post, but let me just start off by asking for some one to explain the above code findings? If you've come here to defend this coin then realise the code findings are what this thread is mostly about, so I want to see some points around that rather than the typical garbage from the XSPEC shills.

this is what i call a detailed info on a scam coin great job we should have an extra page on the forums for scams that should be updated frequently

[d0d15]

So I've sent mandica a private message to see if she has any control over the developer, but from what I'm hearing jbg is now the one fully in charge of XSPEC and if that's 100% the case and mandica can't get a new developer to take over, this project is as good as dust in my eyes.

I'll wait and see how her reply goes, so far her postings in here have cleared up nothing and appear to be more shilling, if she can clear things up about the development and what's being done about jbg I'll be honest in my approach and let the community know, for now though things still remain as you see in this thread.

I’m just quoting your last post instead of the one you quoted me on.

When calling something a scam, and calling out a specific person, yes I do deem it important to actually know what their name is.

We already knew V1.4 was late, what that guy tried to say was that on a Saturday JBG said V1.4 would be released within 48 hours when he actually said he would release an UPDATE within 48 hours. He did come on and give updates.

And to you, where in my post did I mention anything about Monero? I said Verge is shit. Never mentioned Monero once and I am of the crowd that XMR is by far the best privacy coin currently available. To say XVG is better technologically is a blatant lie. If you’re going to sit here and say XVG has better tech than XSPEC (not even counting whether from SDC inception or since XSPEC) then you clearly have an alterior motive. It took the XVG devs like 1 year with 3+ delays to release optional stealth addresses (Wraith protocol) which XSPEC has had since inception. It’s not natively integrated with TOR so it has exit node attack vectors. While you sit here and call out XSPEC, I’d love to hear a rebuttal that proves XVG has better tech. I’m 99.9% sure it doesn’t, but it does have a 40x higher market cap.

Wasn't 'Verge' previously called 'Dogecoin Dark' at some point? hmmmm... - pls don't promote Verge as being something special - the marketcap is just due to John McAfee fake tweets and was Verge not in fact a DOGE clone? XMR was a clone of BCN using the same tech but then being successful in going their own way. I agree that XMR has very strong features but pls don't mention Verge.  

First of all, i own a shit ton of spectrecoin, so it's in my best interest for it to succeed. However, you claim to be the founder of XSPEC and have yet to defend the coin from a technically standpoint. You just been jabbing at any irrelevant info you can find to deflect from the topic at hand.

 As much as i hate it, this guy laid out a claim filled with lots of verifiable proof and i just read thru the entire 6 pages and have yet to see one individual actually defending the platform with info that could be verified. The whole thread is made up of ppl claiming fud ( i guess stating your opinions with verifiable proofs is now considered fud)

 I do understand that all codes might not be available on github but it doesn't negate he fact that the op post is to the tee. No matter how much someone wants the sky to be yellow, it's not fud to state that the sky is blue. Simple as that. What he laid out is currently true.

  I bought my spectre stash of a shill from a friend, i did no investigation into the coin. honestly i invested cos i expected it's growth to emulate deep onions (and yes i know deep onion is prob shit too), so this is my first time really investigating the coin and it does not warrant the countless shill ( i never really paid it any mind but yes there has been a ton of shill on this forum)

 So Mr or Mrs founder, rather than averting from the topic at hand, you should admit that he is right and you can either retort with an improved tech or keep whinning/averting like a common shill

Hey, what's wrong, someone was yelling on you? No!  Let us stop talking about code not being available, and let us talk about code which is avaiable! Tor integration, supportes obfs4, has stealth addresses,
 and ring signatures, which will start being useful when stealth becomes default. Still better than Verge, no?

Otherwise I do think that XSPEC as a project started going same route as DO and Verge, which is using lies for the sake of popularity, and hype. If this doesn't change, and if they don't get their shit together it will be dust in my eyes too, not that it matters.

Also, whatever happens with XSPEC, it has yet a long way to go to reach level of assholness of Verge and DO developers.

[d0d15]

Could you please quote his whole post one more time, and then I will quote mine 27 times?

[preshpr1nce]

So I've sent mandica a private message to see if she has any control over the developer, but from what I'm hearing jbg is now the one fully in charge of XSPEC and if that's 100% the case and mandica can't get a new developer to take over, this project is as good as dust in my eyes.

I'll wait and see how her reply goes, so far her postings in here have cleared up nothing and appear to be more shilling, if she can clear things up about the development and what's being done about jbg I'll be honest in my approach and let the community know, for now though things still remain as you see in this thread.

While I agree that bad, or shady things had happen, and are maybe still happening, IMO you are implying, assuming few things, not sure why. For example you say you will follow github, as if github updates are some kind of mettrics one can use to estimate successfullness or usefullness of a project.

You are shilling, the above quote is utter bs, GitHub has 100% of the code for all released versions of XSPEC, simple as that.
Going forward, you would have to wait for a release to get a full picture of the release, it could be the developers are holding back on the commits etc, but on past releases this is not the case, the entire full source code is up there.

Also from an open source project that the community is buying in to, you SHOULD commit you work and not delay as long as he has on new releases, leaves people with no clue of progress, still though like I said above, the released versions give you a complete idea.

I am not shilling, but you are being an asshole, and you are doing same thing as mandica does. What you said has nothing to do with my post, and you have totally avoided all points I made.

I didn't avoid a single point, I cleared them all up.
What you are trying to do now is confuse people who don't have enough technical understanding to read what's being said.
My guess is this'll be less than 5% of people.

Sad sad person, to make a claim that a full version release on GitHub being observed is not a good measure is as stupid as it gets, I'm not here to be nice to shills, I'll keep my nice nature for honest people, you're not honest.

You're having 0 impact here, should just give it up, to sum up your argument, "The code on GitHub is not a good measure".
Does any one actually believe this?

[Peppo]

Also, whatever happens with XSPEC, it has yet a long way to go to reach level of assholness of Verge and DO developers.

In their Slack channel Beachguy is complete jerk. 99% of time he is rude and just attacking peoples for their opinions.
And as I recall, jbg have called other users as cunts there.

[Mrmogz]

Also, whatever happens with XSPEC, it has yet a long way to go to reach level of assholness of Verge and DO developers.

In their Slack channel Beachguy is complete jerk. 99% of time he is rude and just attacking peoples for their opinions.
And as I recall, jbg have called other users as cunts there.

Complete lies. Beachguy is blunt, not a “complete jerk.”

JBG is one of the most patient people I’ve ever seen on the internet. There’s zero chance he would call someone a “cunt” in the old slack channel. He answered all sorts of questions, often repeatedly.

Here is where XSPEC is headed. These are two updates from JBG himself this evening.

OK @everyone, I have a short update regarding project structure. Even before I needed to take some time off, I had been discussing with a number of longstanding community members about expanding the core team and formalising some kind of "governance" over the project. Given that me taking 10 days off caused such a large disruption, it's clear that these changes need to happen quickly so that the project can keep its momentum even if one member needs to take time off. We now have an idea of what we'd like this to look like, and I'd like to share this with you all. *First,* we're going to officially grow the core team to include several more people, including at least one more developer but also people with project management and marketing skills. <@384779540540424213> is also back in good health and will be participating actively in the core team again. *Second,* we are introducing bounties to encourage much wider participation in the development of the project. This will be managed via GitHub Issues - anybody will be able to "claim" an issue and upon their successful completion of it, the bounty will be paid to them. This will be funded from the staking donations. I'm working on identifying the areas where I think bounties can be best applied and will create issues soon, but I'd also like to encourage _anybody_ who has ideas for fixes or improvements to propose bounties. The core team will select the bounties that will be funded from staking donations, but anybody can fund a bounty if we don't select it and they want it to be worked on. We hope that these changes will "decentralise" development more effectively and also increase our rate of progress. _A specific update about v1.4 will follow in the next days._

Also, @everyone, once the core team is in place I want to hand control of incoming donations over to a designated person who will manage the bounties and make _results-based_ payments to me and Bryce as well as fund anything else that needs funding. This designated person will be chosen by the core team collectively, in a public and transparent way, and will be some longstanding, well-known community member. I want to make this change for several reasons, (1) I think philosophically a clean separation of the funding and the development is a good idea, (2) the constant accusations directed at me are taking a significant toll on my wellbeing and my ability to work effectively, and hopefully this will help, (3) the designated person should be able to more clearly weigh the various needs for funding (marketing, core developers, bounties, maybe exchange listing fees, etc) rather than having it managed by a developer with a more narrow view of the project.

[Hokage]

There’s zero chance he would call someone a “cunt” in the old slack channel. He answered all sorts of questions, often repeatedly.

it really was once, but that dude deserved it for his behavior

[mandica]

Firstly, a couple of things:

a) You state that you are a “senior software developer” - please provide verifiable credentials for this claim
b) I have met with @jbg in person and he is not in his 20s but somewhat older
c) Yes, XSPEC is based on and cloned from the SDC codebase and this has been stated from day 1 and discussed endlessly. Please see the original thread at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1704473.0 and the discussion there. At the time of XSPEC inception I was a follower of SDC and thought that the focus on a market integration was the wrong way to go and wanted to separate this out and continue a focus on privacy features. The main sticking point in the initial phase was to integrate Tor which is something SDC never did.

Your claim that “initially XSPEC made no claims of their coin being a fork of this project” (SDC) is simply not true. You haven’t followed the project for long enough.

Specifically addressing points raised:
The ability to set ring size to 1 for ‘spectre tokens’ was implemented as a way to be able to transfer ‘spectre tokens’ back into XSPEC without having to rely on the correct denominations being made available in the ‘spectre token’ pool. This was / is an issue as the network is growing and the pool of anonymous token denominations were insufficient to combine together to ‘re-create’ the desired amount of XSPEC. The ring-sig system is used for ‘spectre tokens’ and not for ’normal’ Spectrecoins. XSPEC uses two different tokens, i.e. Spectrecoin and ’Spectre tokens’ and the ring-signatures are used to sign transactions made in ‘spectre tokens’ and not Spectrecoin.

Very short explanation of ’Spectre Tokens’
‘Spectre Token’ / ST. ST can be minted / created whilst destroying ‘Spectrecoins’. The creation of ST outputs a group of STs totalling the same value (minus the transaction fee) of the destroyed Spectrecoins. That is, the creation of 1 ST will destroy 1 Spectrecoin. ST takes the form of anonymised spendable outputs on the Spectrecoin blockchain and each ST output has its own private and public key in the form of a key image. In the Spectre wallet the ST you are able to spend will appear in the ‘Private Balance’ field. Your ‘normal’ Spectrecoins will appear in the ‘Public Balance’ field. The spendable ‘spectre tokens’ will be the members of the ring to sign anonymous transactions. This requires a large number of spendable ‘spectre tokens’ in the pool. This is being improved in 1.4 by better splitting / combining algorithms. So, the ring signature discussion is reserved for ‘spectre tokens’ only and does not apply to public Spectrecoin balances. A senior software developer should have made this point in my view and if you had reviewed the history both of SDC and XSPEC you would see why a temporary ring size = 1 was allowed.

Also, it seems to me that @preshpr1nce fails to understand what obfs4 is for. XSPEC implemented a native version of Tor into the code base (this was not mentioned in your detailed professional review @preshpr1nce). Native meaning that you do NOT need to have Tor installed on your computer, XSPEC will connect using Tor and ONLY Tor when you start the wallet. All the XSPEC network runs under Tor and there are no exit nodes anywhere. This was the first phase of improving on SDC and we did that. It then turns out that Tor traffic might be blocked so we found the obfs4 protocol which is essentially to “hide” or “obfuscate” Tor traffic to make packet inspection more difficult. obfs4 is an addition to the Tor implementation.

In addition there has been a lot of work initially around compiling and SDC was working on similar issues for quite some time for people who are old enough to have followed SDC a while back. So, there is a lot of work around building the code as well as the code itself and making this more efficient.

So, for a senior software developer this is a pretty poor review. Now, @preshpr1nce - your credentials please and how could you miss out the fact that we integrated Tor into the code base in your review? How may lines of code was that again?

[preshpr1nce]

So, I sent mandica a PM yesterday, here is how it went:

Hi Mandica, thought I would send you a message rather than going back and forth in the thread.
I've dug in to your initial developer and his work and I'm now seeing that jbg is most likely not the one driving things here, but as it stands he is still the development face behind XSPEC.

If things can get cleared up here, then I'll translate it in the thread and let people know what's really going on with XSPEC vs jbg, I've already made a post correcting my points about jbg being the one behind XSPEC as a project, I'm not doing this to hurt any one or shit talk a project, I'm just trying to bring some transparency to the crypto space and jbg's work is highly suspicious at best.

A few points I would suggest:
1. Be more transparent and honest about the developer, the biggest red flag is his lies around experience, names can be kept secret but the rest has to be honest, I'm not saying you've lied about his experience but you should be policing your staff to keep a good honest image.
2. Get people in your community who can audit the work done, you are paying for this after all? I'm happy to do it for free.
3. The shilling is being driven by some one, this may be completely out of your power but some one is driving it, this isn't typical for any coin of any size, referral systems tend to create this nature but for a non referral coin this is far and beyond the norm.
4. You need a white paper, much of the doubt comes from the lack of such.
5. Perhaps you need to consider removing jbg from the picture and get a new developer, he's ripping you off and hurting the image of your coin.

At the end of the day, the concept behind XSPEC is great, but we see no indicators that it'll ever be achieved, and if we dig in to things deeper it starts to look very suspicious when you compare the promises vs what's been done in a period of time, I would like to believe you are hiring more developers but jbg has driven too much false hope to believe this purely on word.

I would suggest step 1 being dismissal of jbg once you find a new developer, let the community know, a small delay is better than allowing such a bad taste to continue and it should be in your interest to get your values worth from a developer.

Also what's the story with Brycel?

I'm giving benefit of the doubt in this message even though it's pretty hard with the way things have been done, in saying that I've seen developers take people for a ride many times, so I'm interested in your response.

Her response is to come in here and ask me to prove my background, I'm not the one trying to take money from people, I have absolutely nothing to prove.

jbg has admitted he is in his 20s, I've also come to learn his name, he's a guy in New Zealand, and yes in his late 20s, I won't expose his name out of respect but JBG = his true initials, you are outright lying right there.

We've been over the nitpicking about Shadow Cash, this isn't what the argument is about for the 5th time.

I've made a comment prior about the first developer and his work on xSPEC and Tor, go read it please, I said he's done more than JBG, my findings were focused on JBGs commits which are lacking, he is the current developer and the one driving it's future.

Regardless of your excuses for the ring size downgrade, you've hyped it as a big feature change (Improvements to ring signatures)
It's not an improvement, and now you're claiming it relates to a feature in 1.4 (Spectre Tokens) which is yet to be seen, typically you would change this as required, all you've done is removed anonymity from spectrecoin, you're now saying an anonymous token is around the corner which will take over the public coins?

I don't care what's coming, explain why in 9 months of JBG developing he's done nothing yet you've hyped these minimal useless changes as a big deal?
What a joke, you're a liar also, just explain my simple question, why in 9 months has a days worth of work been done outside of the donation system?
I don't care for anything more than that.

Rather than explaining my findings you're still trying to discredit me, this is not how you should go about things, you've shown the value of XSPEC in the process, it should not be this hard.

[mandica]

I'm not trying to discredit you, BUT, the dual system of 'normal' Spectrecoin and anonymous 'Spectre tokens' was always there and was part of SDC as well and is how Monero works in essence. The ring signatures are used by the 'spectre tokens' and not by the 'normal' Spectrecoins. If you read the code or even use the wallet you see this:





The private balance is your anonymous 'Spectre tokens' and the public balance is your 'normal' Spectrecoin which are much like Bitcoin or others and transact like Bitcoin and others. You sign the transaction with your private key etc.



Here is what it looks like in the block explorer when you split and combine 'Spectre tokens' and what the anonymous outputs look that can be combined into Spectrecoins again. You will see the blue address. That is a 'normal' UTXO and the anonymous outputs are the ones marked "anonymous". The ring signatures apply only to the anonymous outputs, just like Monero or PIVX or others. You should know this as being a software developer and you should know that ring signatures are not applied to 'normal' UTXOs.

Please study some privacy coins before you start making comments. And, you display you credentials to make people believe your "analysis" so it becomes relevant, don't you think?

I say your analysis and understanding of software development is poor.