PROOF that XSPEC is a SCAM

[gunner833]

TLDR: its a scam, and you might have an IQ >80 if you bought it

Go back to shill DeepOnion please, you can't even flame.

[size_m]

ok, good finds of gunner833 and preshpr1nce and quite interesting for investors (especially for very cautious, hesitant, and risk-averse investors).
jpg seems to be caught and embarrised by you because he obviously hasn't delivered enough results within that quite big time frame.

but does this really make the whole project a scam or would it even be "proof" for a scam?

i would bet you would find similar things in many coin projects if you would just dig deep enough into them.
some of them might indeed be scam projects.
but in this one i'm not sure about that.
there seems to be still a good team behind it and the technical structure of the "shadowcoin" is pretty nice and solid.

as it seems the team is trying to solve the issues and make up for the done mistakes.

i think jpg should admit his mistakes and give away a big part of the work into other hands what he obviously already does (at least partly).

although jpg might have delivered too less of programming work he could have still done some more work around it than it seems to us.
maybe he spent alot of time with researching the code and whatever else.
not all of someones work can 100% be controlled through physical results.
we cannot really tell.

and also the coin is already working well so maybe it wasn't too urgent to improve things on the technical side.

but i still agree with you guys that it was just not enough of what jpg has delivered until now.

i will hold my coins and hope that other programmers will take over the work now and in the future.
and maybe jpg will still deliver something on what he has promised.

[IIIIIIIII#VIP#IIIIIIIII]

To me, as someone who is not an expert in programming or cryptocurrencies, it is very difficult to understand which project is a scam and which is not. This is a real problem for most people in this forum, because scammers who create such projects - are becoming smarter and smarter.

[gunner833]

ok, good finds of gunner833 and preshpr1nce and quite interesting for investors (especially for very cautious, hesitant, and risk-averse investors).
jpg seems to be caught and embarrised by you because he obviously hasn't delivered enough results within that quite big time frame.

but does this really make the whole project a scam or would it even be "proof" for a scam?

i would bet you would find similar things in many coin projects if you would just dig deep enough into them.
some of them might indeed be scam projects.
but in this one i'm not sure about that.
there seems to be still a good team behind it and the technical structure of the "shadowcoin" is pretty nice and solid.

as it seems the team is trying to solve the issues and make up for the done mistakes.

i think jpg should admit his mistakes and give away a big part of the work into other hands what he obviously already does (at least partly).

although jpg might have delivered too less of programming work he could have still done some more work around it than it seems to us.
maybe he spent alot of time with researching the code and whatever else.
not all of someones work can 100% be controlled through physical results.
we cannot really tell.

and also the coin is already working well so maybe it wasn't too urgent to improve things on the technical side.

but i still agree with you guys that it was just not enough of what jpg has delivered until now.

i will hold my coins and hope that other programmers will take over the work now and in the future.
and maybe jpg will still deliver something on what he has promised.

In my opinion your view is balanced. Calling it a scam or not is subjective.

But we agree on something important: jbg hasn't done much work. Please explain it to the community since they are still questioning this, which is quite obvious to anyone who looks at the github repository. Is he really working full time as he stated then? He might have done some other work, but what? From June to December there is only a week of coding work in September, what has he being doing in all this time? He only recently said that learning the code base requires time. That's true, but not 6 months with very little code changes.

And I agree jbg should just list his mistakes and restart. But he hasn't done so, it's taking months for him to admit a few, which might say something about the moral of the character.

[btccrusher]

Excellent explanation bro. Thanks a lot, you saved many of us and from little to big investors. Yes, now I can see they are SCAM. Who knows how many scams are around us! That's pretty scary for me, I don't have much to invest and lose. Everyone be careful.

[EmmanCryp]

Good findings OP. How I wish I have coding abilities so as to be able to inspect any Cryptos projects I want to anytime.

[size_m]

Excellent explanation bro. Thanks a lot, you saved many of us and from little to big investors. Yes, now I can see they are SCAM. Who knows how many scams are around us! That's pretty scary for me, I don't have much to invest and lose. Everyone be careful.

and how exactly can you see that now?
just because a developer didn't do as much work as he pretended the whole project suddenly is a scam?
also without his work the coin was already a good working product before that and it still is.
although this coin is not really different than the former shadowcoin, so what?
it has still a very good technical structure.
and besides of this one developer there is obviously a great team behind it.
let's wait and see what will be added to it in the next months to become an even greater coin.

[gunner833]

It's his own judgment, you can disagree, but please bring some facts to prove the opposite and not only random claims.

You can wait and check in the next months, I have been waiting for months already and not much happened.

[AlexeyB]

I've put this together to give my take as a senior software developer on what I feel proves it.

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

1. The difference between Spectrecoin and Shadowcash: Have you forgotten to mention Tor hidden service, that isn't in the ShadowCash or any other coins (DeepOnion, Verge, Bytecoin, Zcash...)? Do you know the big difference between Tor hidden service and Tor (exit nodes are involved)?
2. Well
3. Version 1.4, that is completely rewritten, is being developed for half a year. So far, this is a private code, it is absent from the GitHub, in order to Tokenpay does not steal it. Until it is released, we will assume that you are right.
4. You conducted a very long investigation, but it was enough to read official wiki:

Sept 11, 2017
Furthermore, this release was the first to include a binary for Apple MacOS. A change to the stealth transaction mechanism was introduced so that the wallet allows for non-anonymous ring signatures with only 1 or 2 members. The reason for this was that at that stage, the network often did not have enough participants for ring signatures to do a full ring signature transaction.

preshpr1nce, can you answer, is a Tor hidden service a wallet colour, version numbers, the name or logo, also what is the difference between Tor hidden service and Tor, and in which coins is Tor hidden service used?

[gunner833]

tor hidden service is not any of those but, very simply, it hasn't been done by jbg and that's why it is not listed in any of his changes. He has done only UI, library updates and the ability to send money to him, in the less than 2 months (Dec-Jan) he has worked on the project out of the 9 months (Jun-Mar) he is claiming he worked full time on it.

12 March, 1.4 was due on February, no one knows when 1.4 will happen (jbg announced news about it 3 times, last time 7th of March, still hasn't disclosed anything certain). 1.4 code still not public on github after promising so at the end of Jan, 1.4 release still not done.

From his today few messages, it seems he hasn't even started doing linux packages, which were due with 1.4 as you can see in the website roadmap.

[size_m]

i think it's fair to read the response to this thread from one of the team members:
https://github.com/bitcoinx2/spectre/wiki/Proof-that-XSPEC-is-NOT-a-scam

i think it's a good thing that one of the team behind this project admits some made mistakes and doesn't deny your exposed facts but clears some things up and explains their sight from "behind the scenes".

please don't consider me as a "shill" or whatever because of this post.
i am just a small investor with about 500 coins who also thinks critical and trys to see things objective and from both sides.

i see your points which are mostly facts which are checkable and verifiable.
your points showed that there are some promises of one developer not delivered and some things not as they were supposed to be.
i think you have done nice research and your findings are helpful for many people who are involved into this project.

but i just think because of that it is not fair to call this project a scam.
you just showed some weaknesses and mistakes being made of one single person.

i have no further proofs of anything besides the official definition of a "scam", which definately does not describe it being a scam if one person doesn't deliver his promises on time and even not if he doesn't tell the truth.
all of this doesn't make project a scam.

and it is always difficult (sometimes even not possible) to judge about someones work only based on the actual results you can see.
of course you obviously have enough experience to estimate and evaluate the neccessary amount of work for the actual results to this moment.
but still you cannot be 100% sure if that's really all the work which that person had done all the time.
i don't have any facts to prove this but this should be common understanding.
maybe you are right on this one but this point cannot really totally be proven as you haven't seen him all the time what he has done for the project or not.

i know my statements are pretty close to the content in the linked response above.
but this was exactly my opinion on this the whole time although i'm not involved with the team myself as i mentioned above.

[gunner833]

thanks for you reply, I have read that page but unfortunately does not clear up anything of what we are questioning.

That page says basically 3 things:
1. the project is not jbg dependent
2. the project is actively developed
3. jbg is legit because Gandalf86 knows him for long

I think these statements are inaccurate because:
1. if jbg leaves, this project is very likely to die, if it's not dead already. As jbg also said (but it's an excuse to me), one reason of the lack of work is that he needed time to learn the code base (you definitely need time to learn a code base, but definitely not 7 months, which are the months of missing development from github). If this is true, I would expect a new developer to take months to learn the code base too, in the best case scenario. Developers are not robots or machines, you don't just replace them and expect that everything will be exactly the same. You are already very late with your road-map, you will be more late if jbg leaves, and you'll lose more investors and the competition will go ahead more in the meanwhile.
2. This is false until contrary proof. Again only 2 months of work in github out of 9. The points also are a bit ridiculous. One of them says that the 0 balance bug is a race condition. The 0 balance bug is an UI issue, race condition?! Also the 0 balance bug is not fixed yet, it's still happening to some users with the latest version! I would love to see the commit that jbg did to fix this, as I can't find it. At this point, I wouldn't be too surprised if it's not there at all.
3. if jbg fooled you for long, it does not make him more legit.

You need to understand that you're not investing in tech when you invest in this coin, you're investing in your trust on jbg and all the claims he does, claims that cannot be proved. He also has been proved as a liar, a bad project manager and a bad communicator. Good developers are usually good also at communicating, estimating and managing projects, that's why they then become project leads and mentors.

[cryptonoob312]

Great research mate! But it's not a big surprise that one of 97% dead ICOs of 2017 is a scam. I hope this year will be different but still looks like it's not a big chance.

[AlexeyB]

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)

The author of this topic and jbg (spectrecoin dev) are great lads, that synergistically created FUD and delayed release of a new version. This lowered the price to 60 cents, and made it possible to rally again to $ 6 (where the price has been recently), after the release of a wallet 1.4.
The author of this topic did not conduct a large study, he wrote exactly 4 points and for each of them there is an answer: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3055715.msg31812046#msg31812046
He did not write anything new - this was written in the official wiki half a year ago: about ring size = 1, the world's first coin with Tor hidden service (exit nodes are not involved), OBFS4...

Sept 11, 2017
Furthermore, this release was the first to include a binary for Apple MacOS. A change to the stealth transaction mechanism was introduced so that the wallet allows for non-anonymous ring signatures with only 1 or 2 members. The reason for this was that at that stage, the network often did not have enough participants for ring signatures to do a full ring signature transaction.

So Spectrecion has Stealth addresses, split/combining algorithm, Ring signatures, and still allows you to disable privacy if you do not want it - using ring size = 1 (will be removed). Or using Public addresses - as it is done in the PIVX, PARTICL - good privacy coins.
You mentioned deeponion, and if you are interested in its security, for comparison, then there is not even a ring_size = 1, because there isn't ring signatures. Deeponion isn't privacy at all at this moment, there aren't ring signatures, stealth addresses, split/combining algorithm - proof official roadmap, it's called Deepsend, Q2 2018 that isn't implemented yet. Deeponion uses Tor (exit nodes are involved) so it's not anonymous. Deeponion coin requires that you manually download and copy the OBFS4 executable file: https://github.com/deeponion/deeponion/blob/master/doc/setup-obfs4.md
It will also just run the executable file: https://github.com/deeponion/deeponion/blob/413090c51575690ea6697db35b8e3e1e544b32af/src/net.cpp#L633

if (stat("obfs4proxy.exe", sb) == 0 && (*sb).st_mode & S_IXUSR) {

Also I can write verifiable proofs about Verge address/ip/amount-leaks or about Monero IP-leaks, but this does not mean that they are scam.

I will expect more in-depth research and more reasonable criticism from you, I hope this will help the developer fix some really important things and will motivate the developer to release the new version faster.

[d0d15]

The author of this topic and jbg (spectrecoin dev) are great lads, that synergistically created FUD and delayed release of a new version. This lowered the price to 60 cents, and made it possible to rally again to $ 6 (where the price has been recently), after the release of a wallet 1.4.
The author of this topic did not conduct a large study, he wrote exactly 4 points and for each of them there is an answer: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3055715.msg31812046#msg31812046
He did not write anything new - this was written in the official wiki half a year ago: about ring size = 1, the world's first coin with Tor hidden service (exit nodes are not involved), OBFS4...

Sept 11, 2017
Furthermore, this release was the first to include a binary for Apple MacOS. A change to the stealth transaction mechanism was introduced so that the wallet allows for non-anonymous ring signatures with only 1 or 2 members. The reason for this was that at that stage, the network often did not have enough participants for ring signatures to do a full ring signature transaction.

So Spectrecion has Stealth addresses, split/combining algorithm, Ring signatures, and still allows you to disable privacy if you do not want it - using ring size = 1 (will be removed). Or using Public addresses - as it is done in the PIVX, PARTICL - good privacy coins.
You mentioned deeponion, and if you are interested in its security, for comparison, then there is not even a ring_size = 1, because there isn't ring signatures. Deeponion isn't privacy at all at this moment, there aren't ring signatures, stealth addresses, split/combining algorithm - proof official roadmap, it's called Deepsend, Q2 2018 that isn't implemented yet. Deeponion uses Tor (exit nodes are involved) so it's not anonymous. Deeponion coin requires that you manually download and copy the OBFS4 executable file: https://github.com/deeponion/deeponion/blob/master/doc/setup-obfs4.md
It will also just run the executable file: https://github.com/deeponion/deeponion/blob/413090c51575690ea6697db35b8e3e1e544b32af/src/net.cpp#L633

if (stat("obfs4proxy.exe", sb) == 0 && (*sb).st_mode & S_IXUSR) {

Also I can write verifiable proofs about Verge address/ip/amount-leaks or about Monero IP-leaks, but this does not mean that they are scam.

I will expect more in-depth research and more reasonable criticism from you, I hope this will help the developer fix some really important things and will motivate the developer to release the new version faster.

fixed it for you Deeponion and XSPEC coins both require that you manually download and copy the OBFS4
XSPEC will also just run the obfs exe.

[GD199]

straight up scam coin +1 to the researcher!

[CleanCutKid]

straight up scam coin +1 to the researcher!

actually the scammers left and XSPEC is actually trying to do good work now. The topic here should be WISP Scam as XSPEC kicked @jbg hard in the buttocks.

[GD199]

straight up scam coin +1 to the researcher!

actually the scammers left and XSPEC is actually trying to do good work now. The topic here should be WISP Scam as XSPEC kicked @jbg hard in the buttocks.

+1