I suppose I should've encapsulated my message with "to those who understand what I'm talking about", as my original responses were to ny2cafuse who is sortof on the understanding of this all. I thought it was evident since I quoted him and wasn't
intending to spread fear.
Litecoin's (very) recent rise is due to adoption by large Chinese exchanges, it's not a good example. The snowballing of tag is just due to a thin market and lots of negativity on the only major forum for it .. this thread!
The market isn't thin. The chinese market is heavy. The
well-known market (edit: Cryptsy, ex) is dying because it's not profitable for miners in general as it's being eaten away by ASIC farms in China and undersold on places like BTC38. If the demand ever picks up, it may increase in price. Mark's standpoint has always been he doesn't care about the price of the coin, it's up to the end users to determine price--as such, they are.
Also, litecoin has been on Chinese markets before. I'm talking about its stability lately versus other coins. Only a handful of coins have maintained proportional price stability next to BTC despite market shifts, and LTC is one of them.
Small businesses generally are incapable of rapidly producing quality software products because they literally do not have the resources (I know I worked for a small specialist software house for 7 years). The game they withdrew is a case in point. They tested it, it seemed to be ok, they released it and it didn't shape up .. what do you do at this point, pretend that it works? (been there too) The better thing to do is pull it and fix it. This is completely normal. As you say "Time will tell." Maybe you should wait a while?
I was referring to Mark's business which, a while ago, promised huge updates and superb news and announcements, but so far has only provided some broken beta games. Not knocking his efforts, and I have no doubt they have a lot under wraps.
Low mining hashrate is a product of the debate about orphans that transpired in this thread, there seemed to be some confusion as to what the exact problem was with some people blaming Mark and his team but essentially these was no adequate conclusion. In fact, as you say, the evidence about orphan blocks was circumstancial. Links to your "admittance of various attacks" (careful with the English language there .. it's fragile) and "whitepapers on attacks on altcoins" would be nice.
I was discussing Public (as in, known through published pools) hashrate vs the Private (non disclosed Chinese pools, as well as Mark's private pool) hashrate, which has nothing to do with the orphans. The orphan issue was well documented, entire series of blocks between certain timeframes turned out orphan--thousands of network confirmations and maturities after they'd been paid out. My pool, ny2cafuse's pool and other pools went bankrupt overnight. Exchanges went negative as well (because once the block is invalidated, everyone tied to it loses as well). This is why several exchanges immediately delisted TAG.
The whitepapers on methods of altcoin attacks are out there. ny2cafuse linked me to one lastnight even (and I believe provided it in his response). I never claimed there was an admitted attack on TAG, simply that there are admitted attacks which have occured to various coins, and that whitepapers do exist. TAG coin has had 2 known attacks early on, and among the pool ops it was presumed to have sustained a 3rd attack resulting in the orphans--despite large hashrate securing the network (estimated 3GH on average).
Not sure what "asian vs general market coin" even means. So Mark's trying to develop a market in the Phillipines and SE Asia, so that means he has to talk to real businesses in the real world (which takes time) rather than hype his coin on reddit and this webforum so that he that he can offload his premine once the coin's listed on cryptsy.
I'm simply talking about the target audience, mining, exchange and end-use group. It's open to the world, but the marketing is focused in the Asian areas right now, and my prediction is it will never leave that group.
I'm sorry, his strategy is a billlion times more ethical than the majority of cynical pump 'n dumps on this forum. And the weird thing is I know that you think the same, you are clearly a major player here, so I don't understand the negativity.
If you think I believe the same thing and think I have some level of background on the matter, why would you question my reasons? Devil's Advocate on that one, I do understand your point. I'm not trying to be negative, I'm just mentioning some things and I've found it best to keep it public/on record.
Markets go up and down, giving the coin a hard time with opinion masquerading as "facts" is not going to help the up bit.
If you re-read this entire thread, the other TAG thread, and look at about 50 pages of documentation elsewhere, you'd understand where we're coming from. Not spreading FUD, just stating what has in fact occured, or is occuring. Have better things to do than go look up source links, if you're really curious, read back. If you're not, that's fine also. Mine away, or better yet, buy it. Cheaper to buy it right now. It'll bottom out soon enough.
I believe it will go up in value at some point IF Mark's launch on the business end does in fact prove successful, though I also am of the informed mind that the coin value will in fact crash more and stay low for awhile before that. Even if based on nothing else, the fact that you can't use it for anything, so people are just dumping it (rather than simply not mining it, which is my personal choice). I'd rather refrain from mining a coin I have no use for, than to mine and dump it just to say "gosh I need to pay my electric usage".
Hopefully this explains the situation better.
